And She's Off!

First steps officially occurred yesterday. Penelope took her first steps just a little while before I arrived to pick her up at the sitter and repeated them when we asked her to both at the sitter, and at home for Dada. I guess we're in trouble now, but I think it is so exciting and she is so proud of herself!

Here's a video: https://goo.gl/photos/kWwU89G5n2TqNd3i8

And She's Up!

Penelope has just gone through so many changes in the past week! Last Tuesday, she stood up without holding on to anything or anyone for the first time and I feel like it triggered a hundred other changes. First, the standing up. It is adorable. She spreads her feet so far apart and stands up with her hands out to the side and is so unsteady. She looks like a little surfer. We keep trying to encourage her to take a step and she has tried once or twice over the weekend but mostly is just not steady enough.

However, standing up has made her much more interested in the idea of walking and now she wants to hold our hands and walk frequently, where a week and a half ago I would have had to force her to try to walk holding my hand.

Yesterday, we went to the park and she crawled up the stairs (joyously shouting while doing so, because she is the happiest child ever, I might add), went up to the slide, sat down facing forward, and then flipped onto her belly and slid down, the flipping and sliding was pretty much all one single motion. She LOVES the slide. She got to the bottom, reached up for my hand and had me help her walk to the steps, walk up the steps, and then managed the sliding part on her own again. She did this ten or twelve times in a row.

Language changes are happening too. She has started repeating things we say, not often, and never on command, but it's happening. I asked if she was all done eating a couple nights ago and she said "done." She has started to be interested in books. I've been dropping a book into her crib in the middle of the night and she'll sit and look at it in the morning before demanding we come and retrieve her. She's also started saying "hi" to everyone. She just says it again and again and again while waving. Yesterday while grocery shopping, she saw a bunch of those golden cats that use solar power to wave their paws sitting on the window sill while we were standing in line to check out. She shouted, "Ahhh!" pointed, and then when I acknowledged it, she waved at them for about two full minutes.

And one last tidbit, at some point in the past week she has become obsessed with shoes. I think that it's just because we've never bothered with shoes before and suddenly have been trying to find some that fit her since the tops of her feet are calloused from crawling around. We have a pair of toddler boots that are at least one size too big and won't stay on her feet, but if she sees them, she'll grab one, crawl to where I am, and hold it up in the air while shouting and lifting her foot. If I don't put it on, she gets very upset, and then it falls off every three minutes and we go through the routine again and again and again. It's adorable, of course. 

Taking a Walk

Micah was feeling kind of crazy Monday night so we took a walk together. First we went for a jog. Apparently his water shoes are magic running shoes and make him go super fast. We ran and walked around the block. He turned the corner to go home, but I suggested we go a little farther and have some Mama and Micah time. We walked to Fulton school, climbed the tree, and he sat in my lap there for a little while. He was worried that a teacher would come out and tell us we weren't allowed to climb the tree, so we climbed down and he searched the grass for some dandelion leaves for his caterpillar. We walked two more blocks, found some enormous leaves for the caterpillar, found some clover and flowers we wanted to offer the caterpillar as well, he found a hair tie in front of the school and put it up on a railing so the person who lost it could find it, he found a "perfect" pencil (a very stubby but sharpened number 2 pencil) and we took it with us. We stopped at home to drop everything off and then continued walking. We walked past all our mulberry trees to see how they were doing. We agreed that it's a good thing we planted our own mulberry tree since it seems like the ones in the neighborhood keep getting cut down or heavily pruned. Micah told me a story about a man who took off his sock and threw it on the sewer grate (apparently he saw a sock on a sewer grate somewhere). He theorized that the man must have wanted to kill the fish and must have been a bad man. I suggested that he probably didn't think about the fish when he lost his sock. We stopped so that Micah could check out some interesting mud in front of a house that was recently remodeled. He ran his fingers through the mud and considered taking some home but decided against it. Micah wanted to just keep walking but I was worried that we had been gone too long and so we went home. It was just a very nice evening.