How did that happen

Thanks to an unexpected stay at home day, the urge to sit down and write a blog post started tickling a little harder.  It’s always there, jiggling slightly, but rapidly squelched by time demands and a little person in arms.  Not having two hands free to type will kill an urge in a hurry.  I sat down and realized I haven’t written specifically since May.  May?  That was almost a lifetime ago!

In the meantime, someone adorable turned one!

Technically she’s not a baby anymore, but my babies always feel like a baby until at least eighteen months.  Bella is tiny for her age and definitely still seems like a baby.

She’s now sixteen months old and just delicious! As babies do, she’s gone through some pretty tough months with a lot of crying and little sleep and then morphs into pure sunshine again.  We must be on a break from the most intense parts of teething currently if her happiness level is any clue.

She’s pretty quiet.  Whoever said boys are quieter than girls certainly did not birth an Adam and then a Zara or Bella.  He was such a talker I assumed girls talk twice as much as he did!  Bella is starting to say a few words but she rarely jabbers.  She’s a doer, not a talker.  I have never seen a child so capable in my entire life.  She watches everything and then just takes over.

If she’s playing in the living room and I start making tea in the kitchen she quietly walks to the dining room, gets her little step stool, and pushes it to the sink to take over the stirring.  The other night we were all in the living room.  It was darkish in the rest of the house.  Suddenly she got this, “I’m going somewhere” look on her face, walks out of the room and disappears.  I had a hunch she was after something and sure enough, she was over halfway up the steps when I went after her.  I will be SO RELIEVED when she comes down steps as well as she goes up them!  That same stepstool helps her get onto chairs so she can reach the pens and highlighters, onto the couch where she looks like she will flip over backward, and onto the piano bench so she can play piano.  Needless to say, we have someone on Bella patrol almost every waking minute.

She loves nothing more than helping with kitchen work.  She hands eggs to me and I watch her little fingers squeeze against the egg just like mine do, her eyes expecting it to open up.  Thank goodness she hasn’t quite mastered the cracking against the counter part.

But my favorite part about her is the way she learned to say yes this month.  She’s been shaking her head no for a while and used to just hold still and sometimes grunt if she wanted to say yes.  Last week she started nodding yes, but it takes a full body effort … her little face and tummy and legs all trying to get it in motion to get her head to come forward!  It’s sooooooooooo cute.

{the picture Mom works SOOOOOOOOOOOO hard to get!}

{What usually happens with girls with opinions.}

Little lump of sugar!

PS to self: Welcome to the new world of blogging.  Write on one day in fragments.  Add pictures the next.  Deal with it and just make it happen.  Your eighty year old self will rock back and forth and thank you.

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