Life is certainly different now that Anna is walking all over instead of crawling all over. She moves so much faster and I'm definitely in the middle of a learning curve trying to relearn how to a bunch of things given our new situation. In addition to walking, Anna has been doing a bunch of other new things:
1. Yesterday on a walk, she pointed to a dog and said, "da!"
2. She likes to eat with a fork and a spoon. She's been trying to do this for a while now, without too much success. In the past few weeks she really likes to have a fork or a spoon in her hand while she eats, even it is just to hold while she feeds herself with the other hand. But in the past few days, she has gotten much better getting food into her mouth. Last night she was stabbing meatball pieces with her fork and putting them in her mouth. Yesterday at breakfast Matt said she ate a whole bowl of chex with her spoon - carefully spooning one chex at a time!
3. Stairs, stairs, and more stairs. Everywhere we go Anna is on the lookout for stairs. I guess this was always true to some extent, but now she likes to walk up them while holding my hand.
4. Riding toys! For a long time now Anna has really liked any kind of riding toy, but it is only in the past few days that she has decided her stroller is a toy. If we take the stroller to the park, she sometimes prefers to push the stroller around the park instead of playing with the playground toys.
5. Anna has taken a new interest in books. About a month ago she really only liked to flip through her books quickly and look at the pictures. Now she seems to have a greater interest in, I guess I should say, "plot"? She brings the books to us to have them read, likes to choose her books herself before bed, and points out objects so we tell her what they are. Two cute things in particular: when we get to the "M" page in Dr. Seuss's ABC's she smacks her lips together over and over to saying "ma, ma, ma". Also, she seems to have made the connection between the picture of the Washington Monument in her "Goodnight Washington DC" book and the real Washington Monument. When she sees the WM in person, she gets all excited and points to it. When she sees the WM in the book, she also gets excited and points up to the sky, I think to show how big it is.
6. Anna still loves going outside. She asks to go outside all the time by pointing to the door. She gets really excited when I put her shoes on because to her, that means she is going outside. It is very disappointing when she has to put her shoes on to go to the grocery store.
7. Yesterday at the indoor playground at the mall, she climbed up the stairs of the slide by herself, sat down, went down the slide, and walked back to the steps by herself.
8. This one is for all the uncles: She walks around the family room kicking a ball!
