After The Tenth..... When The Fun Really Begins

Just in time for Adam and Kim's (really) short visit, Laney learned two new tricks. If I did the math correctly, we had 6 waking hours with our house guests, before I had to run them over to the airport for their early morning flight. During that time Laney showed off her two new tricks, which she really only learned that morning. (Pretty good timing on her part)

She's been on the verge of crawling and just before they arrived she finally put it all together. She hasn't really gone more than one or two "steps" before she decides that she would just rather sit up, but all in due time.

She can also grab onto things and pull herself into a standing position. This feat seems even more impressive than the crawling one; have you seen how much weight she has to get up off the ground? Once she gets herself vertical, you can see that she's just tickled pink with herself, giggling with a beaming smile. Now her only problem is that she hasn't seem to grasp the concept that when she grabs the coffee table, it will assist her in standing, but the book on top of the coffee table isn't much help and instead is probably going to cause her to come crashing down. It hasn't happened yet, but since she sleeps in the pack-n-play in our room, I'm expecting that in the next few days I'm going to wake up one morning to her peeking over at me.

In the last few days I've received a handful of requests to include more photos and videos with the posts. I will try to have the camera out more and to then add more multimedia to the posts. In the time being, while I can only promise to try harder and I don't necessarily have a ton of pictures OF the girls today, I can offer you pictures taken BY one of the girls.

Don't forget to check out www.TheItsyBitsyPhotographer.com. While daddy has been a bit delinquent, Macy has been snapping away and upload new pictures every day.

So here is the rest of the update...

On Sunday we headed over to Tradewinds park and met up with some friends. Every weekend you can go and on a pony ride, which we did and on a special weekend each month, you can also go on the Tradewinds & Atlantic Railroad miniature train ride. The trains are one-eight life size, or scaled a 1-1/2" per foot and only cost $1 a trip. You go around a lake, go under an unnel (*not a typo--its like a tunnel), go on a tressel and just have a pretty unique experience. I'm pretty certain we'll be going back next month....

Here are two pictures from our ride. The first one is from my view, showing both our friends the Moorman family and the locomotive. The second image was the view of another train on the other side of the lake.

After the train ride, we headed over to the pony rides. (It was a big afternoon)

In a completely unrelated matter, I've begun work on the "Orange Indoctrination", my attempt to get both Macy and Laney excited about Syracuse University sports and last week I had Macy on my lap as we watched my beloved Orange battle Louisville. Throughout the game I tried to get Macy to learn to cheer for SU and during a crucial moment of the game, Scoop Jardine hit his second big three pointer, eliciting a "Go Orange" out of daddy, to which Macy promptly replied, "Go Purple." Purple? Clearly Syracuse wears orange and Louisville wears red, so she wasn't rooting for the opponent, but what was she cheering for? It took a minute, but then it hit me...Macy knows which color is Daddy's favorite, so she decided in that instant, that if daddy could yell out his favorite color, why couldn't she? (you can't make this stuff up)

The house is all a flutter this morning, with the fact that Aunt Kim and Uncle Adam are coming this afternoon. We only get one night with them, but Macy and Laney both seem to be quite excited about the upcoming arrival.

In the last two weeks, there have been some noticeable changes in Laney. She is showing signs of being mobile. It seems that crawling forward just doesn't interest her yet, so she uses a combination of the roll and scoot method along with her newly discovered ability to crawl backwards.

First she grew 4 teeth and now she doesn't stay in the same spot I put her. My littlest little one is showing signs that she's growing up. It is fun to watch and also a little depressing. It seems that just when I get comfortable referring to her age, it changes. I finally came around to referring to her as an 8-month old and now I have to practice saying that she's a 9-month old. Before too long she won't be an infant any longer...Her birthday is now just a short 3 months away...so hard to believe.

It is truly impressive to see her find a way to get her hands on a toy that is out of reach..all without crawling. On top of that, I'm pretty certain that yesterday she made a sound that could easily have been mistaken for "dadda" except for the fact that it was preceded and followed by other sounds that were not really comprehensible.

 UPDATE: My editor just reminded me that I forgot to mention that Laney can now wave at you. If you wave at her, most times she'll smile back at you and follow up with an enthusiastic wave.