2 going on 22

A quick update on Amelie’s current progress:

She can now count up to 20, though seems determined to forget 15. Her vocabulary skills are still struggling, and if you were in the other room, earwigging, you’d think a little Chinese girl had entered because every number has a certain oriental lilt, especially 11, which comes out sounding like, “A-yeven”.

She has begun to sing, mostly nursery rhymes, and the theme song to Something Special. We have awoke many mornings to the sound of her sweet and incoherent tones through the baby monitor, which even now, as I’m typing this out, brings a smile to my face as I reflect on them.

Her tantrums seem to be on the increase, as too is her OCD, which I think are both linked. The other day she spent three minutes placing her boots together, and each time they were, “not right”. Eventually she settled on a configuration, but when I looked, both boots were placed oppositely beside each other, something that kicked in my OCD. I waited until she wasn’t looking before rearranging them appropriately.

She can differentiate between the colours, red, blue and orange.

There is still the incessant need to have everything confirmed that she says. For example, if Amelie says, “Watch Justin, Daddy”, and I fail to respond, she will continually say this sentence over and over until I repeat it verbatim, which is fine, unless of course she says something you can’t understand. We have tried to make the same sounds and mimic the same inflection and intonation, but it doesn’t wash with Amelie. She knows we are not saying the same thing as she, and so she’ll become frustrated and begin to moan and then cry. Normally, a distraction technique is adopted, but I find this is limited when you’re driving a car.

She has taken to jumping a lot, and enjoys being chased around the couch (she often instructs us to, “Come on” and beckons us with her hand).

Having mastered the alphabet, she now has begun to recognise the words associated with the letters. Cocky.

She thinks all Meerkats say, “Simples”, a lot.

We’ve noticed she’s favouring the left hand over the right when drawing and eating.

If she could, she would sleep in her Wellington boots.

Speaking of which, her sleep patterns are pretty solid now, generally 7.30pm to 7.30am, save for the time when Carla and I went to a party on New Years Eve and her brother babysat and rang us at about 10.30pm to say, “Amelie is freaking out, you better come home!” We arrived back some 20 minutes later to find her on the landing, lay on her back, and Mark, still reeling with panic, reading from an In the Night Garden book on the stairs. Strangly, it seems to work so we’ve logged it in our inventory of “ways to calm down Amelie”.

If the moon was made of cheese, I think Amelie would book a trip.

She seems to enjoy Deal or No Deal again, and has taken to referring to Noel as “Nice man, Noel”.

And her current favourite books are, Shark in the Park and We're Going on a Bear Hunt, the latter she calls, “Hunt Bear”.

You've got to love her.