Siena saw this table toy when we got home and said, “What’s this?” I asked her if she ever remembered playing with it herself or remembered being scared by the train (it sits on a little revolving circular platform that can be wound up and then makes a tremendous racket when it unwinds as the train moves around). She didn’t remember at all, so she said. Which I find very interesting, that she is already forgetting things that happened a year or more ago.

Siena immediately attached herself to the plastic phone headset, pretending to make calls and invite friends over. She held onto the phone while watching a Muppet Show episode (Harry Belafonte), and when I told her it was time for dinner, she said, “I can’t come to dinner, I’m on the phone.”

Oh please, already?

I told her to tell them that she would call them back. Whoever “them” are. She said she couldn’t because they were still talking. I asked who, and she answered, “The people who are coming over.” I finally had to explain to her that her choice was dinner or the phone and going to bed. She brought the phone to the table, and it “rang” once during dinner.

This morning she brought the phone in the car with her on the way to school. Aye yi yi.

Let the record show Thalia had very little interest in playing with anything other than the A, B, C blocks, which were delightful little chew toys.

The bunny is, as any self-respecting Monty Python fan knows, the Rabbit of Caerbannog (though I admit I did have to look up the official name, assuming Wikipedia can be trusted in this; also, I note it serves as another great example in the Holy Grail of Monty Python demonstrating some real Medieval literary chops), and he’s a real killer of a rabbit.

The dog is Andrex, the cute, cuddly, puppy mascot of Andrex toilet paper in the UK. Thanks to Mo and Granddad having lived in England for 7+ years, we have a variety of Andrex stuff animals that Siena likes to play with.

Here is the result of the two animals meeting each other:

Siena learned pretty quickly what those great fangs are used for.

Note, the rabbit is by Toy Vault (see at Amazon.com for instance), and the text on the box is part of the comedy of the item, so we’ve never taken it out.

In particular, there is a little cube toy we have that has a knob on the top you can push that causes some widget on one of the sides to spin or rotate. If you bang on top of the cube the widget can get spinning quite fast. When Siena was a baby, I’d bang on the top of that frequently while she watched, but she never really did anything with it other than pick it up and try to chew it. Thalia, after a few sessions of this, started imitating me and hitting the top of the cube to make it spin.

Another example: One of the toys Siena had as a baby was a stacking toy, with light stuffed fabric O-rings. I would put one of these rings on Siena’s head, she’d realize it was there (babies seem to have very acute sensitivity to things placed on their heads), she’d reach for it to take it off, and then she’d misjudge where it was and knock it off her head. It took tens if not hundreds of iterations of this before she was grabbing the ring on her head instead of pushing it off. Grabbing it when you can’t even see it presumably requires some understanding of object placement relative to self, or at least some degree of good luck. When I started this trick with Thalia, she reached up and grabbed it off her head, and then basically presented it to me and handed it back. I thought it was sheer luck, but when I repeated the trick ten or twenty more times, probably 90% of the time she’d grab it instead of knocking it off her head. So she’s either luckier or she’s got a better sense of where things are around her.

Or, as I said, my memory is bad and there’s no difference and I just can’t remember what Siena did. Sorry Siena!