Pearly White Chompers

Ella finally has teeth!! While I was bathing her last night, she smiled really big and I saw white spots in her mouth. I stuck my finger in there and I could feel both bottom front teeth! They have just broken through the skin, so you have to look hard to see them, but they are there. I stuck my finger in there several times just to be sure I wasn't imagining it.

Now she’s guarding them. She's using her tongue as a gatekeeper and she won’t let me feel them. We keep trying to make her smile really big so we can see them because she’s trying not to show them at all. Dave said she probably thinks I’m going to take them away from her. She's definitely using her tongue to play with them, so once the novelty wears off I'm sure we'll see more of them. She already tried them out on me - she leaned into me like she was snuggling and bit my arm. This is going to be fun.

The Piglet has also decided she is finished with bottles. The last time she was offered a bottle was December 22, but the last time she grudgingly took a bottle was the 19th. Since then, she has been drinking her milk exclusively from her cup when I'm away. I can't say I'm upset about this development, in fact I'm overjoyed because a cup is a lot less work than preparing and washing bottles after work every day. However, I didn't expect it to happen this soon or this abruptly; the child knows what she wants. I think drinking from a cup makes her feel grown up.

Her sounds are becoming more and more intelligible, so I don't think it will be long before she starts talking. According to Grandma, she clearly said, "Uh oh" on Monday when she was dropping toys off of the high chair. I haven't heard it yet, but I'm not at all surprised since we say that to her all the time. She's been making a noise that sounds like "Mama" for months, but she only does this when she's upset and crying so I'm not convinced that she's actually saying it. When I hear it plain and clear, I'll believe it.

I've been feeling guilty because I haven't updated her baby book since right after she was born. I just can't make myself fill in the blanks. I think I have issue with being so structured. Over the Christmas holidays, I re-read my blog posts about her and realized that I've captured nearly everything here. I've decided that I'm just going to take out the baby book pages that I consider crap and fill it with my own stuff. It'll be much more thorough that way, and I'll be much more likely to keep it up-to-date.

I realized that I have been blogging for two full years, and I've captured a lot of stuff that I had already forgotten. It was really interesting to go back and read from the beginning, to remember the things I had forgotten and to realize how much I've changed since I started keeping this thing.