Rituals, Telephony, Wordsmithing and Sliding
So lately Margaret has been picking up on little rituals and patterns in our daily lives. For example, she knows that if I kick off my slippers and take off my glasses while holding her, that I'm about to put her to sleep, and she'll immediately start crying. Luckily, she's almost always done within a minute or two of us actually laying down.
She surprised me during bath time the other day. Typically she just hops in the bath with Liz, and I'll come get her when they're done so that Liz is free to take care of herself. Usually I just grab a towel and reach out for her and Liz will hand her to me. This week, when I grabbed the towel, Margaret stood right up and came over to the edge of the tub before Liz even had a chance to grab her.
Margaret has always been fascinated with our cell phones. She now has 3 of her own, two of which are toys and one is just an old cell phone sans battery. This week she's actually started holding them up to her mouth and ear and saying things into them. One of the common sounds she makes into her phone sounds a lot like "yeah?"
Margaret's musical side is developing now also. When we watch any of her Little Einstein videos, or play with any of her toys that make music, she'll dance along with it most of the time. She's really only got about 3 different "moves" at the moment, but they're all cute. We keep trying to get some of it on video, but as soon as we grab the camera, she gets more interested in that than dancing, so we don't have anything to show so far. She weaves her head back and forth or twists her torso from side to side, but the best is when she shakes her little butt back and forth. That's cute for now, but I don't even want to think about my feelings on that in 12 years or so.
Vocabulary wise we haven't made a lot of progress since the last post. She's still saying mostly the same words. She does "talk" a lot more now. When she's playing by herself, or when we're riding in the car, she'll just babble on and on for 10 or 20 minutes non-stop. Liz and I suspect that she's invented her own word. We've noticed that she regularly says "nana" just before she's ready to nurse. This doesn't remotely resemble anything that we say in reference to nursing, so we're wondering if she just decided it was OK to call it that.
One final thing. Although she has shown that she is able to take a few steps on her own, she really doesn't show any interest in walking on her own right now. If we're holding her hands, she'll walk all day, but any time we try to let go, she'll quickly drop to the ground and revert to crawling. We know that as soon as she decides she wants to, she'll just take off. She'll stand or walk when we trick her into it (like convincing her to clap when she's standing next to the couch). It's only a matter of her deciding that she wants to. She can and does, however, climb the steps to her new slide.