She let go of my hands and took a step to Hadley. We couldn't get her to replicate it after that, but nevertheless she walked for a brief moment alone. Dahlia has recently shot up. I am amazed that this baby of mine now hits her head on the kitchen table and grabs any willing pair of hands for a loop around the house and another loop, and she is so tall that I don't have to stoop down to walk with her. Then she gets down on her bottom and crawls in her adorable way that reminds me of a gondolier--one leg is the oar going into the water, one leg and her cute little butt is the boat, and her hands are the hands of the oarman as he rows through the canals of Venice.
In the grass and on the shag rug in the living room she will break into a traditional crawl, but she is too smart to do this on harder ground--it hurts her knees. In fact on Sunday I noticed she had yet a third crawl for rough terrain. Our driveway is in bad shape, full of degraded gravel and tar. Instead of risk her tender little knees she arched herself into a downward dog pose and gingerly moved her hands and feet across the hazardous way.
Then there are the stairs. Of course we have the requisite gates everywhere because given the chance she will climb up all three flights of stairs faster than Miles can do a page of homework or Alec can get himself dressed in the morning, which is not necessarily the fastest, but still a suprisingly little amount of time considering the ratio of the length of her body to the square footage of stairs in our vertical house.
I think Dahlia and President Obama have something in common in that they are both tackling many many things at once. Dahlia definitely has a better deal than the president, but she is no less hard working. She is not content to merely master her gross motor skills she now has an arsenal of words too. She is only just 13 months old and she says
1. Mama
2. Addy (Dada)
3. Aleh (Alec
4.ZZZZZ (Miles)
5. Jjjj (Yenny)
6. Te''y ( teddy bear)
7. Do'ee (Doggie)
8. Hi
She shakes her head no when she doesn't want something. She waves goodbye and hello, and she shakes her finger to say no.
She also dances everytime she hears anything resembling music. This includes a number of her toys, the phone, a song etc. She rocks her body back and forth and flails her little arms. And when her brothers are wrestling like good little puppies she crawls right in the middle of all the ruckus. She is not detered despite getting whacked one too many times already. She will be one tough cookie!
It amazes me how early babies have a sense of themselves as little people. She gets right in the middle of the boy's play, and walks, and talks, and pulls clothes from her dresser which she tries to put on by dragging them over her neck BECAUSE she knows she is a little person. She eats what we eat, tries to talk and play as we do, and a little over a year ago she was still a fetus. It is nothing short of miraculous.
The other remarkable thing about little d as I like to call her is that she now has 8, count them 8 teeth!
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