Where is Kitty?

I've found a way to get Sadie to come back to me when she's got her sights set on "redecorating" a different part of the house. First I tried calling her. That didn't work. Then I said "here kitty, kitty, kitty." It was worth a try, because she's obsessed with cats at the moment and I thought that if she heard me calling a cat she might be persuaded to come back into the room She headed straight on into the kitchen. So I tried something new. I said

"Sadie, where's your lion?" She paused in the doorway to the kitchen so I repeated myself. After another moment she turned around and zoomed back into the room. She went straight over to her Lion walker/cart and tapped his nose. A while later she was on her way out of the room again and I thought I'd give it a second try. So I asked where Kitty was. She crawled right over and picked Kitty up and showed her to me.

Later in the day she was playing in her playpen so I thought I'd try another test to see how much she understands. The playpen is currently stuffed full of toys, although there is enough room for Sadie to move around and practice taking steps (as long as she steps over the stuffed animals!). She has two stuffed cats now. One is "Kitty" who she's had since December and the other is the cat we made at Build-A-Bear last week. The new cat, who we named "Neko" has a pink nose just like Kitty does and Sadie got very excited when we told her that Neko was a kitty.

I asked Sadie to bring me Neko. She smiled and sat down then turned around and fished through the other stuffed animals, pulling Neko out immediately. Then she brought Neko over to the side of the play pen and threw her out. After that I asked her if she knew where Kitty was and she did the exact same thing with Kitty. She's really starting to understand names!

Right before dinner I told Grumpa about what she had been doing and he thought he'd give it a try. He asked Sadie where his tractor was. The big red tractor was sitting outside on Nani's lawn (where it shockingly didn't do any damage). Sadie changed directions and rawled over to the glass door and stood up and looked out at Grumpa's tractor and then looked back at Grumpa. I can't believe how much she's learning every day!