One of the gang

A reader of this blog might have thought that Moriya was not doing anything interesting lately, since I haven't been writing about her much recently. But the opposite is actually the case: She is developing so extraordinarily quickly that I just can't begin to keep up.

She has truly become one of the gang. When Warren hands out the kids' cups for kiddush or havdala, she is often the first to run over and demand hers (shouting "Doosh! Doosh!" for "kiddush"); when we dance to Shalom Aleikhem or Eliyahu Hanavi, she is right there in the circle with her big sisters; and when Warren has wrestling matches on Shabbat afternoon with Rimonit and Kinneret ("Abba, let's fight on Shabbat!" Rimonit has been known to say), Moriya jumps eagerly into the fray.

And not only does she throw herself into the midst of things, she is also increasingly being viewed as a legitimate playmate by her sisters. While beforehand, Rimonit was a bit more likely than Kinneret to play with Moriya (in a hierarchical kind of way, of course), Kinneret is increasingly forging her own relationship with her little sister. The other day, after Rimonit and Kinneret had a fight while playing, Kinneret turned to the other kid in the house and said: "Moriya, you want to play with me?" Instead of the usual tears and recrimination, Kinneret just moved over to Option B.

Moriya, who's almost a year and five months, absolutely loves music and dancing, whether with a partner or by herself, stomping those little feet. She chimes in on our shoe-and-sock song and when she sees the girls getting their shoes on in the morning, she often runs over to get hers too and calls out repeatedly, as she did this morning, "Shoes! Shoes!"

She's been saying quite a lot of words, some of them regularly (like "mine!" and "more!") and some mostly when she hears other people using them, and she seems to understand just about everything we say to her (like when I told her to give back the pen she stole from my desk, and she came over wearing a mischievous grin and handed over the toy she was holding in her other hand before running away, still clutching the pen). Her ganenot are constantly telling me how she participates in activities, like that game where you're supposed to freeze when they stop the music, better than some of the 2-year-olds. Now if only I could get her to stay asleep after I pick her up so she actually gets in her much-needed afternoon nap!