Polly Want a Cracker

Seems we now have a parrot in the house. It's so much fun watching Miss Mira try to copy everything we do. My personal favorite is her mimicking of me crowing like a rooster. Imagine a very high pitched, "co-o-oooo". It's great. The other day we were playing with the keyboard, and I started tapping my toe to the rhythm. She was fascinated. She looked at my foot, looked at her foot, looked back at mine, then back at hers. She then picked her foot up to about waist height, and stomped it down. Repeat. Pretty soon she realized that she didn't have to lift it quite so high, but she's still fully lifting it off the ground, and we're still working on finding the beat.

It seems our little one also has quite the knack for mothering. One day last week, I went to pick her up at day care. All the boys (Mira is one of only two girls) were playing trucks. Mira was playing by herself in the play kitchen. She had four dolls lined up and was feeding them all a bottle in turn. I wouldn't call her motions gentle, but she had the general idea. We don't have a toy bottle at home, but she makes due with a wooden cylinder from a toy train. I'm amazed that she can make the connection. The other morning, when I went to pick her up from her crib, she laid her baby on the blanket, used the other end of the blanket to cover the baby up, and patted the baby. Then she turned to me as if to say, "okay, I'm done. You can pick me up now." I don't know -- perhaps I just haven't been watching closely enough, but I swear this imaginative little girl behavior started over night.

More evidence that our little one is not so little anymore? Eight teeth! And she's starting to take more and more steps on her own. The most I've seen at once is six, but her confidence is growing by the day. Finally, Mira is beginning to communicate her needs with sign language more than ever. She's even linking signs together ("more milk", for example). It's so much fun to see all my signing start to pay off.

When my family came up for Easter, they brought my tricycle from when I was little -- all spiffed up with new tassels. As you can see in the picture, Mira enjoyed the tassels immensely. Yes, that's them all over the floor!