What Our Little One Has Been Up To.

Enough about me, back to the real star of the show...

Nora has been so silly lately, revealing more and more of her goofy and joyful personality. One of the odd little habits she has picked up recently, is the obsessive need to put everything she's about to eat...on her head. It's like she has to mentally taste it before putting it in her mouth. Mmmm, spaghetti, let me just try this on my head first. Milk? Let's just put this up here. Cheerios, peas, cheese, all goes on the head. This one's funny until Mommy has to try to wash all that gunk out of her hair. Yeah, we're working on putting an end to it.

Giving her milk the "head-test" - it appears she needs total concentration.

Another of her eccentricities is her love for her yellow block (see pic). While most kids become attached to a favorite teddy bear, a blankie or the occasional article of clothing, Nora's "lovie" is a hard, wooden block. It is quite hilarious to watch her somehow sniff out, like a hound dog, the block from her big basket of toys. Once she's found it, it's in hand the rest of the day - we even let her sleep with it from time-to-time. Thankfully, she only lets out one little whine of protest when we take it away from her when she eats or bathtime. After being in Pennsylvania for two weeks, we thought maybe she would have forgotten the block, but as soon as we walked in the door and put her down, she had dug out her beloved yellow block.

The beloved yellow block.

On the developmental front, our girl seems to like to take things reeeeeal easy. She waited until 11 1/2 months to start crawling and now that she has that down pat, seems in no hurry to start walking. She cruises all over the place and will stand quite steadily on her own for awhile. But, she's gotten pretty speedy on those hands and knees, so why mess with a good thing, right? Mommy is learning to take things easy too, not worry so much and not try to rush these milestones - they grow-up so fast as it is!

She is, however, doing quite a bit of talking these days, if only Mommy and Ba knew how to speak "baby-ese". Some of her favorite "words":

"Up"

"Bob" - not sure who this Bob-person is.

"Mamamamamaaaa" - what she yells when she's annoyed, usually when she doesn't want to take a nap.

"Rar-rar-rar"

Of course, none of these things actually correspond with what they should when she says them (at least I'm hoping she doesn't correlate "Mama" with being annoyed). So, she keeps us guessing.

That's it for now. I am supposed to be resting and recuperating from a bad birthday cold!