
You’re a master of finger foods now, from Cheerios to cheesy pasta (sneakily laced with peas or carrots), and are good enough with a spoon that we sometimes let you work your way through most of a lunch of shepherd’s pie. (Usually at breakfast we’re too desperate to get out of the house, so you just get a few dips before Dad shovels the rest in.) We’re still exploring the list of foods that you might eat, so there’s lots of nibbles off of parental plates, to varying success.

So, that crazy two-week period! All of this, seemingly at once:
- You learned to drink through a straw, pretty much on the first try. This saved a rather grumpy lunch, at the slight cost of Mom’s frozen and tired hand holding the glass of ice water for your explorations.
- Shaking head to mean “no” arrived during this time. (Previously it had been reserved for rockin-out to music, or to enjoying the wind in your stroller. I don’t know how you came to give it meaning, or whether we just reacted as though it had some and you played along...)
- You started to share, especially letting other kids on the playground borrow your green walker, although you of course want it back after a short stretch. Still, going from fear at their approach to rolling it toward them as an offering was a noteworthy evolution.
- You first did an action that was clearly pretending – specifically, you held a big lego block up to your ear as if it were a telephone, and then gave it to me to continue the charade. (You have also been much amused when I mime feeding your bear with a spoon, although you haven’t yet gone that direction yourself.)
- I had cut up some pieces of apple for you and you actually pointed to the rest of the apple instead – sure enough, you bit right in and ate most of it that way! We think that your enjoyment is a mix of food tastiness and teething relief, but it’s cute either way to watch you open wide and attack.... This also quickly generalized to bananas, making snack time a whole lot easier.
- Most recently, you learned/decided to snuggle. You had always hugged Golden Bear, and then done some flirtatious demonstrations toward the dog’s bed or a pillow on the floor, but you only recently made the leap from that to actually hugging Mom or Dad (and especially to pointing to a book with a picture on the cover of a baby hugging her mommy, and then miming the same). I think we hadn’t realized how much we were looking forward to this – unlike the long vigil for the first smile – until it finally got here. Still enough of a rarity to be treasured. yay!
Also, had my first outing that felt like a shared parent-daughter time: we were just biding our time before meeting Gammy, but we ended up playing on a big cozy coffeehouse couch (wheee! fluffy cushions!), sharing some blueberry muffin, reading a book, and generally snuggling side by side. The time just flew. More and more, better and better!

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