Chair as a Verb

We took Amelia to the local college campus to run around with her friend Livia. True to form, Amelia did not want to do what we thought she'd want to do, which was run around in the grassy areas chasing her balls which we brought with us. She instead wanted to climb up and down the stairs of the various buildings. In a futile attempt to get her interested in the grassy areas, I picked her up and carried her almost to a tree on the other side of the area, in front of two buildings that had no stairs. She rewards my efforts by becoming insanely interested in the empty fountain, begging with her "unh unh unh" to go inside. Since we were too dense to understand (actually we were being too stubborn to comply, but we acted dense for her benefit), she retrieved one of her balls, her biggest one in fact, the one she calls Mama Ball. She begins running toward the empty fountain (which is the size of an above ground wading pool with a 3 foot cement wall and perfectly flat floor). Her daddy and I look at each other and I say, "You know what she's going to do, right?" And he, of course, nods. Sure enough, Mama Ball goes sailing into the fountain as Amelia turns around to look at us like, "How will we get it out?" So Daddy goes in the empty fountain. Soon Amelia is in there, too. She is SO happy, she's doing her happy feet dance. Then she spots me looking at her and points with a completely triumphant grin on her face as she stands next to her daddy. A passing father, who is there with his daughter as she learns to ride her training wheel-clad bike, grins knowingly at me in commiseration.

Later we took the girls to a different area of campus and they still were interested in stairs and we just gave in. It was cute - Amelia and Livia were sharing their balls. Livia would drop or throw hers, Amelia would retrieve it and hand it to Livia. Livia would respond with a version of "Thank you." Very cute. They both got lots of practice going up and down stairs and Amelia is doing a good job of finding a railing or low wall to support herself on the way up, and waits for Mommy's hand on the way down.

Amelia then started sitting on each step as she was going down. After the second one she looked at me and said, "Chair!". I was like, sure, chair, whatever. She says this whenever she sits on something, including the dishwasher door when it's in the down position and the rack is still inside. She repeated, "Chair!" and pointed at me emphatically. I got it - she was saying "Sit!". She wanted me to sit with her and I did, and she was happy.

Happy is a word she says now, out of the blue. She smiles at me and says, "Appy!" It's so cute. I can only wonder if she knows what it means.

On the way to the car we passed the local community theatre and well dressed folks were starting to head in for tonight's show. Amelia wanted to walk the stairs and I let her. And yes, I enjoyed the panic I imagined some folks were having that a toddler might be attending tonight!!! Bwah haha, Mommy has an evil streak!