Love Each Child

You’re Kinda Missing the Point!

by steve

As Christy mentioned, watching Hope Giver develop, grow, and learn is an amazing thing. And the “cuteness factor” just goes through the roof sometimes with the things she learns and does.

The other day, I decided to try to play hide-and-seek with her, even though I knew she didn’t understand the concept. The thing that made me think of it, though, was the fact that she is (for the most part) counting to ten now. I say “for the most part”, because six often gets left out, and frequently she gets stuck in a loop saying, “four, five, seven, four, five, seven, four, five, seven…”! But if you can get her past seven, she excitedly says “eight”, “nine”, and “ten”.

After trying to get her to close her eyes and count to ten while I “hid”, we swapped roles. I said, “You hide while I count to ten, and then I’ll try to find you.” I closed my eyes and started counting to ten. Peeking, I could see she was not at all sure what she was supposed to be doing. However, by the time I got to “ten”, she had gone over and stood by the couch.

I opened my eyes, pretended I didn’t see her, and started walking around the rest of the room calling her name. “Hope Giver*…Hope Giver…where’s Hope Giver?”

All of a sudden, she came running over beside me and started looking around, too, calling, “Hope Giver! Hope Giver!”

I guess she was going to help me find her!

* Obviously, I was calling her real name, and she was, too. She doesn’t know herself as “Hope Giver”, nor do we refer to her as that here at home! Just in case anyone was really confused