Little Tornado

Ella Grace realized last weekend that she can walk behind a push toy. This seems to have opened up a whole new world for her because she has been a tiny tornado all week long - wreaking havoc and creating messes where ever she goes. And she’s been going everywhere, standing on tip-toes to reach table tops, opening closet doors and trying to climb shelves, emptying cabinets and drawers. She is one busy little soul. She isn’t walking by herself yet, but she is getting mad when she has to sit down and crawl because there’s nowhere to hold on to get where she’s going.

Two more teeth have come in this week, both on the bottom, on each side of the front teeth. That’s three in three weeks. Three of the four that she is supposed to get between 10 and 14 months. I’d like for to go ahead and grow the fourth one next week and then take a break, at least until after vacation (16 days!). She slept six straight hours last night (Woohoo!). That’s how I knew the last one had broken through.

Her favorite things this week are drinking out of a straw cup (I bought her some last weekend), and pointing at everything. EVERYTHING. She points when she wants to go somewhere, look at something, show us something, when she hears Daddy/Georgia/Gypsy in another room, etc. It’s so cute, and it’s started a plethora of conversation about the names of everything. She also says, “Dat!” when she wants to show us things. For example, she hit the mother lode of young boy action figures in Uncle Joshua’s room a few days ago. She proudly adopted a few of the little men. When I got home that day, she nursed, and then promptly got off my lap, pointed and said, “Dat!” Grandmother gave her the little man she was pointing to, and she turned to me and held it up with a proud grin on her face. She was so proud of them; she had been waiting to show them to me all day long.

At church Sunday, we were in the hall outside the nursery and she could hear the kids in there playing. She crawled to the door, laid on the floor, and tried to see through the crack under the door. She did that repeatedly throughout the week, and this morning I saw a little hand sticking under the bathroom door when she figured out I was in there.

She now processes and responds to simple commands. She was in hurry to go somewhere one evening this week and I told her, “Let’s take a bath.” She detoured and went straight to the bathroom, pausing only for me to turn on the light. The same night, while playing in the tub, I told her “Give me the duck” or “Give me the frog” and she picked out the correct toy and handed it to me. It is so cool to watch her mind develop – to see her thinking and analyzing to figure out how things work. She is so much fun right now.

She will be 11 months old on Monday. I’m trying to figure out where the last year of my life went. I cannot believe how big she’s gotten. Her hair is long enough in the back now that it gets tangled. She’s so long I can hardly imagine how she fit in the co-sleeper beside our bed. I nursed her during my brother’s graduation ceremony last night (Yay for a contented, sleeping baby!), and we had trouble getting comfortable in our seat because her legs were overflowing into Aunt Becca’s lap beside us. When I look back at pictures from the day she was born, it really is hard for me to imagine her being that tiny. Time passes so quickly.