Penny's started using compound sentences.

I'm not sure when it actually happened, but I really noticed it this morning. I was a bit sleepy, and she didn't really want to get out of her crib, so I sat in the rocking chair to watch her play. She said, "Penny sit in lap? Penny get outta crib and sit inna lap?"

There's also a burgeoning use of pronouns -- she'll use "I" or "me" for herself maybe a quarter of the time, and a few "him"s and "her"s have joined the more instinctive "it" in her babbling.

I find it amusing that I was ever worried about her verbal skills.

She spent some time this morning playing this game with Matt:

She'd open the bathroom door (where Matt was drying off/brushing his teeth/combing his hair) and say, "Hi, Daddy!"

Matt would, of course, respond in kind.

Then she'd back up and close the door behind her and say, "Bye! Seeya later! I'ma miss you!" Sometimes she'd add an, "I love you!" and blow some kisses. This is all straight out of the closing dialogue we'd do when Matt was up in New York and we'd talk to him on the computer.

Then she'd run over to me and say, "Go see Daddy?!"

I know how Penny plays. I pretended to be astonished and impressed. "Did you go see Daddy?"

"Yeah!" And then she'd gallop back to the bathroom door and start over.

It was really quite adorable.

Yesterday, while I was at the chiropractor, I started thinking about Penny's birthday. Unless she does an abrupt turnaround in the next three months (which I'm not ruling out!) she's going to have a princess-themed party.

And there was a recipe I wanted to try out that's a princess cake, where the cake is the bottom half of the dress, and you stick the top half of a craft doll on it for the head and torso -- except I can't figure out how to clothe the top half without sewing something (I'm a terrible seamstress) and then I'm worried that Penny will not take kindly to the cutting of said cake.

So maybe we'll do something a little more standard, or I'll attempt the checkerboard cake again, but with different colors. Or something.

But I was also thinking about who we would invite and games that we could play and decorations we could put up, and I'm afraid my brain got far too elaborate for a 3-year-old's party. Maybe I should save the ideas for when she's five or six, instead.

I'm tempted to put "NO GIFTS, PLEASE" on the invitations this year. Obviously Matt and I will get her something, and obviously her grandparents are going to ignore any such requests -- and three or four presents to open ought to be more than enough excitement, don't you think? And she's already got more toys than she knows what to do with -- in fact, there are still books and toys in our closet that are left over from her last birthday (well, and from Christmas) that she doesn't know about -- she's been getting a new one every couple of months.

Ah, well, her birthday isn't for another four months. We've got some time to think about it.

--Liz