The Color Yellow

Clara is at that age where in an effort to distract her from making some colossal mess or injuring herself in the oh, say, two minutes of time that might elapse between making ready the day's flotilla of supplies and putting on shoes, coats, hats, and mittens before our ultimate departure, we ask her to find all kinds of items. The toy grocery cart offers an array of options (though, as you will no doubt recall, the maple syrup is to be requested only at the cost of great peril). Over the weekend, we discovered that Clara both recognizes, and can say, broccoli. She is still an absolute fan of "NANA!" (Really, who isn't?) and also this weekend, we spent some time on the other yellow items in the grocery cart" the lemon and the corn. She's got the lemon down (though she cannot say it), but seems shaky on the corn? Today, the report of Bridie's daily doings relayed that they'd looked at a book of colors at group time, and, that "Clara recognized the color yellow." Well of course she did.

Julie is always sort of amazed when the colors start to sink in because they are adjectives and thus, it seems to her anyway, a little more difficult. For example, the walls in the bambini's room are yellow. Clara knows (can recognize and say) them as walls. Julie will sometimes say, "yellow wall," while changing Clara's diaper, and thinks Clara is looking at her like, "Why don't you get your story straight lady and get back to me." Ditto the ceiling, which Clara calls both the ceiling ("ee-ling") and the sky ("i") right now, though this is noun confusion rooted in the indoor-outdoor divide, of course.