A whole world to discover

Now that HG so rarely tears books (only be accident) she has been allowed to flip through more of Abba and Ima's books, here are some of her favourites and current HG interests in general.

Deer - Ever since Ima spent an afternoon photographing deer for a work project on the animals, HG has been fascinated, demanding to see at least a daily slideshow of Ima's photos. She loves grabbing Ima's mammal books and hearing about the different kinds of deer, eagerly looking forward to any pictures that show mother deer and baby deer...

Ima and baby animals - identifying "ima" and "abba" animals is big with HG right now. She loves pictures of baby animals, and is especially thrilled to see pictures of nursing animals, exciteldy shouting out "ima, baby, nurse!" whenever she sees one.

Horses - HG spends ages flicking through Ima's horse encyclopedia which is full of photos of every different breed of horse imaginable. She says "ride" every time she sees a person mounted on a horse and likes "making nice" to close up pictures of horses faces, gently stroking their noses while grinning ear to ear.

Stamps - checking the mail box is one of HG's daily highlights. She likes looking through the envelopes and pointing out the stamps.

Maps - HG knows that she has an uncle in England and sometimes it seems as though she thinks all maps are England. Every so often she barges into Ima's study and grabs an atlas off the shelf proclaiming "mappp, read!!" and shoving it into the hands of her parents for them to "read" to her, pouring over the map intently as Ima or Abba point out any places they know about...

She seems to be getting the point that not all maps are England, because lately she grabs an atlas and says "mappp, read, Inland!!" Today she brought Ima a Hebrew highschool atlas and when Ima asked if she wanted to see a map of Israel HG nodded her head and answered "home".

Space - especially models of the solar system and pictures of nebulas and galaxies. Ima and Abba have no idea whether HG understand what she is seeing, but she loves flipping through the pictures! She has been interested in the moon in all its forms for a while now and her current interest are her favourite planets - Earth and Jupiter, presumably because they are the prettiest?! Ask her what the planets do to the sun and she will answer "ra ra" or more recently, more clearly "round and round".

Balcony peekabo

HG is still a hide and seek fan, here she is playing peekabo on the balcony.

She loves sitting by the screen door and watching the birds that come to feed on the flowers growing there. She is fast learning the names of all the common ones and keenly points them out, alerting Ima whenver she sees one of her favourites - the jay and the bulbul.

She knows where Ima's bird books are and loves pulling them off the shelf and running up to Ima saying - sometimes passionately yelling - the names of her favourite birds, so that Ima or Abba will help her find their pictures in the books.

Elmohhh!!!

HG's passion for Elmo continues, though lately she seems very partical to Ernie and Bert too, or as she says "erniebert". Here she is wearing her beloved Elmo slippers which were a present from her Bubbe. As you can see they colour coordinate perfectly with her favourite letter pajamas.

This began on her visit to the States because instead of the usual animal pictures, the American nappies had Sesame Street characters. She is used to Ima and Abba telling her about the animals, so of course she asked about the funny creatures on her new nappies. While she doesn't watch tv, she has seen a few Sesame Street videos, but didn't seem to really identify specific characters until she saw them on her nappies.

Ironically one of the first toys she was given as a newborn was a baby Elmo, but until recently she was blissfully unaware of who he was... Now she is thrilled to have a cuddly baby Elmo to keep her company when she goes to sleep - along with her bear, rabbit, fish and 2 armadillos.

Little nature explorer

Today Ima and a family friend took HG out to a local nature reserve and archaeological site. She hasn't been there for many months, and she seemed to be exploring it as though for the first time, pointing out interesting looking flowers and plants she didn't recognise, picking up stones and leaves and running along wide-eyed in the open areas, enjoying the feeling of being in the open countryside.

While HG is a pretty fast runner and walker in her own right, she does usually realise that she needs to hold someone's hand while she is out, and if she can hold two adults' hands, then she is even more pleased. It is just as well because when she goes on strike and tries to run too much ahead she sometimes comes a cropper, on this walk she fortunately just avoided running straight into a muddy patch on the path, though overall she was very good, keeping to the trail close to Ima and staying out of mischief.

One of her new words in recent weeks is cactus, and she got excited with each Sabra cactus she saw, savouring the word and seeing the real thing that looked just like the pictures in one of her books.

Another favourite of hers was the jujube tree (biblical sheizaf, sceintific: zizphus spina christi), whose little edible fruits, known locally as dom, look just like miniature apples. The trees were covered with fruit
attracted her attention right away, and she picked up a few from the ground and gave them to Ima saying "apple?", but fortunately remembering that she is not allowed to eat food from the floor or from strange plants... There is a lovely spot with a bunch under one of the larger trees and HG spent quite some time playing on the bench, inspecing the fallen fruit and the texture of the wooden seat and just studying the impressive gold and green canopy of the tree.

Knock, knock...

 

HG can be seen here engaged in one of her new favourite past times - knocking on doors, well, many different surfaces will do! She loves saying "knock, knock" and is working on her very first knock, knock joke. 

Bangles

 

Sorry for not updating much of late - HG is learning so much it is hard to keep track
of all her latest adventures and new skills.

As you can see from the photo, she is still very into dress up and she loves jewellery and shoes in particular. 

More dress up