Good afternoon, everyone.

The past couple days have been interesting ones, and so I thought I’d give a quick update.

First, Daphne has taken to what I’ve called “fish hooking” her food out of her mouth. For those unfamiliar, fish hooking entails chewing up her scrambled eggs or toast for a moment, then dragging her index finger from one side of her mouth to the other and flinging the partially masticated bits into her lap.

Your guess is as good as mine.

“It doesn’t need to make sense to YOU, Dad.”

I tried scolding her and taking her plate away on Sunday, which caused her to do it even more. I’m now considering taking an “ignore the behavior and see if she stops/forgets about it if she’s not getting a reaction” tack.
We’ll see how that one works.

Sunday evening we dropped Daph off at her grandparents’ place while Jen and I went to a family service, and apparently she did zero fish hooking with her spaghetti while we were there.

Perhaps it’s a statement about our cooking.

Daphne also had her first non-familial babysitter today. Things got off to a rather inauspicious start as Daphne completely refused to acknowledge the babysitter’s existence. Instead, she’d repeatedly run over to me whenever the babysitter would try to engage her in an activity. The silver lining to this, however, is that Daphne would yell “DA-DA! DA-DA! DA-DA!” as she was running to me.

So she can talk…when it suits her.

After the first few back and forth handoffs, I enlisted Jen’s help and scooted out the door to work, concerned that this rocky start would portend tears and wailing once Mom was gone too.

But apparently, things went swimmingly. They played, read books, watched some Baby Bum, and Daphne even allowed her hair to be braided a bit.

Huge relief.

Okay, see you soon.

j.s.