"Melmo"

Given Ryanne's love of Elmo and my love of warm, cozy pajamas, I couldn't resist the Elmo PJs I found at Target. They're light blue and have Elmo on the shirt behind the text "That Tickles" (which Chrys finds terribly amusing). There's an Elmo head on the left hip of the bottoms, which are snuggly fleece. I put them on for the first time tonight and pointed at my chest to the picture of Elmo and asked Ryanne who that was. She looked at me like I was stupid and said "mama". D'oh! Then, I pointed at the Elmo head on the pants and asked who that was. "Dada" D'oh^2! Third time's a charm...I asked who was on my shirt. "Melmo" Sheesh...this is getting complicated.

I guess that interaction is an indicator of how much she's understanding these days. She had the start of the language explosion while we were in Phoenix. We had at least 1 new word a day. It was simply amazing to hear her utter new things. I lost track of all of the words, though. The highlights of my memory - "brace-et peas" (while trying to get my LiveStrong band off of my wrist) and "doe maaaaow" (to grandma's dogs...we realized later that she'd never seen a black dog, but all of our cats are black so maybe that's confusing). She's got shoes and diaper pretty well down and I understand "tantoo" more times than not. There are dozens more, but I won't try to list them.

She's really getting some mileage out of "tantoo", too, which is very nice to hear. Most times she uses it right, but it's pretty funny when she asks for something by holding out her hand and saying "tantoo". We've got some work to do on dada's "tantoo" identification, though he's getting better already.