Determination

I told the Pirette after her nap that we needed to go to the shop around the corner (about 300m away) for some bananas for Pirate's lunchbox.  She immediately went for her little shopping trolley.

Now, this trolley was a Christmas gift, and it comes with us to the big supermarket, but I've never let her take it outside.  It's fairly flimsy and I feared the bumpy pavement would rattle it to bits if I didn't end up carrying it 3/4 of the way.  But the Pirette insisted and I though, fuck it, what are toys for?

Well I'll be damnded if the determined little shit didn't push that thing all the way to the shop. AND BACK.

Not only that, when we arrived she walked straight in, proudly pushing her little red, yellow, and blue trolley.  I told her we needed bananas.  She got bananas and put them in.  I said we need oranges.  She selected a bag of oranges.  And an apple that we didn't need, but who cares.

I told her that was all we needed and it was time to go to the till.  She walked her trolley straight up to the till and very carefully put her items on the counter for the man to beep, I mean scan.  With each item she had to stand on tiptoes and reach all the way up and declare "up there."  She then moved her trolley to the other side of the till, and as the man beeped, um, scanned her items through she got up on tiptoes and took them down from the counter, one by one, and put them back in her trolley.  She then took ther receipt, gave it to me, and walked out the door, pushing her load of fruit.  She neither looked back nor waited for me to follow.

She then walked all the way home, even lifting the trolley up to get it up a curb, refusing assistance.

The whole expedition took the better part of an hour, but she never got distracted, she never gave up, got bored, lost focus, or threw a strop.

I am convinced that if I had just handed her a fiver and told her to go to the shop on her own and buy mama some bananas, the little pisher would have done it.  And she's not even two yet! This isn't normal.  And there's more...

Butterflies in my tummy

Hmm.  It appears while I have been on indefinite hiatus blogger has changed its format.  Now I'm going to have to re-learn how to operate the blasted thing.  Ugh.

Right, so, the main reason I haven't climbed back in the saddle as regularly as hoped is that the OCD part of me hates to leave gaps in a narrative, and there's far too much missing to catch you up on everything, ergo I've fallen too far behind to start up again.  The mountain is insurmountable, or something.

So I've just had the artistic, fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants, leaves-tea-cups-everywhere side of my brain beat the OCD side into temporary submission and put up a post. It would be nice to have some comments from the old gang, if any of you are still out there.

I'm not even going to try to give you a summary of the past two years, I'm just going to start as though I'd never stopped, and maybe now and again fill in a bit of back story maybe.

Yesterday Small Pirate, aka Pirette, did the most extraordinary thing.  She was watching telly and playing with her magnadoodle (which hadly leaves her side).  The man on TV was talking about butterflies.  She scribbled on her magnadoodle for a moment, then waved wildly to get my attention from the kitchen.  I turned around and she made the sign for butterfly (we do a lot of signing around here), then pointed at her magnadoodle. This is what I saw:

And she's not even 2 yet!  My baby's a GYNIUS!