The letter A

A is for Adjectives

Eve has recently started using some adorable adjectives. I realize that I say them all the time, but they sound so much cuter coming from her. She saw a small table at "the bins" and exclaimed, "A table just Eve's size! It's AWESOME!" She tried some pineapple out at dinner, and declared, "Mmm. It's tasty!" And she was running around the house and shouted, "Eve is super-fast!" Oh my goodness.

A is for Ambiance

I got my hair cut this evening (yay!) and Dave and Eve met me afterwards at the salon. We walked up the street to the Doug Fir, a very hip (but not particularly family-friendly) restaurant. They don't have any highchairs, but the hostess happily provided a booster seat, and we scooted right up to the table. Eve did not think much of the fancy-pants mac-n-cheese (I think it was too garlicky), but she loved the ambiance. We talked about the way the lighting and the design gave the restaurant it's own feel. She found it very interesting to pick out all the circles and squares (they've worked on shapes at school lately). When we discovered that the candle on our table was a square with a circle inside, she announced, "I like this restaurant."

A is for Ambulance

Eve woke up in the middle of the night last night, and we could hear her calling out. She sounded panicky, but it was hard to understand what she was saying. To me it sounded like, "Help! Wipe Eve's nose! Wipe Eve's nose!" Which was bizarre enough to get me up and into her room, although her nose did not appear to need any wiping when I got there. But she was very upset, and I thought she said she was cold, so I tried to bring her to bed with me to cuddle and warm up. That just made her more upset, so we went back to her room and just sat in her rocking chair. After a while, she started to calm down and snuggle up. Then she said in a very soft voice, "Eve's ambulance downstairs. Have to go to doctor." (Now, we had seen an ambulance a few days ago, with lights and siren, and she had asked what it was. I had explained that if you need to go see a doctor in a hurry, an ambulance will take you, so you can go super-fast.) I tried to explain that she didn't need an ambulance- she wasn't sick or anything. She said, "Eve throwing up." She was clearly NOT throwing up, and did not appear ill in any way. We chatted about it for a while, and I think I was able to reassure her that ambulances are friendly helpers, not scary, and they only take us to the doctors if we WANT them to. Near as I can tell, she either had a nightmare about an ambulance or she heard one and thought it was coming to get her.

It is killing me that something I said- something that I thought at the time was a simple answer to a question she asked- was scary enough that it freaked her out in the middle of the night. My poor baby, I don't know how to protect her against this sort of thing. I want to encourage her inquisitiveness- we're just entering the "What's that?" phase, and I LOVE it. But I guess there are questions that I will have to think twice about answering, maybe for a little while.