Just Bragging

My daughter has impressed me a lot over the past few days. Truthfully, as a biased parent, she impresses me with everything she does on a daily basis, but there were three things that stood out recently. Over the week-end, I had a visit from my ex-step-sister (long story), along with four of her EIGHT children (even longer story). Pumpkin was thrilled to have so many kids around, and basically adapted to their games and activities, even though they were all older than she is. She followed them around, ate what they ate, played where they played. At one point I found her and the four-year-old chillin' in the basement, crashed on the couch, watching Star Wars. This was of course after I realized I hadn't seen her in over an hour, being the attentive parent that I am. She is a lot more independent than I usually allow her to be.

Then today, she gave me both a laugh and a shock when I realized just how much information gets into her head. I was trying to do her hair, but she was squirmy, so I tried to subdue her by singing. This would make the average person run the other way, but Pumpkin doesn't know just how bad I am yet, and remained still enough for me to create a lopsided ponytail. I woke up with Hey there Delilah running through my head, so that's the song I sang. I gave it a verse, then quit, because honestly, I am so sick of that overplayed song. All summer long, I heard it every time I got in the car, even if I was only driving for five minutes. As it turns out, Pumpkin was also affected by the constant repetition of that song. When I stopped singing, she blinked at me in the mirror, possibly wanting me to continue, then took matters into her own hands and sang, "Ohhh, wha do do mee, ohhh wha do do meeee". At age 2-and-a-bit, I am still getting used to the fact that she can say anything, let alone sing a top 40 hit.

To add to my perception that she is absolutely brilliant, Pumpkin even managed to outsmart me today. She is absolutely addicted to YouTube, thanks to my hubby and his propensity to entertain her by granting her a video of any subject she shouts out at him. Lately, she is all about a Hippo video that I am not going to link to 'cause I don't know how. You don't want to see it anyways, trust me. She wanted to watch it on my upstairs, desktop computer this morning, but I wanted to keep her downstairs so I could eat some breakfast. Fifteen minutes passed, then she said, "Pee pee! Go potty!" Well, that got me excited since she isn't at all toilette-trained, so I rushed her upstairs to the potty, only to see her run past the washroom, into my office, over the computer, shouting, "Hippo!" Apparently she is aware of my eagerness to get her toilette trained, and has no problem abusing this information for her benefit. I'm kinda proud!