Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

Adventurous Annie
Our youngest daughter seems to be adding to her vocabulary almost daily now. Long ago she mastered "No", which is not a big surprise. More recently she has figured out how to say "yes", or more properly "yeah" with a drawl at the end, which is how Erika and I talk to each other sometimes – obviously enough for Annie to get a handle on it. In addition to words like "buh bye" and "nigh-nigh" (for "night-night") that she's been able to say for a while, she's been saying other words as well, including "okay" (again with a bit of a drawl), and a passable "up please" (which gets her out of her high chair). She's also babbling up a storm, so she's working on it.

This little girl really wants to be like the bigger kids, especially like her older sister. If she sees big kids doing it, she wants to do it to. That's where the "adventurous" part comes in. A good example of this happened during the early evening when we went to the local indoor pool for a swim. Annie doesn't want to be in the "baby" pool, she now much prefers being in the pool where her big sister is. In this pool there's a little water slide in the shape of a large frog – the kids end up sliding down his tongue. Vanessa only started going down this slide herself maybe a year ago, when she was four or so. But when Annie saw all the kids going down this slide well, that was all the encouragement she needed. She's been in slides before, but never a water slide. For the first slide I was in the water at the end of the slide while Erika helped her climb the few steps at the back of the frog. The expression of shear delight on her face as she slid down the slide was priceless. After a few times of this I exchanged places with Erika so that she could see Annie's expression. Annie got really jazzed up about all of this and must've gone down the slide – at the end with only the barest intervention from me – a dozen or so times. She was shivering from the cold when she got out of the water, though it may have also been partly due to the shear excitement of it as well.