Maya's latest achievement is one of her most charming to date: repeating our most-used expressions and phrases back to us. She's been saying a lot of "There you go!" and "See?" and "I know, I know" and "Yup!" The really fantastic thing is that she uses them correctly! She'll present me with one of her shoes, for instance, and say, "There you go!"
She also understands more of what we say than we realize. Yesterday Maya was pointing to Ndugu and shouting, "Ndugu! Ndugu!" and just to make (what he thought would be one-sided) conversation, Seth goes, "Right. And what's our other cat's name?" And Maya answers, "Toonces," and Seth nearly fell over, he was so floored. (Although, she kind of compresses the double-o vowel sound, so it sounds more like "Tnces.")
She also has started using the word "home" to announce where we are when we arrive back to the apartment after an outing, and she understands the concepts of two items: Interestingly, she'll point to two items in succession and say, "two, one," instead of "one, two." I'm pretty sure this is my fault, because she first became aware of numbers when I started doing "three, two, one, blastoff!" in the mornings when taking her down from the diaper-changing table. Oh well. The teachers at school can clean up my mess later on down the road.
:-)