Week of November 26 - Freedom!! :) *

They grow up so fast. This week, we opened up a new zone of the house for our "free roaming" little daughter. Emily has had free run of the upstairs for months now, but downstairs we have limited her to free run of the family room (having placed a barrier between family room and kitchen).

Maaa! Let me out!! Peeze!

So over the weekend, I removed that barrier and added a gate between the family/kitchen area and the living/dining area downstairs. Boy did Emily like that idea.....ALOT. Her new favorite passtime is chasing daddy around the center island. Round and round we go. But for me, it brings on the next thrill in life.....how to teach Emily that toys stay in the family room, not the kitchen. Oh well, my life is full of challenges. :) One really nice thing though is when I am cooking, Emily is generally pleased and content to sit strapped into her high chair as long as I place it where she can see everything that is going on. I think she actually likes to watch dada cooking, as long as he remembers to come over and share little tid bits now and then :)

Much Better!! :)

Now this is all part of a grand scheme to progressively enable Emily to have a free roaming experience. Eventually we will have the entire house opened up to her, but we take it a zone at a time. The Living Room will be the most difficult as we have glass tops on the tables there and I still need to put a saftey bumper on those nasty edges so Emily does not suffer badly from taking a tumble near a table top. All in due time though :)

Emily by the way can now consistenly and safely climb up and down the stairs. In fact, one of the other reasons she does not have free roaming of the living room is because she will make a beeline for the stairs and be half way up before we catch her (until I make the next downstairs gate move). While she is now well trained for the stairs, I think it will be some time yet before the top and bottom of the stairs will be gate-free simply because she needs supervision to insure she does not have an accident (particularly at the top of the stairs which is right off our bedroom and is a high traffic area for Emily).

We went to Borders over the weekend and picked out some new books for Emily. As I have said before, Emily loves books, and the two new ones Nancy picked out for here are big hits at the moment as you can see in the photos below :




By the way, that little back pack you see Emily wearing is one of those little teddy bear packs that parents can also attach a tether to. We are getting her comfortable with wearing it so that should the need arise (and I think it will seeing as Emily is already a "runner") we can attach tether (or a spotter flag) in order to keep track of our fast moving little girl when out and about. For now she seems perfectly content to be in the stroller, but we are sure that is going to change at some point, and she has genuine sprinting abilities already underway.

This last photo (below) IS the photo of the week!

We have never met with great success with getting Emily to self-feed with her fingers. She just does not like to do it. She knows how, but when you hand her something to eat, she will most often reach out and take your hand and put the food item in your palm and then wait for you to feed it to her. A total Princess, wants to be waited on!

However, Nancy decided to prepare a bowl of cut banana this weekend and hand Emily a fork to see what we could achieve. Sure enough, while she is not keen on finger food, she has an immediate grasp (punn punn) of the concept of silverware!! She has not gotten the stabbing skill with the fork quite perfected yet, so mom will help her if needed to skewer a banana piece, but once that is done, Emily freely and quite deftly will take fork in hand pop that fork into her mouth and pull the banana off with her teeth and munch away. Too soon to tell if this is novelty and will wear off and revert to insisting one of us hold the fork though :)


I guess in the end, I'm not so surprised. Emily is quite observant, quite a good mimmick, and we have always shared food from our plate with her using our adult silverware. But it was a nice leap over top of the ongoing challenge of trying to get her to feed using her hands. In a way, since I hate messy, it's a good thing :)