My world gets bigger everyday

It's fun to watch Anna discover more of her world each day. Obviously, she has discovered a lot in the past 8 months. In April she could only see a few inches in front of her and by June she still didn't know about her hands. However, in the past few weeks it has been fun to watch her discover new things on a daily basis by crawling. Even though she was a pretty proficient crawler a week ago, there were still parts of the house she didn't bother to check out. When we first put her new rug down in the dining room she really didn't have a lot of interest in leaving the rug area. She's changed her motive for crawling in the past week. Last week she crawled because she saw something she wanted. This week she crawls to see if she might find something she wants - just taking a little stroll to see what she can see. I can't remember what day it was, but one day in the past week she just crawled into the kitchen. Slowly she's realized that the cabinets and refrigerator do open (although she can't figure out how to open them herself) and that there is a shelf at her height with her tupperware on it. She's also just started to go in the other direction in the dining room. She's run into a few hurdles there - the dining room chairs are just low enough that everytime she crawls up to them, she bumps her head. And I know this is hard to believe if you haven't seen it, but she hasn't figured out how to duck her head so this basically stops her from going any further. The good news is that she no longer cries when she bumps her head. She has actually become a lot more resilent in the past week. She has taken so many tumbles and bumps - tumbles and bumps that previously resulted in a few wimpers - but now I guess she has realized that if she stops to wimper about each bump, there will be a lot less time for discovery!

In both the dining room and the living room she knows where her toy basket is and while she previously tried to play with the toys while reaching over the basket, she's figured out how to take them out of the basket to get a better look at them. Today she also discovered that if she props herself up on the banister next to the stairs, she might have a better shot at diving for the higher up ornaments on the tree.

And last, but certainly not least, today she crawled into the downstairs bathroom for the first time. Now that I have to watch her every minute, I usually put her in the living room so I can see her from the bathroom - ya know, when I have to use the bathroom, but today she decided to crawl right in and tip over the waste basket then launch for the plunger while I was trying to save the waste basket...a little bit of a disaster given that I was, well, trying to use the bathroom...