walking, words, Tobin's birthday, new room

Well, walking is offically here now. It's hard to tell in the picture above, but Aria is standing up on her own, not balancing against the table. She's getting much better at walking. She is starting to prefer it as the best way to get from place to place. She can take as many as fifteen steps at a time before falling over. Also she's done some tricky moves like stand up, walk over to her ball, bend over, pick up the ball, turn around, and throw the ball.


It's been amazing to watch how much she has blossomed mentally in the past month. Her playtime is much more creative now. She loves the little animals in the picture above and she knows them all by name. In fact she's getting quite a recognition vocabulary - she understands probably two or three dozen words now, maybe more: cat, dog, cow, zebra, kangaroo, Mommy, Daddy, Aria, Nana, Uncle Adamen, strawberries, Cheerios, spoon, up, light, on/off, block, door, car, hi/bye (she waves when you say them), Woobie (her blanket) & Teddy Bear, hippo, bunny, etc. She still doesn't speak many words - her vocabulary is pretty much Mama, Dada, "dis," and "dat." Although periodically she repeats back other things we say.

She LOVES playing with blocks, both the wooden ones and some brightly colored foam ones that our friends Lina & Jason got for her birthday. She has learned how to stack them up and knock them over. Yesterday morning she stacked the wooden ones up five high, and almost made it to six.

She pushes her little car around, still loves to dance to music, plays with the telephone (real or fake) and even brings it up to her ear.


She's continuing to be more interested in the food that we are eating than in baby food out of a jar. So we've gotten more creative in supplementing the usual baby stuff with things like cut up fruit, rice cakes, bread, and of course the ever present Cheerios. Tonight she fed herself with a spoon for the first time. She plays some games while eating - one of them is to offer you some food, then eat some herself. The other one is to drop whatever food onto the floor, pick it up, and then eat it. We're not so into that game, but it's pretty hard to stop. :(


Her hair is getting long enough so that Hosie and Kathy have been experimenting with barrettes and pigtails. And Hosanna even trimmed her bangs the other day.


I managed to snap this picture during the 15 seconds or so that she will tolerate wearing the sunglasses. Lately she's been more tolerant of a hat - she's even made a game out of taking it off and putting it back on - but the sunglasses are still definitely a no-go.


Yesterday we went to Santa Rosa for Hosanna's nephew Tobin's 5th birthday party. We all had a great time there. Aria loved playing with Tobin. She also had her first real time spend with a dog, Manny and Tova's beautiful and mellow pooch Monty.


She's gotten really good at going up and down stairs:


She even gave Tobin a birthday kiss...


...and she liked it so much that later she gave this statue of a cat a kiss too:


The other big news is that today we moved a bunch of stuff around so that we could put Aria into her own room. So now she is sleeping in the blue room in the middle that was previously our guest room. We moved our bed into the room where her crib used to be, and put the guest bed in the room that's been our pseudo-office for a little while. She had a heck of a time getting to sleep in there tonight - it took until about 10:00 - so we hope she gets used to it over the next few days. We were pretty motivated to make the change, though, because lately both she and us have been sleeping poorly. We kept waking each other up. e.g. we'd accidentally make some noise coming into the room and wake her up, and then she would be up for an hour. Or she would just flop around in her sleep and wake us up, then we'd be awake for an hour. Hopefully this way (fingers crossed) we will all sleep at least a *little* bit better.