At Last!

Finally, a post! It is amazing how much time gets lost when you move your family across country (again) and start new jobs. Now that we are pretty well settled, hopefully I can get back to some more frequent posts.

(this is the "Really, Mom, you are totally interrupting my important work" look)

The big news around here is that Emily has been walking for weeks, but has always insisted on having a finger to hold onto as she moved around the room. She just refused to go anywhere without a safety net. This past weekend she finally decided that she was ready to strike out on her own. Now she is walking everywhere without requiring assistance. And, because she spent so much time practicing, she is actually moving pretty quickly. It is definitely strange to see because I had gotten so used to seeing her crawl everywhere. Of course, we have been doing lots of clapping and cheering for her and she is just so incredibly proud of herself. If only that feeling could be bottled . . . .

She has also started dancing lately. She has three moves that she likes to do. One is to bend her knees and bounce up and down. This is the most common. On special occasions she will twist from side to side, and on very rare occasions she will break out the hokey pokey fingers. I have no idea where she learned this, but it is pretty funny.

Emily has also gotten better at giving kisses. She used to just kiss her hand as a way to blow kisses to people. Now she has actually started kissing us. It isn't all the time, but it is happening more and more. Last Friday, for example, Abbie, Chad and I were all sitting on the couch and Emily was walking in front of us. All the sudden she decided to stop at each of us and kiss our legs. It was so cute.

Perhaps following in her sister's footsteps, or perhaps just being a girl, Emily has become interested in drawing lately. She has started climbing into the little chairs that Abbie got for Christmas last year and working on her coloring. She seems thrilled with the fact that crayons actually leave marks on the paper. So far she has been pretty good about finding paper to color on, although a couple of nights ago she also thought that the kitchen cabinets could use a little color. Fortunately, she really doesn't press that hard yet, so it didn't really leave any marks.