On Missy’s last afternoon with Allie in mid-October, she told us almost as a by-the-way before she left, “She knows her hair now. You can ask her where her hair is and she’ll put her hand on her head.” That ended up being a nice trick to charm Allie’s grandparents with. This video was taken last weekend when my parents were visiting. My dad’s holding her and my mom’s taking the video and it’s my mom’s voice you hear.


Allie caught on to most words pretty quickly, but had a little difficulty distinguishing “hair” from “ear” for about a week. They sounds similar, so it’s understandable. It’s funny what she remembers from past unintentional training. She was shown flowers a lot, in the garden, in a clipping at home in a vase, on her walks. We try to keep her from grabbing the flower as it’s usually a thorny rose, so we tell her, “No, you don’t TOUCH the flower, you SMELL the flower.” Then we’d demonstrate a sniff, then hold her hands down and put her face toward the flower and she’d sniff, too. So a few weeks ago, she was fingering a print of a flower on my shirt, and I said, “Flower.” Next thing I knew, she was ducking her face down and shoving her nose in my shirt. She inhaled loudly through her nose. The same thing happened when she was rubbing her index finger on a pattern of a flower on a quilt on our bed. “Flower,” I said. Nose down. Sniff. This age is really fun.