Brought to you by the letter "H"

Helena is home today with a nasty cough, runny nose, and slight fever, but with a mostly sweet disposition. She's home today to fulfill the law that demands she prey on my guilt and mothering instincts on the day that's the worst possible day for her to be encroaching on my time, what with my having a work project due in a couple days.

She's napping now, and I've decided to go ahead and blog cuz, hey, the day's pretty much a write-off workwise anyway.

What makes it worthwhile: she sits beside me at my desk, picks up a pen and writes "I" on the legal pad. "Mama, c'est 'I.' C'est pour toi: Isabella." Then "H," a recognizable capital "H," "pour moi, Helena." She writes a thousand "H"'s, half of them on my arm. Then "X" — I don't know why, other than that she can, but she writes "X" and calls it "X" likes she means it.

Recent lightbulbs
Noted here for posterity before I forget and because I don't think I'll ever get 'round to writing something clever and meaningful about any of these points individually:

She operates the CD player with ease, although despite my best efforts her taste in music leaves something to be desired. (I try to listen as a 3-year-old, and remind myself how normal it is for children, such naive creatures, to like children's music. Why should I hurry her to have "sophisticated" tastes?)

She is almost as proficient with the DVD player, inserting her program of choice. I used to cringe at her handling DVDs (and CDs) and did what I could to dissuade her, but we're past that now. She knows triangle is for "play," square for "stop."

Back in February she figured out the computer mouse, or her hand was finally big enough, coordinated enough, to make it do what she wanted. The lightbulb that correlated mouse movement with cursor position had already been illuminated. She favours matching and memory games.

Friday she drew a spider that looked like a spider and a mouse (of the mammalian variety) that looked like a mouse. Sadly, these pictures have not been preserved as they were drawn on the palms of my hands.