More explosions in talking

The girl is now almost on complete sentences. She's gotten a hand on using nouns and verbs and articles and the occasional adjective and preposition. She'll repeat back pretty much any new word you say to her, with varying levels of accuracy.

She's even realised her name is her name. The side effect of this is she now refers to herself in the third person, and quite a lot – R sad, R happy and so on. Which is odd, but much better than her old habit of referring to herself in the 2nd person (when she'd see a picture of herself she'd say it's you! because that's what we'd say when we'd show her a picture of herself).

In the time since I last posted about her putting two words together, she's now able to explain what she did the day before (Yesterday. Park. Slides!), where she wants to go ( That way (pointing), up the stairs), what she likes (Do you like it? Good. Like the flavour), etc etc.

I gave her a dog puppet my grandmother made me when I was a child. She recently has taken to constantly carrying it all over the house in a mesh bag which she refers to as her doggy bag.

On the other hand, her recent levelling up has been matched by a downgrade in her sleeping. It's driving me a little batty. She's taken to skipping her afternoon nap. Which kind of kills a couple of hours in the afternoon trying to get her to sleep (usually L doing the trying). When I try to get her to sleep, she usually ends up wide awake, and me so tired I'm barely able to stand. And cranky. And not the good kind of cranky where other people might be sympathetic.

She'll either fall asleep later, right when we need to leave the house for some engagement, or stay up till 11 or 12 and be completely loopy. I'm trying rather hard to be patient with this. It could be worse… it could be a potty reversion. I mean, beyond the loopy bits at night, the problem is just me not being in control. So it's really up to me to deal with it. But… that's easy enough to say, it's hard to feel.