All better

I am happy to report we are all feeling better! It took a while, but we're there.

Ashley is still not walking on her own. In fact, sometimes when we try practicing she forces herself to sit down. We don't push it, we want her to know she can trust us. I also read that if you do push it, it can actually slow down her readiness. She has stood for long periods of time, and she has also started plunging toward me (sometimes when I'm not even aware of it), so those are all good signs.

I have a feeling she is going to hold out for a while until she has mastered walking around on other things, then one day pick it up and will be a pro.

Ashley's vocabulary continues to grow. She is saying more words and has also started saying a couple of two-word sentences. She says "all done" a lot, and does the "all done gesture that we do". Matt also swears she said "there is is" a couple times when pointing to the moon in her book (that is what I often say when we read and she points to it).

She's gotten more into "singing along" and doing the hand gestures to songs like "The Itsy Bitsy Spider". Sometimes she says "again" when I finish.

Tonight she had pulled out a rubber ducky, and I said "it's a duck". She happened to be holding it at the same time that we were looking in her book, and there was a pic of rubber ducks, and she pointed and said "duck". She was able to recognize matching objects.

She also has been playing with her toy phone. She holds it up to her ear and says "hello" or "hi". It's cute. One day she even took her baby doll and held it up to her ear like a phone and said hi :)

She has also been interested in her baby doll. I'll say "where's the baby?" and she'll look for it. She tries wrapping her in the blanket or putting her little cap on her.

I did some catching up on reading, and she seems to be right on track with milestones, behaviors, eating habits, sleep habits, etc. And apparently we seem to be responding to things very well (even prior to reading the how-to's), so that is good.

Ashley is definitely her own person. She's left behind the little baby phase, and has turned into a person with her own thoughts, feelings, wants, opinions, etc. It's lots of fun to see her growing.

Tonight we had fun. I don't even know why Matt had it out, but he had a flashlight out. We had a fun time playing with it. We turned out the lights, and Ashley had fun shining it all over, back and forth. Then daddy was making animal shadows out of his hands. Fun memories :)

Here are some pics from the past couple of weeks: (Newest to oldest) From our trip to the zoo, to getting into the toilet paper, to playing ball, to our fun day trip to Asheville NC last weekend, to fun playing with her toys.