When D2 is sleeping, D1 and I can do the activities that involve Things of Choking Dimensions. Not that D1 is absolutely consistent about not putting things in her mouth yet, but she is more interested in other activities and if it's just her I can keep a close eye on it.

She loves the set of sorting beads she got for Christmas. Mostly what she loves doing is putting on and taking off the necklaces I made the first time we played with them.

I saved an eighteen-slot egg carton to use with them, since there are six different colors and three different shapes. While she does what she does, I sort out the colors in rainbow order, each shape of each color in its own designated spot. (I don't know why, it's just fun to do. Like sorting M&Ms, but not as fattening.) Sometimes she scatters the beads at random through this.

Yesterday I had most of the slots filled, except for the green cubes and the green balls. D1 pulled out a couple of green balls from the unsorted pile. She looked at them, and said "Geen!" Then she carefully set them down in the empty slot that, according to the way I was setting them, would be the right slot for the green balls. One of them fell into the slot with the blue balls, and she laboriously fished it out and put it in the green slot.

Later she apparently decided she wanted a necklace with all green balls, because she hunted through and found all the loose green balls and asked me to string them. Even a week ago she showed little interest in the idea that some beads were more alike than others.