Words, Spoken and Written

MADELEINE: Mom!  I need some MILK!
ME: What do you say?
MADELEINE: Um, MILK!  Get me some MILK!
ME: Madeleine.  Where are your manners?
MADELEINE: Please?  Um... they're in my MOUTH!

I'm glad that she was able to retrieve those manners from inside her mouth and actually use them.

When she wasn't busy trying to find the words in her mouth, Madeleine was busy writing them today.  As Julia sat down to make cards for the three birthday parties she's been invited to this week (that's right - THREE.  In one week.  If it's this bad in preschool, I don't even want to know what elementary school social life will be like...), Madeleine got her own piece of paper and, completely on her own initiative, sat down to try and write her name.  I haven't actually formally worked on this with her before, so I was a little stunned to see that she had attempted it all on her own:

While at first glance it looks an awful lot like Egyptian hieroglyphics, I can actually see what she was trying to do here.  I can make out the M (with a few too many points) A, and D... then after the following backwards C-like symbol she has her E (with a few too many horizontal lines and no vertical line.)  She had tried an L but obviously was dissatisfied with her work and scribbled it out, then followed another supercharged E, and that's as far as she went.  Still, for 2.5, not too shabby!

Meanwhile, she has been perfecting her ghoul-people:

Although sometimes she colors the eyes in now, making them look less creepy, even if some of her people do have lots of weird, eerie tentacles coming off of their bodies, making them look like alien octopuses:

I think I see a surrealist artist in the making.