Gremlin’s Fireside Chat

Its Christmas and the creche Maeve is at is very good. The day before yesterday (Wednesday) Father Christmas visited the creche and Maeve got a lovely present of a book of nursery rhymes – I know she loves it because she rarely puts it down. Anyway I digress. I started to sing in my rather poor singing voice some of rhymes to be joined in by Maeve; Not perfect, but the words and small phrases she does understand – as well as having a go at some new ones she does not know as well. I know that Maeve does know certain words because she repeats some words a number of times until she finds its closer to what I said than she originally uttered. Rarely a day goes by with Maeve learning a word or two. I noticed that she has learn’t to plan her actions somewhat because when she climbed up the kitchen steps (which have 2 steps) and she grabbed a bottle of apple-juice in one hand and some fruit in the other she placed one of them on the top step, stepped down and then moved it to the next step down.

Ok thats the good bit…. now one more “skill” thats not so nice. Maeve has learn’t to spit. I was holding my beer sitting on the sofa watching the TV when Maeve climbed onto the sofa and then lean’t over my beer glass and then started to spit into it; Fortunately she missed …. but I was shocked.

Ireland is one of those places that goes nutty over christmas – not that we get much snow here which is a pity. When I went out to lunch and I saw the following snowman on the move.

Made me laugh out loud – something good on a miserable day like today.

Maeve, like most children her age is coming along in leaps and bounds. There are many sights to be interesting in, concepts to be learned and the slippery complex task which is speech mastered. Maeve has shown definite progress in these area’s in acquiring new words and has started stringing simple sentences together along with showing understanding of simple instructions and expectations of other people.

A simple example would be Maeve in the last couple of days has picked up the words “Help” and “Tower” – the latter usually said when she is building a tower of large lego like bricks to impressive heights. This evening my Archos hand-held music/video/browser which Maeve likes to watch childrens movies on ran out of battery juice and needed recharging. Maeve came across and grabbed my hand and said “Help Me” in a clear voice; I said “and” to which she replied “Please”. She also likes to come over to me and throw her arms out and say “carry me”.

This week I have started to ask Maeve to put her toys away before she goes to bed. I say “Put away X” and normally she understands and moves the offending item from the floor to someplace like her toy box. Maeve also can understand and to correctly respond to questions like “where are your shoes”, “find your shoes”, “Find your bobo” (Bobo = feeding bottle or mug) and “go to bed”. Needless to say her favourite word is still “no” although other new words seem to be “socks” and “spoons” have started to appear (along with Panda,Lion, Elephant,Dog,Cat and Ben-10) and she shows the basics of counting (2-6) when she walks down the stairs.

Maeve as every is a happy loving daughter who loves to smile and has a ready dirty laugh.

I thought that I had a decade or two until my daughter (now 23 months old) discovered boys. As a father I now understand the perils of men – we only after one thing, but I had thought that I had a decade or two before all I became was “the taxi service”. This was shattered this evening when my wife mentioned in passing that when she went to pick up Maeve from the creche on Friday it was mentioned our Daughter was “very friendly and affectionate” and even “had a boyfriend” since one of the staff had seen her hugging and kissing some other boy in the creche.

I know that girls mature fast these days…. but Lord let them learn to speak a language first!!!

- New words of the day “Penguin, Sword and Tower”.