A sense of self

Philosophically speaking, there's something significant about first recognizing yourself as a distinct entity, realizing that you persist through time, that you can interact and affect those around you, and indeed, that things like noses, hats, stuffed animals, and even (oh joy) shoes can *belong* to you.

Sophie has recently (over the last few months) entered this stage, and is now very fond of assigning ownership to various things around the house. "Dada pants", "Mama brush", "Sophie (everything else)". She's (currently) particularly attached to a couple of "Sophie bags" and the "Sophie shoes" that Daddy bought for her. (They're runners.)

She's still quite the avid reader, but doesn't claim possession of them as "Sophie books". They're just books - sometimes named by a minor character/feature in the book - "little boy", "chicken" (a book about cows with a tiny chicken on the back), "fat baby", and "galleries" (a book about urban yuppie babies).

Back to the topic - now that she's realized she's Sophie, she's showing signs of having a pretty solid self-image. We've recently taught her to say "I love you" (awww, so cute, shmoopy), and on the bus today, she started saying/yelling "I looooove... SOPHIE!". And then she'd call out the stops for people, as usual.

Sophie's second Halloween

This is how she rolls

Sophie and I had our very first mommy/daughter baking session on October 30th. We made pumpkin cut out cookies and they were delicious.

Here she is going through a dry run with the rolling pin. Things got very messy very quickly once we added the dough and flour.



On Halloween, Aunt Kristi came over and helped bake the second half of the batch.

Yoda and Obi Wan vs Darth Vader

Since Sophie was going as Princess Leia for Halloween, we decided to have a Star Wars theme for our pumpkins this year. Janet joined us to create a dramatic Obi Wan Kenobi:


I made a wrinkly Yoda:


And Dean used the green pumpkin to create a Darth Vader pumpkin that actually opened the way his helmet does in the movie!


Here they are in action, note how Yoda and Obi Wan are side by side, fighting the evil of the Empire.

Happy Halloween!

Princess Leia wants to wish you a Happy Halloween! We'll have more pictures and even a special video (cross your fingers we can get this to work on Linux) later this weekend!


Here she is in 2007 at 7 months for comparison:

"Fun" at the pumpkin patch

Today, we visited the Richmond Country Farms Pumpkin Patch and had a "fun" time. Instead of letting Sophie explore the exciting world of pumpkin patch fun, it was more like subjecting her to pumpkin patch fun. At first, she merely looked around disdainfully:

and she was quite good natured when we tried navigating the furrowed pumpkin patch:

she even slogged through the mud of the corn maze for a few minutes in relatively good spirits:

but, when this happened:

well, you can see she wasn't pleased.


And I don't think she appreciated my laughter. What's so funny, Mommy?


We calmed her down a bit by pointing out the fact that at least she wasn't dressed up like a pumpkin like THOSE kids.

She calmed herself down by sucking her thumb.

We made another mistake by trying to get her to touch a pumpkin. "But they're dirty, Mama!"

So, we took the wagon away from the pumpkin fields and returned to dry land.

Sophie wasn't a huge fan of the hay and kept picking individual strands of hay off her sweater.

But all's well that ends with cinnamon mini donuts!

A post for Trisha

Here you go Trish, Sophie in her owl pjs. After our phone call, I picked up the camera and got a couple silly pictures in low light conditions.

This is one of Sophie's favourite things to do these days, her downward facing dog yoga pose.

And below you'll see our silly daughter fooling around and trying to delay her bedtime.