Amalia antics

If you're a frequent visitor to this blog -- or if you've ever met my younger child -- you know Amalia is quite a character. Below are a few anecdotes from the week.

We've recently been reading a Mercer Mayer book called Where Is My Frog? in which a boy loses his pet frog while fishing with his dad and looks for it in all the usual places. In each hiding spot there's some other type of animal, which Amalia enjoys calling out the names of. Mouse! Spider! Turtle! But when we get to the page where there's a raccoon hiding in a tent, she always says, "Cow!" (No.) "Moose!" (No.) "What is it?" (Raccoon.) "Raccoon." Every time.

We also recently started a new conversation game at dinner called The Bad and The Good, where we go around and each say one bad thing that happened to us that day followed by something good. (Lily's first day of kindergarten resulted in this report -- Bad: "Nothing!"; Good: "Everything!") Anyway, Amalia hasn't really been grasping the concept, but two nights ago I thought she was on the right track when her bad report was, "I bumped my head." Ooh, I said, and what good happened to you today? "I fell down the stairs." Maybe this game still needs more work.

Toilet training has been picking up speed, with Amalia frequently requesting to "go pee on the potty." The other night she made this request and sat down on the potty with no luck. Trying to help her out, I said, "Do you know any songs about going potty?" She immediately broke into what I can only assume was an impromptu ad lib of, "ABCD going pee! ABCD going pee!" and so on, to the tune of the alphabet song.

And just this morning she made a solo trip to go pee on the potty. When I went into the bathroom to check on her, Little Miss Independent had already lifted the potty receptacle up out of the seat and was pouring the contents into the toilet (well, most of the contents).

Good times.