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was this morning when as I walked down the hall to get Isaac up, I heard Nicole’s sweat little voice calling out “Mom, where are  you?” over and over again.  She’s just at that age where her language skills are exploding.  Not only is her vocabulary increasing, but she is starting to string two words together.  Ironically, “where are you” is like one word to her.  Usually in the morning, she’ll be sitting up in her bed talking gibberish and occasionally she’ll sit up and cry to be released from her room.  This is the first time I’ve heard her call out a whole sentence.

While I”m on the subject of Nicole, I ought to share two more stories from this week.  The picture to the left is from the other day when she spilled some water on the floor.  She said “oh, no” then opened the drawer containing washcloths and hand towels, retrieved one and started trying to clean up her mess.  I was so proud.  She has observed the times when her older siblings have spilled and I’ve directed them to clean up their own spills.

The other story happened outside this week.  I had all 4 kids outside with me and we were playing with balls and other toys.  Our driveway has a rather steep decline towards the road, so I have repeatedly told Isaac and Charlotte that if a ball rolls down they are not to chase it into the street.  I tell them that I will replace the ball if it gets hit by a car, but that I can’t replace them.  I didn’t see when Nicole’s ball rolled down the hill and across the street into the little ditch on the other side, but I did see that Nicole was upset and instead of descending into tears she looked at me and said, in a very sad voice “oh, no!  Ball!”  and pointed towards the street.  Not having seen it roll, I wasn’t entirely sure I’d find a ball, but I cautioned her to stay up on the hill and went down to investigate.  Sure Enough at the bottom of the hill I could see her ball.  After I retrieved it, I handed it to her and my heart swelled with pride at this successful communicative exchange that I had just experienced with my daughter.  I am still puzzling over why that experience felt so profound to me.  Was it that she finally caught on to the lesson I’ve been trying to teach her (don’t cry, use words instead) or was it that she gave me information that I didn’t know and I was able to act on that information to achieve a successful result?