Uuuhhhgggrrrr!

Sometimes it’s easy to forget that Abbie is an actual, thinking person capable of soaking in the world and spitting it back out in her own way. Usually she just sits passively when she’s not playing with something, and I forget she’s around me. Like when we were at the basketball game the other night, and when a player took yet another ill-advised shot I muttered “aww, hell.” A woman a couple rows ahead of us flashed me a puzzled/dirty look to verify that it was the father of that sweet little girl mumble profanity. I remembered who was with me, went back to watching my mouth, and suddenly found a silver lining to Abbie not being able to talk yet.

Nevertheless, she’s still watching and soaking up her parents’ actions. A couple nights ago, Ellie was checking on Abbie after hearing her banging around her room long after bedtime. She directed her back to bed, laid her down, and asked for a goodnight kiss. Whenever I ask Abbie for a kiss, I make sure to stick out my cheek to give her a wide target, otherwise who knows what body part she’ll slime. Without the benefit of experience that comes from spending every waking moment with her, Ellie simply brought her face down to toddler-mouth level, and trusted her to plant one in the proper spot. Abbie responded by giving her mother a soaking wet kiss on the mouth, just like mommy and daddy do. Ellie didn’t know whether to be horrified that she just received an open-mouth kiss sans tongue from her daughter, or gratified to know that she’s at least paying attention to us.

She doesn’t seem to pay much attention to the television, which is why we’re surprised when she reacts to it without our prompting. I’ve seen her clap her hands along to Dora counting, or maybe sign when she recognizes an object like that butterfly from the Lunesta commercial, but not much else. With this in mind, Ellie was pleased when she tried watching her Muppet DVDs with her, and found her reacting to a host of objects. She’d laugh when mommy laughed, sing when a Muppet sang, and waved her hands back and forth to sign “fish” when she saw a fish. Abbie was really getting into this signing thing, when she saw a creature she didn’t quite recognize. It was large, brown, and hairy, as opposed to the puppets that were smaller, fuzzy, and colored with primary and secondary hues. Abbie took her best guess as to what it was, and panted to sign “dog.” Ellie looked at the screen, saw no dogs, and tried to figure out what looked like a dog. It turns out that while they were watching the Muppet episode featuring the cast of “Star Wars,” Chewbacca* had wandered on the screen, and Abbie thought he looked like a canine. After she stopped laughing, Ellie regained her composure and told me about Abbie’s misidentification.

“Aww, hell, that girl has a lot left to learn.”

* Chewbacca, by the way, is in Microsoft Word’s spell-check for some reason.