Valentine Vignettes 5: Totoro! Raar!

Eliza's learned the names of some of her favorite movie characters (besides Elmo, thank goodness). She now can request Bambi by name also, Ernie from Sesame Street, and other "amals" or animals. And she keeps surprising us with more that she knows from movies we've shown her and books we've read to her. Sometime this last week, she apparently learned to recognize a "beaver" and a "vole" thanks to our latest library book and "octopus" from the Wonder Bear book and can actually say those words really well!

The other day, though, she found her old baby monitor and was talking on it like a phone (which isn't that unusual, anything rectangularly shaped with buttons on it gets used as a phone- remote, camera, gameboy, etc). Steve and I started listening to what she said, and it went like this, "Hello? Oh, hi Totoro! RAaaar! Bye, Bye." For those of you who don't know us well, My Neighbor Totoro is one of the best movies ever, animated by Miyazaki. We had no idea that she could say Totoro or thought he was a friend who would enjoy a little chat on the telephone.

In case you're interested, here's a youtube trailer of one of our family favorites. It was actually the first movie Steve and I watched together, on the first day we met... thanks to Katy!