I know her!

Phoebe was in a bit of a wild mood before bed this evening. She was drawing with Rachel when I stumbled upon her/them and she said, "I'm making all the grown ups draw with me! Here's your paper, Mom!"

So I sat down to colour with her and Rachel. 

"What am I to you—a kid or a grown up?" Rachel asked.

"Ummmm...you are...Zoë!" Phoebe said. 

"What?! I'm not Zoë."

"You could be."

"How?"

"You could be Zoë for Halloween!!"

This kid is a trickster, a jokester, an imp.

A few minutes later she leaned toward Rachel and said, "I'm going to kiss you!"

"This feels like a trick" Rachel said.

"No, it doesn't," Phoebe assured her.

"It might not be a trick," Rachel said. "But it feels like one."

"Shhh...it's not," Phoebe said and then she leaned in and licked Rachel instead of kissing her.

"It was a trick!" Rachel said.

"Yeah!" Phoebe grinned. "It was!"

Anyway, I told Phoebe it was my mom's birthday today.

"Today?!" she repeated. "Your mom's birthday?!"

"Yes!" I said. "Today!"

"Oh! Well, I am making this picture for your dear mother!" she said, adding a few furious scribbles to show how serious she was about her artwork. "Is your mother nice?"

"Do you...know who my mom is?" I asked.

"Ummmmmmm..." she hedged. 

"My mom is Naanii," I told her.

"WHAT?!" she gasped. "I know her! I've seen her on your phone 'afore!"

"Yeah, well...that's my mom. And I think she's pretty nice."

Rachel summed it up nicely when she said, "Being a baby must be wild. Like, you just have no idea what's going on or who people are or anything."

Here's the drawing she was working on (Rachel wrote "Dear Mom" at the top of the page, because that's what Phoebe asked her to write):

You can perhaps see some primitive people popping up amongst the scribbles. 

Once she knew that today was Naanii's special day—Naanii, who lives in my phone—she wanted to talk to her. Unfortunately, Naanii wasn't available just then (though we did eventually get to talk to her), but we made some little videos. 

Here she is being rather chaotic:

She did some dancing and then wanted to "climb on the rails" and wondered whether Naanii also likes to climb on the rails. Which...I mean...I kind of doubt she does. But Phoebe likes to do it (all the kids like to do it; I may as well have a climbing wall installed in my hallway at this point). 

And here's Phoebe switching to play on the stairs. As you can hear, she's already morphed from a consistent /b/ "bump" to a solid /j/ "jump." That switch only happened in the last couple of days (so, once again, I'm really unconcerned about her language development at this point because she's continually figuring things out and making progress).

She sings "Row, row, row your boat" as she slides down the stairs, only she says things like, "Row your boat gently down the street" which is kind of funny.

Oh, also, ignore my gasps and chiding at the beginning of the video. I did not know she could jump down the stairs backwards. Apparently she can. I still hold that it's a bad idea (especially from beyond the bottom step so I'm glad she was talked out of that idea). And the only reason I didn't rush down to the bottom of the stairs to catch her when I initially thought she was going to jump from up there is because (and I don't think you can hear it in the video) she told me she was going to slide down, which is much safer.

She and Alexander spent about ten minutes "penguin sliding" together after this video.

And there was a lot of dancing and jumping and climbing of the railings. She was just...off the rails this evening...so it should come as no surprise that she fell off the couch (while we were having a Switch Sports Bowling contest, at Alexander's behest) and bonked her head.

Fortunately, the next thing on our itinerary for the evening was to break into the eggnog (*gag*) and Phoebe really enjoyed that. 

Rachel had gone out to the fridge in the garage to look for something during dinner and came back in talking about the E-G-G-N-O-G out there. All the kids soon got on board with E-G-G-N-O-G until one of them said "eggnog" out loud.

"Why did you say it out loud?!" Zoë accused.

"It's really not a big deal," I said. "Everyone but Phoebe can spell eggnog, anyway, so she's the only one we're keeping that word secret from...and she doesn't even know what eggnog is so I think we're okay."

She doesn't even know who my mother is, apparently. 

There's just a lot she's still figuring out, okay? 

Although she remembered things about trees and lights and Santa and presents and baby Jesus from last Christmas...she was really confused about the concept of Christmas stockings (so she didn't remember those) and she can't really tell you why There's Always Tomorrow makes her tear up (we haven't watched Rudolph yet this season) and the idea of Mr. Grinch (she's very formal about his title of Mister) was, from her perspective, brand new to her as well. She had no memory of eggnog, either, but it sure cheered her up after her fall off the couch.

“This egg nog is so good! It makes me feel happy again! It makes me so much happy!”

She actually went down to bed fairly easily once we got her settled down...but she sure had the zoomies going on earlier!