Through Grandpa's Eyes

Karen has been doing a great job of documenting Sophie’s development but I have a few “Grandpa” (Pepaw?) experiences that I wanted to share.

Last week Sophie’s counting was, as Karen reported, —1-2-3-9-5. I had her count my toes. She carefully held each toe between her thumb and forefinger and counted 1-2-3-9-5. Once she accidently missed toe #2 and counted 2 on toe #3. Not to worry, she back-tracked to toe #2 and counted 3 and then skipped toe#3, that she already counted 2 on and went on to toe#4 to count 9 and then 5. I thought that kind of place keeping was quite remarkable in one so young.

After that session Sophie liked to have me sit down and take my “shoes off”—“socks off” and count my toes. I decided to divert her by sticking a crayon between her big toe and second toe. She decided that it was “pretty” and walked around on her heels with the crayons sticking up and showed everybody.

She also notices that I wear glasses “gasses” and Penny does too. But Sophie has “no gasses”. Somehow we got into a little game where I would say “Sophie, glasses on”, take them off and say “glasses off”, and zoom my face close to hers and say “a-a-a-h””. This seemed to amuse her and she would usually laugh and give me her “you’re weird Grandpa” look. Later we played the same game with her hair bow. Hair bow on—hair bow off.

We also had fun at the reunion. I went upstairs with her where there were a couple of deer heads mounted on a wall within touching range. I lifted her up and she gently stroked the fur on the 2 deer heads. She’s learned to be gentle with animals when she wants to but she likes to hit them apparently just to be defiant. That’s what happens with Brie most of the time and Brie jumps off the bed and hides.

I think Sophie is a smart little kid—but I am biased, of course.