This week you've gotten a lot more mobile - in more ways than one!
First of all, you are pulling yourself around now like a little army man on a secret mission. It's funny, because few things seem to warrant troubling yourself to get to them like a good magazine, piece of newspaper, or catalog. You will stop any and all play time if you spot the glossy pages of a catalog in your midst and immediately start your rocky descent from seated position to zombie dragging ready. You usually bonk your face. You haven't quite learned how to gracefully get from "seated" to "belly," and normally just lean forward farther and farther until -bonk!- you are on your belly. But once in this position, there is no reading material that is safe from your juicy jaws.
You also like to go after anything you shouldn't have: Mommy's nail polish bottles, the carpet (which, for some reason, pulls out so badly that we've decided against ever buying a shag carpet again) and bits of fluff. Your daddy has always wanted a clear coffee table, and as soon as you're crawling for serious, I can see that for a period of a few years, we will not be able to leave magazines, books, and papers out lest they become Lilah food.
You also have this funny way of scooting on your bottom, more like bouncing, really, to get from place to place. It takes forever and is terribly inefficient, but you seem pleased by the results. This technique is used more when you think I should nurse you. Sitting up, your face is pretty much even with your breakfast, lunch, and dinner when I'm next to you on the floor, so when I am playing with you for any length of time, you eventually look at my chest so long you make yourself hungry (I imagine for me it would be like playing with someone who had a cake strapped to their midsection) and start bouncing Tigger-style over to me, hands out to grab at my shirt and "tell" me what you're after.
Another way you're mobile is that you've learned to pull up to a stand from a seated position if I hold my hands out for you to hang on to. I'm thinking that we will probably go ahead and put your crib mattress down a level tomorrow, because I am having trouble sleeping at night for fear you are going to figure out you can pull up on the edge one morning when you get tired of waiting for me to come get you and you'll just propel yourself out onto the wood floor on your head. And this would be a much higher fall onto a less rugged area than when I let you fling yourself headfirst off the sofa. :-/
Finally, you are now legal to move among the neighboring countries of The United States. We went on Thursday to apply for your passport card! This is particularly exciting to me, who did not even go on real family vacations when I was a kid. The only family vacation we ever took where we did not stay with friends of Gramma and Grandpa was to Stone Mountain in Georgia, and that was only 2.5 hours from our house. That is not really a vacation. I'm not even sure why we had to spend the night. Anyway, I thought about getting you a for real passport, but they are quite expensive, costing nearly $90 and they only last for five years. I figured that you're not going to be visiting overseas before you're five, and possibly not before you're ten, but because your daddy works so often near the Canadian border and because Aunt Janice lives right across the river from Canada, we might actually want to go there. So we opted to get the $35 passport card instead of the $85 passport for now.
Here is your little application and your cute little passport card photos:
You did SO well for the picture! They don't want you to show teeth for your passport photos anymore, so we were lucky that you never smile for a photo until after the flash goes off (fashionably late, you are!) The manager at Walgreen's said you did better than any other kid he's ever taken a passport photo for. I was oddly proud. :-)So that's it, baby girl! You are on your way, now! Soon you'll be crawling around eating all of my scrap paper and the kitty fur tumbleweeds, and one day in the not too distant future you'll probably go "international" for the first time!
So study up on those maps and globes in your room, baby. We've got a lot of trips to plan.
Love,
Mommy
