In Sprite's bathtub sit the usual suspects. There are sea creatures waiting to have the water squeezed out of them (or be thrown at Mommy), a boat waiting to be submerged, a big yellow duck waiting to, um, float. And there are cups of different colors and sizes, waiting to be filled and poured as Sprite plays while Mommy or Daddy (depending on whose turn it is) clean the various crud she's picked up at day care. (Our tub is quite like an ocean, we even have sand which makes its way into various orifices while at day care and then sifts down and settles on the ocean tub floor. In another month, we should have enough to see a reef peak through.)
I have been using these cups lately to help Sprite learn colors, but she seems to be stuck on yellow. Everything is yellow. Every time I point out something to her and ask her to identify the color, I get "lello." It's like she's looking at the world through Ray Bans.
I hold up the green cup. "What color is this?"
Sprite looks up from trying to drown the penguin figurine. She rests her hooded eyes on the cup and considers it. "Lello," she replies, getting right back to her toy murdering ways.
"No, the cup is not yellow. The cup is green. Green." I wave the cup in front of her face.
Sprite then parrots back, "Geen".
I pick up a blue cup. "What color is this?"
"Lello."
"No, blue. The cup is blue."
"Boo."
Same goes for purple, red, orange, and even a different shade of blue which will probably confuse the hell out of her so I may just take it out of the tub until she's more mentally prepared to go into different shades of the same freaking color and can actually pronounce words like teal and aquamarine without looking at me like she's surprised they left her with me in the first place and entrusted me to teach her this crap when I obviously know these two cups are two very different colors yet I am trying to convince her they are the same?!?!? (....Goodness, where did THAT come from?)
So, I finally hold up the yellow cup, thinking at least she'll get this one right.
"Sprite, what color is this?" I hold the cup up expectantly, praise sitting on the tip of my tongue about to spew forth.
"Puhple."
Seriously?
Sprite looks at me, smiling. Her penguin is sitting on the bottom of the tub, all of the air squeezed out of it. The penguin is purple. (I don't know why. Maybe the manufacturer was out of black coloring and thought it was time to think out of the box when making the next shipment of tub toys?) Maybe she meant the penguin?
I hold the cup up one more time. "Sprite, what color is the cup?"
"Lello."
Whew.
(Hey, we not be moving forward here, but at least we're not going back.)
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