Getting ready for Halloween

It feels like this Halloween is the first holiday that Maia's ever been excited for. She's been talking about it for days, and seems to get the sense that something big and fun is going to happen. She's saying things like:

• "Skeletons for Halloween!" (When she sees a skeleton in a shop window.)
• "Trick-or-treating in the pumpkin." (She has a pumpkin container for her candy.)
• She's got her eyes peeled for ghosts or witches or bats decorating the shops and houses around town, and is thrilled to point them out whenever she sees them.

Brian returns home from L.A. in a few hours, and he has the day off tomorrow, so it's going to be a Genisio Family Halloween Extravaganza! Downtown Ann Arbor has trick-or-treating, of course, at all of the shops along Main Street, and then we'll have more of the same in our neighborhood. We skipped the Halloween thing last year due to the fact that she was only 9 months old, and at that age, any holiday celebrations were for our sake rather than hers. We just wanted to stay home and hand out candy. :)

We're going to carve our pumpkin together sometime tomorrow, too, which will probably be quite a thrill in its own right. Maia's been very aware of her big pumpkin sitting on our kitchen island (we got it last week with our CSA share), and I think she'll be quite pleased to find out that her pumpkin can be even more interesting than it already is!

In other Maia news, she's learned how to say "President Obama," courtesy of one of the women who we see at Zingerman's in the mornings when we go there for coffee. This particular person loves to see Maia in her Obama shirt, and has urged her coworkers to come up to Maia and ask her about her shirt, just for the pure enjoyment of hearng her say "Obama shirt!" Due to my sometimes-superstitious nature, I'm not encouraging this whole "President Obama" thing yet, although you can be sure we'll be shouting it to the heavens on Wednesday morning if it comes to pass.

Maia's also learning about prepositions and pronouns, which is cool. These little connecting words are some of the last ones to fall into place and make sense, and she seems to be starting to get the hang of it. In her bath today, she was stacking some of her toys and said "Octopus on the duck."

The teacher/educator parts of my brain are just endlessly fascinated with the daily, incremental process of hearing her develop verbally. The physical things (fine motor and gross motor skills, sense of one's body and one's place in the physical world, etc.) are interesting, too, but don't seem to trigger the same moments of amazement for me. I just love this part of being a parent: she's able to express herself with a bit more assurance and clarity every single day. Just today, as she and Papa Stan and I were driving downtown together for dinner, we heard her sorting out the differences and similarities of the words "sandbox" and "sidewalk" by repeating them and listening to us say them, too.

Oh, and another interesting thing that I want to remember: she's getting a sense of some of the temporal words, like "now," "soon," "then," and "later." She uses all of these terms in her speech these days, and is usually agreeable when we explain that we're going to do "activity X then activity Y." This little leap in understanding has been so helpful in going about the ordinary tasks of our day together.

Maia's favorite books these days (which she'll ask for by character name or title):

• Horton Hears a Who (known to Maia as "Horton")
  
• I Love You, Dude
• Hello, Sparty! ("Sparty Book!")
  
• Messy Baby
• One Fish, Two Fish . . .
• Green Eggs and Ham