Tree, Dva, Adeen.. Count!!

Lara's speech is improving day by day, she can recognise lots of things in her bedtime story books, she recognises the animals, can say what they are and what noise they make, and remembers how the story unfolds. At least this is the case with one of her "Spot the Dog" books, she shocked me one night when lifting up a flap and saying "Boo", when the image under the flap was Spot in the bath with a speech bubble saying "Boo"! For a microsecond I thought she'd read it, but of course she'd just learnt that that's what Spot says on that page of the book.
She's starting to string words together more, so we hear much more of "My coat", "My hat" etc.. rather than "mine!" and "coat". The current excitement is based on counting, and in the car on the way to nursery each morning she practises counting with Olga - in Russian, just to make it more interesting. I practise with her in English when it's my turn to put her to bed, or at any other time when it's just the two of us. Lara is confident with adeen (1), she loves dva (2) and tree (3), she struggles with chet-eer-re-yeh (4) quite understandably, but enjoys p'yet (5). We're working on 6 to 10, which she copes with quite well, except for vo-sem (8) for some reason, which so far this week has come out as "mornin'". For anyone who wants to practise, here is my phonetic version:
6 - shest
7 - sem
8 - vo-sem
9 - dyay-vit
10 - dyay-sit

Other funny behaviour we're seeing - she's using different tones now, she has different ways of saying "Misha!" and "Jack-jack!" when she's telling them to leave the room (Misha Out!) from when she's wanting to give them one of their toys ("Meeeshah"). She has started ordering us about - we've both been on the receiving end of "Mama, out!" and "Papa, out!", accompanied with a pointed finger towards the door. Once I've been told "Papa, sit!" when I got up from the dinner table. We've dispensed with her high chair now, so she sits on a booster chair at our new, smaller dining table. Hopefully this will help her at nursery, where the staff report that she has a habit of getting up from the table at mealtimes and wandering around, which can set of the other children off wanting to do the same. We think this is where she got the "Papa, sit" command from!

One final thing - happy birthday for yesterday to Olga's mum, and enjoy your reitrement when it finally starts!