Growing by leaps and bounds

New concepts that Maia's able to articulate these days:

1. Something that's "real" as opposed to "pretend." Sample sentence: "The real polar bear is in the zoo, but a pretend one is in the car with me, sitting right there!"
2. A pretty accurate sense of relative time. She seems to have a relatively clear understanding of "yesterday," and she understands "tomorrow" well, too. "Now" and "later" are well-established, as well as the order of things, including "first," "next" and "last." This is pretty cool, and it certainly makes life easier! She knows that her birthday is in January, but clearly has no sense at all of how far away that is.
   
3. Counting up to the number 16, and enumerating up to about 12 or 13. If she has a line of toys, she points and counts one by one, and doesn't begin to lose one-to-one correspondence between number and item until about 12 or 13.
   
4. A few letters of the alphabet, including M, O, S, W, G, E, F (those two sometimes switch), N and Z. For some of these, she can identify the phoneme as well as the letter, and she knows words that begin with that letter. She inevitably identifies "M for Maia!" and "N for Nana!"--others aren't as consistent.
5. Something that will probably make for some easier parenting moments along the way: she's able to articulate several emotions and bodily sensations these days. This is the newest development of all the ones listed here. She now is able to talk about missing someone, about being excited, frustrated, angry, tired, hungry, thirsty . . . and a few that I'm forgetting at the moment. She's been talking about "happy" vs. "sad" for several months, but some of these more complex and subtle emotions are new. Just tonight, for example, we had dinner at the home of one of Brian's colleagues. He has a ten-year-old daughter with whom Maia bonded within 10 minutes of our arrival. As we were leaving, Maia sat next to her, clutching her forearm, and even gave her a light kiss on the shoulder. In the car on the way out of their neighborhood, Maia said "I'm sad because I miss all the people. I'm sad because we are leaving."
6. The relative "bigness" (age and size) of people is starting so sink in, although she was convinced earlier this evening that she could make herself as big as a 10-year-old by flexing her arm muscles. :)
   

Maia spent most of this past Saturday and Sunday in East Lansing at Nana and Papa's house, and got to do the following things: go to an MSU football tailgate (her third!), make apple crisp, go to the MSU Children's Garden, play in the backyard with garden hoses and buckets of water, have a bath in Nana's tub, and other things that I've undoubtedly forgotten.

Brian and I sat at streetside tables in downtown Ann Arbor, soaking up the sunshine and relishing the lack of a schedule. It was delicious! :)