The Rankin Zoo 

I was taking some pictures of Coral today and this is what I got.

I asked her to smile and she said, “I’m making sad face.”

I tried to get a funny video of Coral but she wasn’t being very funny. So here’s a quick one of her throwing a ball and a frisbee for Buttercup.

If you keep up with this blog at all then you know that Coral is quite a talker. Lately she’s started throwing some twists into her speech which are pretty interesting.

At daycare today she apparently was being a little too rough with Timmy, one of the cats over there. As he has done before, Timmy scratched her hand. When I came home from work today I asked her what happened to her hand and she told me about the incident with Timmy. I reminded her, “Coral, you need to be gentle when you pat the cats.”

Her response was, “Next time I pat he gentle-ly.” She has obviously heard us say “gently” sometimes and “gentle” other times but it was interesting to see her make this conversion on her own. Now if she could just figure out when to say “him” instead of “he” we could start working on her Princeton application.

The other funny thing she does these days is that when she’s telling a story and she gets to a word that she doesn’t know or can’t remember she’ll say “um” a few times and then say, “I no say it.” For example, she might say, “for lunch today we had, um, um, I no say it.”

We had a couple of birthday parties for Coral and here are some pictures from the family party that we had. Thanks to Aunt Emily we had a cool elephant cake!

Family Birthday Party
Sep 16, 2006 - 24 Photos

There have been a lot of birthdays lately and we have another one coming up next week - Uncle Brian’s!

When Eva and Coral are over at Mimi’s house they sometimes get into debates over who gets to play with something. They throw “mine” back and forth a lot. To try and mitigate this problem Mimi reminds them often that everything at her house belongs to her, not to the girls. Mimi is good about sharing with both of them but corrects them whenever they say “mine.”

We were over at Mimi’s house on Sunday to celebrate he birthday. Since we knew Eva (and family) would be coming over lately we were reminding Coral that the toys at Mimi’s house belonged to Mimi and that everyone would have to share.

Later in the afternoon, Coral and Eva were playing together in the sandbox. At one point Eva grabbed a shovel and said, “mine!” Coral looked at her calmly and replied, “actually, it’s Mimi’s.”

…And another quick, funny story:

Tonight after dinner Coral kept saying something like “bleebleeblah” or maybe it was “blahblahblee” or something. I kept asking her what she was saying and she kept repeating the same nonsense. Finally, she looked at me and said, as clear as could be, “daddy, I’m saying bumblebee!”

…Okay, and one more:

Coral loves fruit and one of her favorite things is bananas. But she usually calls them “bananananananas,” which is pretty funny. But the funniest is when she says, “I say bananananana but other people say banana.” It’s good to know that she knows how to say things the right way - I’m not sure why she feels the need to make up her own way.