Cute Selah Stories

As we sat around the house yesterday morning, Selah wanted to watch the "Tiger" movie. For those of you who are curious enough without anymore intro than that and are thinking, what children's movie has a tiger in it?....it is obviously Madagascar, the animated film. However, to my recollection, there are no tigers in the movie.
Anyway, after the movie, Selah wanted to see pictures of a zoo, so we got online and looked up the zoo right here in the area. Next we heard a sweet little "go to zoo???" petition and couldn't resist, being that we had nothing else on the schedule for the day and we'd been talking about the zoo for a couple of weeks with Selah. After driving about 45 minutes, we arrived and set our expectations very, very low. There were 3 reasons for this: a friend told me that it wasn't a very good zoo, we could hardly find the sign on the entrance and were the only ones in the parking lot when we arrived at 11:15 AM.
After wondering around for an hour, we started finding every animal Selah was hoping for: tigers, lions, zebra, peacocks, ostriches, every kind of monkey and bird, bears, emus, llamas, camels, miniature ponies, turtles, snakes, fish, goats, sheep, ducks and even prairie dogs. I have to say, being from Amarillo, seeing prairie dogs at the zoo seemed a little comical to me, but when I thought about it a bit more, it made sense. There's not a lot of "prairie" in these parts! Selah was tenative about getting too close to any of the cages, but did want to share her fish crackers with the lively monkey that we saw at the end of our visit. He appreciated the fish cracker and raisins, but not Ryan's poking the end of the umbrella through a hole in the fencing. He hit the cage kind of hard in response....which only encouraged Ryan. According to what I hear from Ryan's parents, I think this part of his personality hasn't changed much since he was young.

Recently, Selah has been asking us lots and lots of questions: "what's this, Mommy? what's that, Daddy?, etc."

Here's tonight's exchanges:
"Where's Selah's car?" (in the shop getting body work done because its broken)
"Mirror on car broke." (yes, honey, the mirror broke when the icecream truck hit the car)
"Where's the mirror?" (in the road somewhere)
[a bit of thinking]
"Where's the road?" (ummm, by our house)
"Daddy sad."
[turns to Daddy and pats his arm and gives a him a kiss]

A few minutes later, we had another great conversation. She accidently pulled a tea candle over early tonight at church and got hot wax all over her hand. She is fine, but remembered her own sadness at this point.
"Selah hurt hand." (I know, baby. Everyone kissed it and its all better now.)
"Selah sit in mommy's lap?" (Okay, you can sit in mommy's lap.)
[Selah lays down "like a baby" in my arms and cuddles close and puts her lips on my collar bone]
"Selah drink milk." (I laugh and never really know how to respond in this situation. She's been weaned for a year now, but we've been reading some books about having a new baby at home and I think she gets the idea for how baby sister is going to eat!)

A few minutes later...
"Selah is baby Levi. Mommy [is] Anna. Daddy is Tim." (This is a family we know in our city. We meet with Anna and Levi once a week for play group and we never forget to pray for Levi before going to bed! As we're walking into our apartment building and wrapping up these insightful conversations, she runs up to Ryan and says...)
"Hey Tim!"

I find this hillarious on several levels, but mostly that she renames everyone in our family, then proceeds to call us by our new names for the next 30 minutes or so and she remembers to pretend to be baby Levi for most of that time.

Then, as we were putting her in bed tonight, she looked up and saw the lamp was still on. She said, "Turn the lamp off" in her sweet, little requesting tone of voice. As I walked to the lamp, she closed her eyes tightly and said, "turn light off with eyes." Brilliant. She is one brilliant little girl, if I do say so myself.

My first attempt at basic video editing: