Well, another Christmas has come and gone. We had a lovely trip to Fresno, spending a couple of days with Grandma C.R. and Uncle Steve, then back up to the Bay Area for a gathering with the Cahalen side of the family. This year was especially fun because it was the first holiday that Taylor had some idea what was happening (i.e. that she got to open gifts). We started off by telling her that she was going to get a surprise and gave her one gift a few days before Christmas. She picked at the paper a little bit, then she started tearing into it. She opened the gift (a new book) and from then on kept saying, “Prize, prize!”. I was a little concerned that she would be disappointed when the “surprises” ended, but we explained that she doesn’t get them all the time and she just took it in stride. Taylor received some really wonderful gifts for Christmas, but one of her favorites was a plastic box filled with about a dozen large buttons that she got from her Grandma C.R. Pure genius…it’s better than a TMX Elmo! The button box has kept Taylor occupied for some good stretches of time so it’s really a gift for T.J. as well as for us.
As I’ve mentioned before, Taylor loves to look at pictures of herself, so we spend a lot of time checking out her photos on the camera or the computer (and there are MANY of them!). We skim through the pictures and she points to the people that she recognizes. She’s quite good at identifying other people, but whenever we point to her image and ask her, “Who’s that?” she replies, “YOU!”. Naturally she would say that because we always point to her and say, “Look, that’s YOU!”. I’ve run into the same dilemma when she wants something of mine. I had a glass of water on the table and Taylor picked it up and said “Mine!”. I replied, “No, that’s MINE”. I’m sure she was thinking, “Yeah, that’s what I said – MINE”. We ran through our Abbott and Costello routine for awhile before I realized that “me” and “you” is pretty much impossible to explain to another person – especially a one-year old. In her mind, the WORLD is hers. For now, we won’t tell her otherwise.