Stories

A couple random stories about Elizabeth from the last few days:

Suddenly in the last couple days she has decided that she wants to have books read to her instead of looking through them herself.  Or, well, that isn't quite accurate.  It is more like she wants to have you flip through them with her.  For weeks now she has entertained herself by pulling the books off one by one and looking through them.  But now she takes a book off the shelf and brings it over to you.  This is not as easy as it sounds since she isn't confident enough to walk over and crawling while carrying a book is tricky.  So she does a combination of crawling while pushing the book along the floor and holding the book in one hand while doing this half-crawling/half-sitting kind of thing.  She then climbs up on your lap if you're on the floor or raises her hands to be picked up if you are on the chair.  It is endearing, but confusing since she doesn't actually let you read more than half of the words on any page (and these are board books with not even a full sentence on most pages).  She then squirms down, goes back to the bookshelf for another one, and repeats the whole process.  And again.  And again.  And again.  And if you are foolish enough to clean up the books after reading all 35 of them, that is apparently an invitation to start over again.

Last night she was up in the middle of the night and after fussing a little for 10 minutes or so got really upset.  So I went in figuring I needed to feed her.  I didn't bother trying to give her a pacifier since that has been met in the last couple weeks by her taking it from me and throwing it, thereby losing it in the dark room.  But something was different when I picked her up and I couldn't figure out what was up with her.  Normally if she is crying and I pick her up, she is happy, but she was just looking at me with these big sad eyes.  And when I sat down with her in the rocking chair, she did not act eager to eat but just kept looking sad.  So I didn't feed her but sat there talking with her.  And then I noticed that she kept pulling on my hands and looking at them.  And I have no idea how the idea suddenly occurred to me but I suddenly wondered if she was looking for a pacifier hiding.  So we stood up and I picked up the pacifier from her crib and she took grabbed it out of my hand.  And instead of throwing it across the room and screaming, she promptly stuffed it in her mouth and leaned towards the crib.  And back to sleep she went.  I guess all the fussing was that she was up and couldn't find the pacifier in her crib and was having trouble going back to sleep without it.  If only there was a way to attach the pacifier to her hand so this wasn't a problem.  Oh wait, that is called sucking your thumb, but she has never had any interest in it.