Scary puppets

Yesterday afternoon, I took the girls to a puppet show at our town library. The entire show consisted of three separate story acts: The Bear and the Beehive, The Rabbit and the Moon, and The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Can you guess what Julia was afraid of? The bear? The bees? The man in the moon who turned into an actual man and started dancing around? Nope. It was, in fact, the caterpillar. As he grew bigger from eating more and more green leafs, he apparently grew more and more terrifying to her. As we (the audience) sang "Munch, munch, munch, crunch crunch crunch" while he ate the leaves, Julia moved from an increasingly panic-stricken, "But he's not going to eat us... But he's not GOING TO EAT US, RIGHT MOMMY??" to "MAMA! I WANT TO GO HOME RIGHT NOW!" as she clutched onto my arm. After I explained to her that the caterpillar was a puppet on the arm of the puppet lady, and the puppet lady was moving his mouth, and he was NOT going to eat us, she responded with a somewhat disbelieving "Okay..." and sat back down to watch the rest of the show.

Madeleine, on the other hand, sat transfixed on my lap for the first half of the show, staring in fascination at the puppet stage. I had not expected such rapt attention from her, but of course, seeing as she's an 8-month-old, it didn't last. During the second half she preferred to leap off my lap and crawl over to other children and reach out to touch them. However, she is starting to show signs of listening/understanding, which is really exciting. Last night, Julia, Ethan and I were all hanging out in the living room. Madeleine started crawling away, into the dining room, all the way across the room to the kitchen entrance. Unhelpfully, the safety gate between the rooms was open, since we had recently finished dinner and had been bringing dishes in and out. I figured I would need to get up and grab Madeleine and shut the gate, but I decided to take the lazy approach first. "Madeleine! Come here to Mommy!" I called. She turned around at the sound of her name and stared at me, then started crawling towards me. I began clapping and exclaiming over her good listening, which just about put her over the top, and she began crawling even faster, squealing with delight as she made her way to me. As Ethan put it, "All right! She now has the intellectual capacity of a dog." Later in the evening, of course, she decided I was not nearly as interesting as her overwhelming desire to get into the kitchen, but hey, at least it's a start!