reading readiness

She takes after her parents, she does.

Spying two new children's books lying on the floor (purchased at the Book Fair and wrought by her uncles Elbert and Hai... though I figure maybe she doesn't know that...), she swept them up into her arms and asked, "Mommy, can I read?"

"Sure, sweetie," I replied, heading out the bedroom door. "Well, you can look at them, but Mommy has to eat dinner first, so I'll read to you after, okay?"

"It's okay, Mommy," she said, settling down on the bed with her pile of two.

Moments later, I heard her talking to herself, so I poked my head back in to find her holding Uncle El's book in both hands, very seriously declaiming, "Once upon a time, dfhlngsfnbkjrhtjk..." Everything after the first phrase was gibberish, since she wasn't really reading, only repeating the way she knows that most of her stories begin.

Then she put the book down, picked up Uncle Hai's book, opened it, and recited, "Once upon a time, sfhanfjshgjrrhiojj."

Okay, she may not be exactly reading yet, but she does understand story structure! That's our girl.

Sage, at two and a half, says...
"mak" for "map"
"wight" for "right"
"gammiya" for "grandma"
"Swek" for "Shrek"
"Muwawin" for "Mulawin" (a local soap opera)
"The Simpsoms" for "The Simpsons"
We are trying to teach her to say, "Uncle Vinnie, give me money," but she tends to say "Give me mommy" instead.

helping daddy

Sage, sweetie that she is, agreed to help her Daddy clean up his new office. So she strolled down two blocks with her nannies and critically eyed the dirty walls.

"Dad?" she asked her father. Dean nodded and pointed to the cleaning stuff. Sage selected a sponge, dunked it into soapy water and proceeded to slosh the door down.

"No, no, honey," her father said. "First you've got to squeeze the sponge, like this, so there's no extra water."

"Squeeze, Daddy?" Sage asked, frowning.

"Yup," Dean replied, demonstrating again.

"Yes," said Sage, squeezing her own sponge as hard as she could before sloshing the door down anyway. After a single stroke, she came back and dunked the sponged in the water, again and again.

When she tired, she asked if she could draw, requesting for some paper. Dean gave her some and she created avant garde figures (later explaining patiently that the figures were her mother, her father and herself).

When lunch time came, all the hard workers took a break to eat, Sage among them. She insisted on sitting next to her father, happily picking it her barbeque and adobong manok and sharing her father's Coke.

"Dad, I'm tired," she said later, collapsing on the couch and in moments was asleep.