Sim! Waader!

We re-introduced M to her kiddie pool this weekend, and she's hooked. She spent almost an hour stepping in and out, in and out of it yesterday, and she howled in protest when I finally hauled her shivering body out for good. Today, it was all she could talk about -- she'd run to the door, yelling "waader! Sim! 'Side!"" over and over again until we finally got around to filling it up. The Boy spent another happy hour soaking his feet while she played and while I used the break to clean the bathrooms. (yes, we have officially reached the point where cleaning bathrooms constitutes a "break." Pray for us). So obsessed is M that, when she started dawdling over her dinner, all it took was a promise from the Boy that she could go swimming afterward to cause her to cram the rest of her carrots in her mouth. It's not really lying if what he actually meant was that she'd go "swimming" in the bathtub, is it?

I also took M to the NC Zoo on Friday, with my MIL. The monkeys were a big hit, as was the aviary. M seemed disappointed with the lions, who just laid there instead of roaring as we've taught her lions do.

The zoo visit brought up an interesting (if small) parenting dilemma. M knows a lot of animals by sight and sound -- just your usual farm/jungle suspects. But of course, she's not familiar with the variety of animals out there. She doesn't know what a fox or a bison is, for instance. So should I have corrected her when she encountered these animals for the first time at the zoo, and named them as the closest animals in her vocabulary? I confess that I didn't. I was too busy cracking up as she shouted "Mooooo!" at the bison (yes, pretty much everything M says comes with an exclamation point at the end) and barked at the fox. I figure right now, it's more important to reinforce the fact that she can recognize certain types of animals. We can introduce her to the wider variety later, I think.

Finally, you may have noticed that I've been posting more often. That's because no sooner did I mention that M had been napping well than she decided that 30 minutes constitutes a perfectly respectable naptime for a sixteen-month-old. That's the longest she's agreed to nap for for most of the past week. My blog may be (somewhat more) prolific as a result, but my house is a mess. If she doesn't go back to napping soon, I'm going to have to start lacing her lunch with brandy.