This Girl.

Here are a few updates on Anna's rapidly expanding brain.

• Where she used to have trouble with question words, i.e. mixing up "who" and "what" and "where", she now has "after" and "before" confused. "We can go before I put my shoes on" "I will go swing after we go inside"
• She is trying hard to understand time and dates. Yesterday and Tomorrow mean very little to her. Same with Day, Month, Year. We used to categorize things as "Last day" or "Next day" but really that could mean any time in the past or future. Now she adds any measurement of time "5 years ago we went to the zoo" It really just means 'sometime in the past'. It's interesting to see her try to incorporate these things correctly.
• She is intensely interested in family relations. It is rare that we go a day without discussing who is married to whom or who my or ben's brothers and sisters are. Marriage, especially, is extremely interesting to her. She asks us about weddings and honeymoons and all that quite often. Still, I took her to a friends reception a few weeks ago but I don't think she understood the connection somehow.
• She has recently become quite skeptical about Eliza's name. Today she asked me why we named her Eliza. Sometimes if you ask her about her baby sister she will say "my mom calls her Eliza". When pressed she states that she prefers the name "Ellie", which is fine with me, but she never actually calls her that.
•  She likes to build houses and nests with pillows (but who doesn't?).
• She woke me up this morning demanding that I go downstairs and do my exercises. She's my own little personal trainer and if I don't want to do it, she has tantrums. I guess it's part of our morning routine. After I work out, she gets to watch a show. But that doesn't mean that if I don't work out, she doesn't get to watch a show anyway.
• We made Jell-o today at her request. She was enthralled, and even more so when we ate it at dinner. She loved the Jell-o

And here's a picture of Eliza.