Are they supposed to know this much, this soon?

If any of you saw my facebook update earlier this week, that's just one example. If you didn't let me enlighten you.

My little newborn baby girl will be 18 months old on the 18th this month. I guess she's not really a newborn anymore. *sigh, lip quiver, tear, sigh* At the same time these last few weeks have been some of the most entertaining EVER! Her personality has been showing since she was pushing my lower right rib up and down with her little toes, but now it's really emerging!

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but is it still flattery when all that's imitated is talking on the phone and watching TV?

Wednesday morning, Chloe decided to watch a little TV. So she walked up to the TV, turned it on and found the bluray remote. Then she climbed up on the couch and turned on the bluray player. Our bluray is a Samsung and has streaming Netflix on it, it's awesome. Once the bluray was on and at it's home screen she selected the Netflix button and when that had loaded she pushed play on the first show available on our queue.  When the opening credits started she started fake laughing at it. After a few minutes she somehow found the pause button and climbed off the couch to go play in her room.Two minutes passed and she came back to the couch and started it up again. It was something about Africa so they were showing some zebras and she started howling because they look like striped doggies!

Three minutes later she changed her mind about the whole thing, as girls often do, and turned it all off and went off to play. I'm grateful she hasn't learned that we should sit in front of the TV for hours at a time. Thank goodness for short attention spans... wait... no. There's a time and a place. 

Preston has a work phone and a personal phone, but no matter the phone he always answers it the same. I guess he's self conscious about being on the phone in front of me when it's business and when it's friends it's probably because he thinks I'll disapprove of the conversation material. When the phone rings he grabs the phone, hits answer, and as he says hello he's walking out the door of the room. After the conversation is over and he's finishing up the call he will be walking back into the room as he says goodbye, hangs up and stuffs the phone into his pocket almost in one motion. Yesterday we were in Chloe's room playing with her and Preston let her play with his phone. She put the phone up to her ear and said "Ah-ra? Ob-di-bara ya. Ha ha ha!", fake laugh and all as she strolled confidently out of the room. About a minute later she came back, "Oh-ru, ba-da-ya. Yah!", took the phone away from her ear as if to hang up, and I swear she would have tried to stuff that phone in a pocket if she had been wearing more than a diaper. I looked at Preston and said "That was you! Not me for once!"

It's so fun to see the things repeated that she watches us do. We can ask her to fold her arms and she will fold her arms and bow her head with her eyes closed. Sometimes she'll even go all out for us and hunch down as if she's sitting in a chair and bent over, squish her face into her little folded arms and make little whispering noises as if she were saying the prayer. If we ask her where her nose is she will point to it and then get carried away and stuff it up there and then we consider ourselves lucky if it comes back clean. She can use a fork to stab small soft bites of food like ravioli and feed it to herself, though she usually ends up poking herself in the face and I freak out and trade it for a spoon even though she has very little luck with them.

She tried to unlock the bathroom door with my car key once. She almost succeeded except she couldn't turn it all the way and it wasn't locked in the first place. When she can get into the bathroom, she opens my drawer and pulls out my hairbrush and brushes her own hair. She loves to play fetch with the doggies and empty baskets of clothes one article at a time at high speed. And she LOVES to give kisses! Her kisses are usually wide open mouth ones that sometimes encompass half of the rest of your face in drool. Whenever she gives one she always says "ahhhhhhh," while doing it, because it's not a real kiss if you don't. This is one of those things that you really don't want influenced by what they see. You see, short kisses are great and all but, long kisses? Those are better. They must be! Why wouldn't you want your daughter's wide open drooling mouth with a little bit of fishy cracker goop on her lips attached to your lips for at least 8 seconds? *eye roll* I guess the way daddy loves mommy shows and she wants share!

Chloe is the highlight of my life! I can't get enough of her and at the same time, I still love my breaks from her... like nap time, and date night. She's getting super tall too. I blame Preston. She can reach stuff off my counter tops now. Things that were once far out of reach are brought to me on a daily basis. Like the package that had gum in it from my purse, or a cup of water I filled 30 seconds earlier and set down to let the dogs out and by the time I turn around it's been dumped on herself, or the floor, or both. Sometimes it's a plate of food. Or my computer on which I am blogging, she can somehow highlight half of what I just typed and with a few presses of other buttons replace it with "nmm,/..;;;/..,mmmczcn,//.////". Yeah that's always fun! Most of the time it's just hard not to laugh.