Elise moved on from elephants to dogs as her favorite things. And by her favorite things, I mean her obsession. She constantly finds books that have pictures of dogs in them, opens the books to that page, and signs away, trying to vocally say "dog" at the same time.
Of course, her favorite dogs are real dogs. We were in the Apple store at the mall recently, and Elise and I were waiting for Matt to finish drooling over an iPad (which can take a while), when Elise spotted a man with a dog on a leash. I tried to let her look at it from a safe distance without him noticing, but she was so enthusiastic that he eventually invited us to come pet it.
Here she is showing me this toy dog.
Notice the book she opened at her feet.
Besides two different counting books with dog pages in them, dogs are also featured in Go, Dog, Go! and Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? I know because dogs are all Elise wants to talk about these days.
[poor baby has bruises on her legs from her shots :( ]
Better than looking at books, though, is seeing and hearing the real things. From the backyard, Elise can usually hear dogs barking. Occasionally she even gets the treat of seeing people exercising their dogs on the greenbelt.
She signs "dog" in these videos. The baby sign is patting your leg, but sometimes she pats her chest instead, especially when she's standing up.
Maybe if Elise still loves dogs this much when she is much, much older, we can get her one.
(The fact that I'm even considering this is evidence of how much I love this kid.)
