Happy Halloween!!

I'm still pregnant!! And Ada is still a strawberry.
I had to work in the peds ED on Halloween (while my family went trick-or-treating at the zoo), so I wore a pumpkin on my baby, and generated a lot of laughter.

The fantastic thing about having a belly this large is that my brain doesn't remember that the belly belongs to me, and I run into things! Especially in close quarters, I often look at a small space, and think: I can fit ... but I don't!!

see Ada read

We hit a new linguistic breakthrough in the past couple weeks. Adelaide has been working on learning the sounds that letters make for quite a while, and she's reliably identified her favorites ("o" and "s") all over town for many months. But recently, she's figured out that the sounds string together to make words. Better yet, she's realize that we string the letters together to know how to read to her.

Each of her favorite books right now has an associated letter to "practice". Fiona Loves the Night holds the distinguished honor of her first sounded-out word: plop. She very reliably identifies p-l-o-p, in rapid succession, p-l-o-p, p-l-o-p, over and over. A huge first step!

A funny anecdote: this week she and Joe were sounding out words in a book about body parts. They got to "knees" and Joe tried to skip it (as the silent "k" is pretty confusing). He said, "this is a hard one, let's do the next page." She patted his shoulder sympathetically, nodded her head in earnest, and encouraged, "No, it's okay, you can do it! Just try!" Knees.