Elliora is sitting up pretty well now. In just a day or two she went from being able to balance in a sitting position for a second or two, kinda, to being able to sit for 15-20 seconds at a time. I expect by the time we leave Omaha she’ll be walking and reciting her ABCs.

(Sorry for the lazy blogging. I have a half-dozen other posts in my head, but you’re getting videos of my kid sitting instead. I meant to post a photo yesterday for Wordless Wednesday, just a photo, and didn’t even manage that. You’re lucky you’re getting videos.)

Elliora already has a favorite doll. Well, she has two dolls that she really seems to like, that she will play with and talk to and stare at for minutes on end. Minutes, I tell you! (Hey, when you’re talking about a three-month-old, that ten minutes is easily equal to an hour in toddler time.)

The first doll is this one, a gift from my friend Jen, which is why she’s called Jenny Doll. A couple weeks ago. Troy moved Jenny Doll to the windowsill where it’s right in Elliora’s view when she is on the changing pad. It immediately became clear that Elliora was fascinated by it. She stared intently at Jenny Doll, smiled at her, talked to her, and even grabbed her foot and hand.

We left Jenny Doll on the windowsill where Elliora could see it at every diaper change, and gazing at and grabbing at soon became pulling down and trying to eat.

“My doll. You like?”

“You cannot haz.”

The other doll that Elliora likes is more of a toy than a dolly made for snuggling. Her name is Princess Sophie; she came with a tag telling us so. (That’s why my mom bought her, because Annalie’s middle name is Sophia.) She has a crinkly skirt, the underside of which is covered with black-and-white patterns easily visible to a newborn. She’s holding a ring with three sliding beads on it, and has a handy sewn-on clip for attaching her to carseats and strollers.

I used the clip to attach Princess Sophie to the bouncy chair one day when I needed to take a quick shower and no one was around to hold the baby for me. I expected Elliora to ignore the toy and cry the whole five minutes it took me to speed through showering and getting dressed. I was only putting the toy there for form’s sake.

Imagine my surprise when she entertained herself for the next ten minutes with Princess Sophie as I showered, got dressed, and combed and blow-dried my hair.

So a few days later when I needed to run some errands, I clipped Princess Sophie to the carseat.

Now, Elliora hates being strapped in her carseat, and usually starts wailing her protests before we even click the carrier into the base. She is not one of those babies who can be put to sleep by a car ride; on the contrary—much like her older sister as a baby—she actually will start to nod off, realize that no one is holding her, and jerk herself awake to holler some more. We’ve tried everything we can think of to make car rides less stressful for her, and nothing seems to help. We finally came to the conclusion that she’s probably just gonna be unhappy in the car till she’s older and can play with toys, so we try to avoid taking her in the car unless we absolutely have to.

When I clipped the doll to the handle of the carrier and positioned her on Elliora’s lap, I wasn’t very optimistic but figured it was worth a shot. Over the next 15 minutes, Elliora was so engrossed in examining the doll and playing with the crinkly skirt that she completely forgot to cry. I felt like grabbing random strangers in the mall and exclaiming, “My baby didn’t cry! She stayed happy all the way to the mall!” but I figured that would embarrass Annalie and probably get me a date with mall security, so I restrained myself. Just as well, because on the drive home Elliora was tired and completely ignored Princess Sophie, preferring instead to scream all the way home. Sigh.

Still…since then, when Elliora is well-rested and has a full tummy and the stars are aligned just right, Princess Sophie has kept the carseat drama to a minimum. I’m just gonna go ahead and assume things will only get easier from here on out. Right?

(Here’s a video I made for Jen, to show her how much Elliora loves Jenny Doll. There are two more videos on Flickr if you’re into that kind of thing.)

Language has always fascinated me, in both written and spoken forms. I love listening to people with accents different from mine, and especially people who are native English speakers from a different part of the world than me. When Erin and I spent two weeks traveling around Great Britain in 1998, one of our favorite pastimes was comparing vocabularies with the people we were visiting (“That jumper looks really smart on you.” “Smart!? How can a sweater look smart?” “I just mean it looks good, it looks lovely. Why, how would you say it?” “We’d say it looks sharp.” “Sharp!? How can a jumper look sharp?” etc.)

My friend Jill posted a short video of herself on her blog Jill Will Run, reading a list of words and answering some questions with regional-specific answers. She saw it done first at Healthy Tipping Point. I thought it was a really fun idea, so I made a video of my own. I can do that, now that we have electricity in our house again, after a snowstorm knocked out our power Wednesday night (along with thousands of other people in the DC metro) and we were without power for 47 hours. I’m wallowing in the luxury of having electricity again, and being able to do things like make videos and upload them to the internet.

Just for background, I was born and grew up in Omaha, Nebraska. When I was 21, I married Troy and moved to San Diego. Since then, I’ve lived in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada; Virginia Beach, Virginia; Tempe, Arizona; Southern Maryland; San Diego again; and the Washington, DC, metro area. I tend to pick up accents and regional expressions wherever I live. By the time we left Ottawa, I was saying “eh?” at the end of a lot of sentences, and then I picked up “y’all” when we lived in Virginia Beach. Someone listening to me during that time would have been very confused about where I was from.

bethany actually sounds like this – the accent vlog from bethany actually on Vimeo.

Wow. Watching this video, I was struck with how much I really do resemble my brother, not just in looks but in facial expressions and speech patterns. Also, I can see more clearly how much Annalie looks like me when I watch videos of myself. Weird.

Anyway! Here’s the list of words:

Aunt, Route, Wash, Oil, Theater, Iron, Salmon, Caramel, Fire, Water, Sure, Data, Ruin, Crayon, Toilet, New Orleans, Pecan, Both, Again, Probably, Spitting image, Alabama, Lawyer, Coupon, Mayonnaise, Syrup, Pajamas, Caught

And here are the questions:

• What is it called when you throw toilet paper on a house?
• What is the bug that when you touch it, it curls into a ball?
• What is the bubbly carbonated drink called?
• What do you call gym shoes?
• What do you say to address a group of people?
• What do you call the kind of spider that has an oval-shaped body and extremely long legs?
• What do you call your grandparents?
• What do you call the wheeled contraption in which you carry groceries at the supermarket?
• What do you call it when rain falls while the sun is shining?
• What is the thing you change the TV channel with?

Do you have a special name for rain falling while the sun is shining? I don’t know a term for that, but I do have a rain term that as far as I know is specific to my family: when it’s raining so hard that the drops of rain are creating circular ripples and then bouncing back up, my family calls that raining ballerinas, because if you squint it kind of looks like a ballerina with a tutu. I think my brother or I called it that years ago, and it just stuck for some reason.

Feel free to play along. If you do, please let me know in the comments where you post your videos so I can watch them! If you don’t feel like making a video, just tell me about a weird regionalism of yours.