When Zoe turned two, I decided to write less frequent monthly updates. But Zoe has changed so much since her birthday that I just had to prepare another one.
If we thought Zoe talked a lot before, we had no idea what we were in for! Zoe is constantly chattering and often comes up to us and tells what sound like long stories (though we’re not always sure what she’s saying). She still uses baby sentences like “No want this” or “No like that,” of course, but she also talks in real, full sentences. (I posted a few of the funnier ones below.) She has her favorite phrases, like “You’re funny!”, “What are you doing?”, and “What’s that?” (which she started to ask non-stop just a few days ago), and after we answer her questions, she usually says, “Oh, okay!” and carries on.
She is still pretty independent, often demanding that she do certain things on her own. When I try to feed her, for example, she’ll usually grab the spoon or folk out of my hand and say, “I do that!” or “I want to do myself.” And she recently started taking books out of our hand and saying, “I read that.” (She usually proceeds to flip through the pages and point out what she sees.) If she does something challenging, like climb on top of something or get to a hard-to-reach object, she’ll often say, “Got it!” triumphantly.
Along the same, independent line, she’s usually pretty good at entertaining herself and playing on her own. As I’m typing this, for example, she’s in her room, going through her books and “reading” them to Panda.
Speaking of Panda, Zoe has a whole posse of stuffed friends: she’s still most fond of Panda, but she also enjoys her baby, Baby Dog, Big Dog, and Baa Baa Black Sheep. She often carries one of them around with her, and we wake up most mornings to her either talking (loudly), singing or reading to them in bed.
As for other developments: she likes to count, and can usually get to eleven or twelve on her own. She also finally got her colors down: while she used to call everything pink (or, for a time, yellow and purple) she can point out the right color about 90 percent of the time. She knows the lyrics to a surprisingly large number of songs, and she has really started to remember people. (She frequently asks when she’s going to see Zander and Miles at the playground, and she often asks about her far-away relatives, including Coco!)
Zoe still has her little quirks. She loves looking in people’s mouths and saying, “I see that!” for example. And she loves talking about whether certain foods are hot and cold – she’s constantly asking us about the temperature before we take a bite of something.
Though Zoe has her fair shares of (usually short-lived) tantrums, she definitely has a sweet side. When I was having a bad morning and wound up crying recently, she came up to me with a look of concern and planted several kisses on my face. (Now, whenever she hears me sniff, she’ll look at me and say, “No cry, Mommy.”) And she likes to give us praise for things. One night, after we showed her how to drink from a cup using two hands, she saw that Q was using both of his and said, “Good job, Daddy! Two hands!” Very sweet…
-M
