Changes

Silje is changing really rapidly right now. She's making just huge leaps in multiple areas.

She's gotten so much better at the gross motor stuff. She can stand unassisted, she can pull up, she can walk holding onto just one hand, she's doing some cruising (walking along a piece of furniture while holding on), and she's even starting to take just a few steps by herself. She'll let go of my hands and take two steps and collapse into Daddy's arms, or the reverse. It's mostly just controlled crashing at this point, but she's going to start walking any day now. She's so proud of herself with this stuff. She just gets a huge grin on her face when she does it.

She's getting a lot more verbal. She has new words that she uses like "dog" (a favorite), "ball", "more", "Rosa" (the name of one of her stuffed animals, it's pronounced the Norwegian way so she can roll her r's), "hi", "Nan" (her lovey), and I'm sure there are more I'm not thinking of.

She's learning some baby signs. She can do "eat" and "more" and "all done." We should work on some more with her. I'm torn over using too many signs with her as I want her to learn how to talk, so there is a balance in helping her to learn how to communicate and also encouraging her to use her words.

She's suddenly eating finger foods almost exclusively. She's gotten really good at it. This was something she was really behind in because she would just gag and choke on anything that wasn't a puree, but suddenly she is just doing great with it. I made curried vegetable hash tonight, which is not a finger food, per se, but is quite chunky and she loved it and gobbled it up. Her favorite food right now is probably watermelon. I swear she'd eat an entire watermelon if I let her. She's really good with the fork too. Incidentally, it really looks like she's a lefty.

And she finally has some teeth! Just two so far - the two front bottom ones. The two front top ones are coming in right now, but she won't let me look at them, much less get a picture of them.

She's just jumped forward in so many areas so quickly. She's becoming a whole new kid. She's also learning how to annoy her brother. I probably shouldn't giggle when she does it. For some reason she likes to shriek at him, which really annoys him and he yells at her, which just makes her shriek more.