Cute Things

(Photo by Meagan Kopp and Picnik.com)



Of course Charlie is a pretty "Cute Thing" herself, but this post is about some Cute Things she's done recently...

We spend the better part of our days, whether at Charlie's House or Grammakate's, with televised children's programming for background noise. (Don't judge me until you've tried to entertain a very busy one-year-old with only your own devices, whatever they may be!)

We tell time by the tube...If I hear Moose A. Moose, I know that it's approaching either the hour or the half-hour. Sometimes I'll use a program as a conversation starter. The other day I said, "Hey, Charlie -- It's time for Between the Lions, thinking maybe she'd come back with, "Sweet -- Let's watch it!" or, perhaps, "Can we watch Franklin today instead?"

But Charlie responded by fetching her "Little Lion" book and bringing it to me in the kitchen, where I was busily picking up puffy little fruit snacks from the floor. Such a clever baby -- She'd rather read a book than watch TV!

Yesterday, I was reclining on the floor, watching Charlie practice her Hatbox Ballet. (That's where she climbs up onto a hatbox that's about half her height, balances on one foot, and then climbs down -- which she does masterfully, both forward and backward. Since she rarely falls -- I mean, since she rarely gets hurt when she falls -- I'm allowed to savor a moment or two of immobility.) After a few warm-up climbs, she decided to up the difficulty level by clutching a picture frame in one hand as she stepped. I was impressed when, discovering that she was not quite ready for Object-Clutching, she placed the frame in the center of the box, stepped up, then bent to retrieve her prize -- a task made more difficult by the fact that her feet were now squarely on top of it. (Sensing disaster, I jumped up and rushed to the rescue, thinking What a clever baby indeed!)

Charlie is a great tease. Someone (someone who wanted to remain in my good graces, most likely) recently told me that teasing in a young child indicates a high level of intelligence. If that's true (and I've no reason to doubt that it is), then our girl is a genius!

Charlie's favorite game is having someone say, "Hey -- You give that back!" It doesn't matter if it's a pair of socks snatched from a freshly folded pile, a magazine you're trying to read, or the camera you're wildly trying to focus on a rapidly moving subject. She'll hold out the object as if to say, "You want this?" then snatch it back and run. (Well, actually, it's just fast walking, but you can tell by her face that she thinks she's running.) It's all great fun, until someone gets hurt -- or tries to play it in a fabric store with baskets of notions and tubes of buttons displayed on low shelves!

Obviously this is not a complete list of Cute Things that Charlie does. My days are just so full of Cute Things, I could gag. But since she's now doing that Cute Thing where she pulls large, heavy objects off of surfaces several inches above her head, I feel that I might as well just click "Publish Post" and play along!