What we have here is a failure to communicate

I'm often impressed by Kate's resourcefulness in getting her point across. There are still times, though, when her clueless parents just can't figure it out.

The other night we were watching The Incredibles after dinner --that is to say, Doug and I had finished eating and left the table, and Kate was still sitting in her high chair playing with her food. (She does that a lot. An oft-repeated question at our house is, "Are you eating that applesauce, or just playing in it?") As she sat there making snake noises and slithering her spaghetti noodles around on her tray, she looked up and pointed, and said, "Want the sheep? The white sheep?" The only sheep I could think of was the little wooden one that came with her train, so I found that and held it up. "Did you want this?" I asked. She shook her head "No!" then looked thoughtful for a moment, and said, "The dancing sheep?" "Ah!" I said, as the light dawned, "You want to watch Boundin'?" I was impressed that she remembered that Boundin' went with The Incredibles. (We hadn't watched either recently.)

That time I was able to figure out what she wanted fairly quickly. Other times I'm not so lucky. Recently Kate was asking for "the bouncing ball on the computer," and I just could not for the life of me figure out what she was talking about. I even called Doug at school (between classes) and he couldn't figure it out either. So Kate was, perforce, bouncing-ball-less. Then, several days later, she was on my lap while I was shutting down the computer, and when I got down to the desktop she suddenly lunged toward the screen, pointed at an icon and cried, "It's the bouncing ball!" Oh, that's the bouncing ball. It's this game called DXBall. So she played that for a few minutes. She can't really do it, but hey, she's having a good time. She also recently asked for "Big Ideas" which we eventually discovered was The Three Caballeros (and not, as we at first thought, perhaps something to do with Veggie Tales). I don't know where she got that from. Big Ideas. Three Caballeros. Nope, I'm just not seeing it.

Doug pointed out today that Kate is saying "carrots" now and not "darrots." Alas, for the fleeting ways of babyhood.