Binkies and Babies

A huge joy in my life is to go to her room and wake her up. I want to point out, it's her room, it's the room she lived in for the first several months of her life. We've kept it, and we will continue to keep it as long as we can. Anyway, she woke up in her room, I heard her on the monitor and I went down and got her. I have a sweet routine. I open the door, turn off the fan, go to the crib and wait for her to tell me how we're going to do it. She's in charge. She usually hands me her "lovey" (pink thin and soft blanket) and her two kitties (stuffed animals, one of which looks more like a little bear, but is labeled a kitty) which she calls "meows". I take those kitties and that lovey, she drops the binky after making sure I get rid of any "yuckkies", invariably lint from the bed that has gotten on her binky, and we begin to go upstairs.

Sometimes we go straightaways upstairs, but often we dawdle and look at the kitties and puppies on the wall. I bark and meow, and I'm very realistic. She barks and meows.

Eventually we make it upstairs and begin what is usually, given these descriptions, a sunday morning, since she sleeps here saturday nights. So, the other day, after we'd been upstairs for awhile, she says to me "baby", which I intepret to mean that she's left her doll in her bed and I was supposed to bring it up. So I say "is it downstairs?" and she yes "yeth" so we go downstairs and I look into the crib. There is no baby there. I say, there is no baby, but she is insistent. I see a binky and I say, there is a binky, you want the binky? "Yeth". I give her the binky and we go up. I'm thinking, she was confused, but as we pause between the kitchen and the livingroom she stops and points to her binky and says to me "poppy..." and makes the sign language sign for binky and says very, very clearly "binky". Then she points to the table, where at the end her baby doll is sitting and she says, again, very clearly, "baby". Satisfied, she walks off. I figure, dazed there by her clear communication, that she figures, "that poppy, he's slow, but he's teacheable.