13 months

I just re-read my post for Pancake's birthday and realized that she has changed so much in the past month. She walks while I (or Mr. D) hold her hands. She can cruise around a table but prefers to stand there and whine for someone to hold her hands to walk to whatever she's after. She has pulled herself up twice in the past week. She's making big strides toward walking independently.

She tries to put on her own socks and shoes by holding up her foot and limply touching her shoe/sock to it. Tonight after their bath she tried to put socks on Doodle. She babbles like crazy and says many many new words every day (sometimes only once). She knows the colors blue, orange and green. This afternoon I went into her room when she was in her crib and asked what happened to her pacifier. She promptly pointed through the exact slats she had dropped it through. Of course it wasn't out the side of the crib facing the room it was the side against the wall. So I had to remove the boxes of diapers and wipes under the crib and get on my belly to reach it.

She scoots over to the cabinet where we keep most of our food, takes out the box of graham crackers, opens it, opens the bag inside and helps herself to a snack. She's done this three times now. She enjoys rooting through my diaper bag and pulling out items, playing with them, then going back for more goodies.

She calls "daddy" throughout the day. I repeatedly tell her that he's at work. Sometimes Doodle answers for me. She loves books. She turns the pages (which she's done for a while) and has favorite books. This morning I was reading a book that she didn't want to hear so she closed it. I thought she may have unintentionally closed it so I re-opened it and kept reading. She insisted on closing it by whining and closing it tightly keeping her hand on it so I couldn't open it back up. Then she reached for the book she wanted to hear.

She has a baby doll named Penelope. She hugs her, rocks her, swings her in her baby swing and says whee, eats her head and feet, throws her on the floor, hands her to me so I can be her mommy too. If you ask Pancake where Penelope is she either points to her or scoots to get her.

In addition to the sounds that dogs and cows make she now does snake. There is a snake on the bottom of the curtains in her room and when I'm rocking her to sleep she'll take out her pacifier so she can say "sssss." She looks older too and I think she's starting to lose some of her belly now that she is moving around more. I'll try to find a representative picture to paste below.

I just browsed through my pictures and the last one taken of her was at the beginning of April. I am going to have to be better about photographing her. Poor second child.