Sharing and "into"

Kate is so sweet that she has started to share - more like "share and take back". She will take a toy and hand it to us. She'll wait a second or two and then reach for it back. This applies to Cheerios too! She loves to "feed" us a Cheerio, but will try to steal it back out of our mouth. She gets quite upset it we eat her offerings.

Kate's always enjoyed knocking over any blocks that we make into towers. We have cups that stack too, and she loves knocking them over. I barely get the tower started, and she's over to knock them down. If I can, I'll hide a little toy under one of the cups while I'm building the tower, and she likes finding them as she's demolishing the towers. This week, she made a developmental leap and put a toy "into" a cup.

Climbing

Kate is climbing on EVERYTHING lately. She started at the stairs, and has moved onto the playground. She likes climbing up all of those turning metal stairs, especially if she's chasing after another kid. At home, she's climbing up on stuff. What kind of stuff? This week, she moved a package of paper towels over to her exersaucer. She used it to climb onto her exersaucer! What a strong girl!

Yesterday, she decided that she's ready to move onto other things. Her old rocking chair is her new climbing adventure. She has to try several times to get her bottom up onto the chair. Once on the chair, she either sits on the chair sideways, or tries to climb over the top of the chair. I've had to move the chair against the couch or she'll tip the rocking chair over as she tries to climb over the top.

She doesn't know how to get down off of an item though. That's given us several scares. "Feet first!" hasn't even started to register. She wants to go head first off of the chair, stairs, couch, or anything else she's managed to climb.

But, boy do we get giggles when she sits on our bed. She sits up really tall, looks at us, then throws herself backwards and begins a fit of giggles! She'll do this over and over.

(Anyone think that these two skills don't go so well together? - yesterday, she climbed onto the couch, and tried to throw herself backwards off of the edge of the couch...but she was giggling, so it was cute...whew!)

Miss us?

We know that it's been a looong time since we posted last. Kate got sick just after the holidays, then Anissa and Tim got sick too. Soon after Kate became mobile...like don't take your eyes off of the baby for an instant! She's standing by pulling up on furniture, but not on her own yet. She's walking behind her walker (or stepstool, or anything else that slides across the floor), but she can't walk without holding onto something. We're finding it difficult to take pictures of her while chasing after her at the same time!

She's mastered the pincer grasp. At first, she was thrilled to get a speck of a rice puff in her mouth. Now she shovels Cheerios with both hands like it's going out of style!


Her Godparents and her Godcousin came out to visit over Danny's semester break for a couple of days. It was too short of a visit and we miss them terribly around here already. We went to Universal City Walk, where Danny challenged Tim and Mike to a race in the Nascar simulators. We went to Griffith Park to ride the train and to play at the playground. We went to Mountasia where Danny and Mike rode the gocarts for hours, but managed to take a break to play minigolf with the girls. And we truly enjoyed the great company and conversation.



Kate is still not interested in the TV, not even educational baby videos, but she loves working on the computer with her parents, especially if you go to animalplanet.com.