In the last two months, Georgie has gone from taking a few tentative steps (and then deciding crawling is faster) to walking like a pro! At the beginning of August she decided to try walking again and has just gotten better and better. This last weekend she added a new trick - she can stand up on her own now, no need to pull herself up. We've cleared the main floor of obstacles, blocked off the exits, and just let her have the run of the house. She just runs back and forth all the time now - officially a Walker! She falls a lot and occasionally falls hard, but for the most part she just picks herself up and keeps on moving. Sorry the video is sideways but it's a good slice of what walking looks like!
She is also starting to climb on things (we are in so much trouble). She'll climb into her toy bins, step up onto low shelves or ledges, and sometimes figures out how to get her knee up so she can actually stand up on things like her push toy. The other day she climbed halfway up the stairs before turning around and asking for my help. Tim was a monkey as a child and we're thinking Georgie has those genes, too.
Georgie is/was FINALLY sleeping through the night - 11 or 12 hours at a stretch. I say "was" because we just got back from vacation and she's teething so she hasn't actually slept through the night in about two weeks but now we know it's possible and it will happen again! I am a much much happier mama now that I can get more than four hours of sleep in a stretch. The next step (once she's sleeping again) is getting her to go down for a nap without needing to be held or rocked. She still howls for up to half an hour or longer if she isn't sufficiently sleepy when I put her down, so we are going to work on that next. She is currently taking two naps a day, which is wonderful and I very much hope will last for a while!
Speaking of teeth, they are busting out all over the place. Georgie apparently cut a tooth while we were on vacation and we didn't realize it until we were home and suddenly discovered she had five teeth, not four. She's cutting two more as I type, which means there's probably going to be one more before too long. This is by far the fastest and the most she's had teeth come in at the same time. No wonder she's tired and cranky!
I am also in the process of weaning Georgie. Right now, I nurse her first thing in the morning and right before bed, but other than that she's drinking 1-2 bottles of regular milk. It's been a real challenge to get her to actually drink (she won't sit still!) but she's getting better and yesterday she actually had 3 bottles, which is a record for her. Over our vacation last week, she figured out how to hold the bottle herself and it's still new enough that I think it's darling. She eats all kinds of solid foods - fruit, bread, cheese, applesauce, [pasta, the occasional baby food squeeze packet - but mostly, she is interested in eating whatever other people are eating. If someone has food, she'll make a beeline and beg until she gets a bite. She still likes to spit out her food into her hand, examine it, and then put it back in about forty percent of the time. It's been hard all over again to figure out how much she needs to eat, what she will eat, and when she needs to eat, but I feel like a pattern is sort of starting to emerge.
My favorite trick of hers is asking "please." For a few days I picked up her hand and did the sign for "please" (open palm in a circle on the chest), then she started doing her own version - scratching at her chest with one hand. (Sometimes she gets her stomach instead, like in the picture above.) Sometimes I still remind her to ask for food but for the most part, she does it without any prompting. In fact, she has caught on enough that she uses this to ask for things other than food, like being picked up. It is so nice to know when she wants something, even though sometimes we can't figure out what it is she's asking for.
There is definitely a lot of language development going on right now, too. Georgie babbles all the time and she seems to understand a lot of what we say. She knows what I mean when I tell her "no," to smile (I get such posed grins sometimes!), to be soft (still working on that), "Come here," and "Can I have it?" She'll identify Tim as "Dada" and me as "Mama," and we almost have her saying "Nana" for my mom.
Other tricks: She waves hi and bye (not super consistently yet, but it's there), she blows bubbles in her bath water, she plays peek-a-boo, and she's getting better at putting toys back in their containers instead of just dumping them out. Sometimes when she falls down, she rolls over as if she meant to fall in order to lounge for a minute. About half the time, she remembers to slide off the couch feet first. She still loves to grab eye glasses and cell phones and has a fascination with cords, which drives me crazy. She doesn't know how to play with other kids yet, as we learned after spending a week with our Herrick family: she constantly tried to take her cousins' toys and bottles. She's pointing more and more and has this fake laugh she does when other people laugh. She also has a fake cry that makes me laugh super hard. Her hair is getting longer and curlier, and she immediately pulls out any bows I put in her hair. She is all-around adorable, energetic, clever, and playful!
