Every day, a different animal

Pretty much every morning, Sophie decides within the first few minutes of waking what animal she wants to be during the day. Lately, she's been a red dinosaur, a sea turtle, a mouse, a penguin, a snowy owl, and most recently, a reindeer. This choices carries on through the day (although occasionally, it changes a couple times a day), and Holly and I are designated as Mama [animal] and Dada [animal]. I found out over the chat today that I would be Dada Reindeer when I showed up at home.

Holly was just putting Sophie into bed, and taking her best guess, she asked Sophie if she wanted to get into her owl nest. Sophie rolled her eyes and said, "Owl-reindeer-burrito nest, Mama!" ... Of course, wasn't it obvious?



(Amazing what Google's image search comes back with, isn't it?)

A child's view of the world

Conversation while walking in the early evening:

Holly: (looking up and noticing a beautiful moon on a clear evening) Oh, Sophie, can you see the moon?

Sophie: Yeah! There it is! It's caught in the tree!

Image by spratmackrel on flickr.

Reading voices

I've just realized that most of the time, when I do the voices while reading books to Sophie, they come out sounding either like a Monty Python member in drag, or Admiral Ackbar. I need to work on my range, or no voice acting career for me.

Art gallery

Pointing to her pumpkin

Sophie has been making art with three other little girls in an art group ever since January 2009. Each week, we rotate houses and one mom comes up with an art project. It's been incredibly rewarding for both Sophie and myself and we're sad that one member of the group is moving to the States in December and another is moving to East Van.

Sophie's room is her art gallery and she's amassed quite a collection. Between art group and preschool and her daily independent art activities, we've got much more art than could fit on the walls. Today we did some refreshing of the gallery, so I thought I'd share it with you.

In this mixed media collection, the trained eye may be able to spot fingerpaint, electrical tape, aluminum foil, foam stickers, markers, bingo dabbers, watercolour paints and tempera paints. Sophie's an eclectic artist who prefers not to limit herself to one medium.

Here are a few images of the artist at work:


Making blotto art (folded paintings), August 18, 2009


Squirt bottle painting, August 4, 2009


Painting en plein air, June 4, 2009


Potato printing, May 4, 2009

Say cheese!

Sophie: "Look, Mom, I made a line in my hula hoop!" (shows me this cool arrangement of blocks inside the hoop)
Holly: "Wow, can I take a picture of that?"
Sophie: "Yeah, but they cannot smile." (the blocks)

Hope you like the photo anyway, even if the blocks aren't smiling. I think Sophie is smiling enough for all of them!

Riddle of the Sphinx

We're on the bus coming home tonight, and out of nowhere, Sophie starts asking me the riddle of the Sphinx: "What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three legs in the evening?" It wasn't delivered with the same veiled menace you could imagine the Sphinx asking it with (the first part was mumbled and I only caught on during the "two legs at noon" part), but still, I was pretty impressed. I answered quickly - just in case there were any Sphinxes taking the bus home after a busy day Sphinxing, but there didn't seem to be. And no, I'm not going to tell you the answer, if you don't want to be eaten by a Sphinx, you'll have to figure it out. Or Google it. Google, the Sphinx's bane.

I know Holly already mentioned this book in her last post, but here it is again - a most excellent book, one which apparently teaches riddles to toddlers. Hooray for Calef Brown! The only two books of his (that I know of) that we haven't seen yet are "Flamingos on the Roof" and "Soup for Breakfast". We'll have to check them out.

In Sophie's library bag