G walking... almost

We noticed in the last 2 days that G was able to stand up by herself, completely unassisted.. she starts off holding onto the wall, then pushes off, is completely standing by herself, looks around, and maybe slowly sits down... but at least 10 seconds or longer.   Today, she took a step forward from a standing position!   She never takes a step... always sits down to scoot somewhere else, even if it's just really close...  

Since today is just before her 13 month-day, perhaps we can claim that she is starting to walk at 1 yr old  :)

-E

Merry Christmas to Mommy & Daddy! I can feed myself!

Massive update with photos (I've given up on photos from our Breck trip, you'll just have to wait for the scrapbook and come over to see them, sorry!)

This was about a month ago, at her friend R's house. R's been using these to help her walk for quite a while now, so we thought we'd let G have a try.

Here we are picking out our Christmas tree, Thanksgiving weekend. Daddy, I like THIS one:

Playing with her favorite friend:

G likes her friend so much she decides to kiss her:

One of our early feeding attempts, organic buckwheat soba noodles, brought us back to the early super messy days. Here she actually managed to grab some noodles.

G loves playing peek-a-boo, especially with her pei-pei and her toys. However, she hasn't quite figured out that part of the game involves hiding, this little Chinese book is one of the toys that doesn't work so well for peek-a-boo, but she still looks cute playing!

At home, since we don't have any fancy walkers, G uses the ottoman to push all over the house. Sometimes she enjoys herself and squeals out in glee and pride, other times she complains that we make her work hard.
G definitely has the crawl mastered. Sometimes, because of the hardwood, she does a modified crawl with one leg up (so one leg she's using her knee, and the other leg she's using her foot).
Here we are visiting Swing Central for the last time, they are changing locations because the building has a new owner. This was their holiday party. E & S met here, so we made a special effort to go for this final farewell. We actually had to leave for G's bedtime before band even got started! I think next time we will put her to bed and have a friend stay home with her and then we can go out to have some dancing fun!

Here we are at B's holiday playdate, another of G's friends. This is the contraption they used to help him learn to walk. E decided to give G a test run in it, quite funny, actually!

Here's a close-up of her in it. Note her fancy outfit, one of the few times we put her in a dress or skirt. Don't you just love her stockings?! Yes, those are stockings, NOT SHOES! Too cute!

And the biggest news of all. For Christmas, G decided to give us the gift of her self-feeding! This was last night when we gave her a big piece of a brioche dinner roll (we're supposed to be aggressively trying to gain weight with high fat foods). She used one of her hands to stuff the piece into her mouth.

This was this morning at breakfast, feeding herself organic Ritz-like crackers. It's like a switch turned on inside her and BAM, now she can feed herself!
Whew! What a whirlwind! I'll be back to post Christmas day photos...