A long-neglected Rachel Update

Friends

This little video is over a month old, and just fell into that pile of "things we need to post" before getting lost in Daniel's birthday.

Rachel, like her brother, has an amazing vocabulary, and has started to say some really funny things. The other day, Anida turned on the radio and the commentators were talking:

"Dat's a talking Song!"

Most of the time, she's easy to understand. She substitutes "s" for "f" at the beginning of words, so that "Firefighter" becomes "SiAH sitAH". "L" or "R" at the start of a word becomes "W" (I like it is I wike it and I ripped the book becomes "I wipped it"). We understand 99.9% of what she says, but occasionally, she'll rip out one that has us scratching our heads. "I wanna cosa cousins" turned out to be "I would like to close the curtains".

Rachel LOVES to read books, and one of her favorite activities (if not the top one) is to have books read to her. Dora and Diego are good standbyes, but she's recently discovered the Gruffalo books. She gets a kick out of painting, and now really knows her colors (the much earlier post on colors turned out to be a fluke, but we forgot to tell everyone that, which in turn caused our friends to think that their son of the same age as Rachel was a slow learner. Sorry, Sean).

Most of the time, she plays well with her brother, but when they got into it (usually Daniel's fault for getting in her face), Rachel had this nasty habit of biting him - hard. Thankfully, that seems to have diminished. A few weeks ago, Anida witnessed Rachel getting so provoked by Daniel that she grabbed a (clean) diaper from the pile in the bathroom and screamed "I hit you with a diaper" while actually swatting him with it. It's funny what constitutes progress these days.

Rachel has inherited Daniel's old tricycle, and has just figured out how to pedal it. She's not shown the same enthusiasm that Daniel did yet, but that might change. The swing is still her favorite. She'll hold on tight and as that you "Push me Hi-ah, please"

And that's about all for the Rachel-specific update. A more general posting coming momentarily.

Love, ADRE.