"B" is for Baby...

Ok, I know that everyone thinks their baby is a genius. I think it is because you watch them go from being a little blob that does nothing to learning and doing everything so you just can't help but feel they are the smartest baby that ever crawled the earth...so with that said...Mabel is soooo smart!

Mabel does a lot of amazing things, but the other night when I was settling her down for bed (bedtime is another story all together) she didn't want to go to sleep. She was all excited so she and I sat her room by her night light reading books and quietly playing it an attempt to induce some kind of sleepiness. She crawled over to her basket of alphabet blocks rummaged around and pulled out a block and showed it to me and said "B". To my shock it had the "B" embossed on it in yellow. I said "What?" She looked at the block and said "B" and handed to me. I said, "B?" she nodded and said "Baby!" and smiled.

Ok, so we read a lot to her, she LOVES her books. She loves her books so much she begs me to read to her. She has some picture books that go through the alphabet and two book have pictures of babies among the items for the letter "B". I thought that her connecting the meaning of the letters to the word in such an abstract way was beyond amazing and I stand by my statement that she's so smart for a 15 month old! I did pull out other blocks to see. She identified the "M" and I asked her what "M" stands for and she pointed at herself. She knows "M" is the first letter of Mabel since she loves it when I spell her name. She also knew "A", "C", "R", "E" and a couple of others.

Now bedtime...well, since the surgery and cast Mabel has really had a hard time with falling asleep. I mean when she feels herself drifting off she screams, she jumps and cries. It is really hard watching her fight her sleep. Before the cast she was the best she had ever been with going to sleep. Most nights we could put her in her crib and she's settle herself to sleep with out a tear - that took work mind you, but she did it. After the surgery and the twelve weeks in that cast her sleep was totally messed up. The brace added another few weeks of sleepless nights to the mix and now that she's standing up - well, lets just say she doesn't accept bedtime well. I'm trying to really work on it to make it a more natural transition, but she really hates falling asleep. Overall once she falls asleep most nights she stays asleep through until 6:30 or so. On that note she's waking up! Got to run!