Chaos and order

This month has been an incredibly hectic month at work (so sorry for the serious lack of substantial posts to the blog!). It figures that it's also the month of Evelyn's first birthday (which is exactly a week from today!), and we've done little (zero) planning for her party (date TBD).

True to form, here's another video to pass as a blog entry. Usually, Evelyn creates chaos wherever she goes (which explains the messiness in the background of all these videos... yeah, that's it). She generally likes to take things from where they should be and tosses them haphazardly, content that wherever they land is not where they belong. So it came as a pleasant surprise to see Evelyn trying to put things on a table or shelf rather than pulling them off. For example...

Dancing queen

I couldn't resist posting some more videos of Evelyn dancing to the eerie beat of her rundown walking toy. The "Old McDonald Had a Farm" song is especially good (bad).



This snippet, taken from the same morning (this morning actually), shows a couple of exciting seconds of Evelyn hovering/standing! She's looking and blowing at the paper fish that are blown up and hanging from one corner of the ceiling. That's one of her favorite things to do, and we've inadvertantly taught her to blow at just about everything, hanging from the ceiling or otherwise.

Movin' on up

Evelyn's on the cusp of learning to walk I think! As John says, she's been working on it for a while now, with all of her cruising along furniture and holding onto our hands while she walks... and walks... and walks... We borrowed this walking toy thing from John's coworker, which is totally hilarious because it's so old (or the batteries are so run down) that the music sounds really creepy.



Evelyn sure seems to like the music though. I took this video early one chilly morning (the girl still wakes us up at almost exactly 6am every day!).



Yesterday, as witnessed by myself, John, and Mike, Evelyn crouched into a squat to grab some wooden blocks, got a couple in her hands, and straightened herself into a standing position all without holding on to anything! She stood there for what seemed like forever (OK, maybe 5 seconds, which is forever for her), then she took the tiniest step forward! Unfortunately, no one but me saw that because at that point, I had my arms hovering around her on all sides to protect her from falling into the surrounding furniture or the hard, sharp-cornered box of blocks. Oh boy, we are really in for it now...

Goodnight moon

When Evelyn was about 2 months old, her Nana and her Aunt Taryn came for a visit. Nana gave Evelyn a copy of Goodnight Moon, and I've been reading it to her almost every day ever since. Of course, in the beginning, I may as well have been reading to Puddin. But she's definitely taken a special liking to the book these past few months. Even though she's been "reading" this book the longest, she doesn't seem to get bored of it and will even pause sometimes between page flipping to look at the pictures and let me finish reading the words.

During our Mendocino trip in June, the evening before the bad night of sleep (or lack thereof) that we had, Evelyn didn't feel like going to bed when she was supposed to. So we stayed up a bit longer and I read Goodnight Moon to her. One of the best reasons to read this book to her is her reaction to certain pages, as you can see in this video. (And by the way, even by Evelyn standards, she's flipping through the book really fast in this one.)



What, I ask, is so irresistably lickable about these 2 pages? She still does it, to this day, like clockwork.



The head-shaking to "Goodnight nobody," on the other hand, was short-lived. A few days after we returned home, Evelyn really shocked me when she started shaking her head as I read the 2 lines before the "Goodnight nobody" line. She did it twice that morning, and then one more time when I was reciting the words without the book! (She hasn't done it at all since.) I realized how much she is actually listening and remembering, and John and I have been trying harder ever since to clearly tell her about what we're doing or what things are. I think we've been trying all along, but that incident made it clear that we'd been underestimating her cognitive abilities.

On a related note, I think Evelyn is pretty lucky that it's me reading Goodnight Moon to her, and not Christopher Walken:

You spin me right round, baby, right round

At last, I'm breaking the long dry spell of videos on the blog. (We bought a new camera that takes videos in a different file format then before, so I had to figure out how to compress the new file format, which required finding some free time...)

Just yesterday Evelyn debuted a new skill that she learned all on her own, where she spins in place like she's sitting on a turntable. I have no idea where this came from, but I like it!

Open sesame

I am so sick of what seems like my perpetual mommy brain! This morning at work, I attended a financial planning seminar and realized that I'd made a biggish mistake on my 401K contributions (granted, I did that when I first returned to work from maternity leave - my first mistake!). I rushed back to my desk and tried to log on to the Web site to correct my mistake, and was faced with a password prompt.

Working for a big company, I have a jillion IDs and passwords to maintain, half of which have to be changed every 6 months or so. I recently replaced all of my hastily and cryptically scribbled Post-It notes (an admittedly UNsecure way to maintain security) with something called a "Password Vault" on my computer, so it's all in one place and I just need to remember one password to get into the vault.

But wait, oh crap... what is my password to the Password Vault??? I am like the woman in that Mervyn's commercial from years ago, with my face pressed against the window quietly chanting "Open open open...." (to my brain, not to the vault, and certainly not to Mervyn's!). It's been almost a year since Evelyn was born... when exactly do I get my brain back?

She's winsome AND toothsome

It's official - our girl has 4 teeth now! 2 lower, 2 upper. As if she could get any cuter. They've come in pairs so far -- the first 2 bottom teeth within weeks of each other when she was 7 months old, and the first 2 upper teeth at 10 months. Both times, it was right tooth first, then left.

Her first upper tooth emerged the very day she turned 10 months old (June 23), while we were in Mendocino for a long weekend. With her first 3 teeth, we had exactly 1 night of bad sleep (preceded by periods of general, otherwise unexplained crabbiness during the day) that coincided with the tooth emerging from the gum. Unfortunately, that one night for tooth #3 was in the small, one-room cabin in Mendocino. Three hours of no sleep... in desperation I even brought her to bed with us, but she took that to mean that it was really time to play! (Picture full on baby gymnastics: spastic, thrashing limbs; climbing up to standing with the headboard and batting the artwork on the walls.)

That was immediately followed by a heretofore unusually long period of general crabbiness -- Crabtree and Evelyn, as we like to call her during these times -- so we were sure that another tooth must be coming. Her upper gum area has been like the Iron Curtain, as John observed, because she won't let us near it to check on her teething progress. I was able to glimpse her gums during a few bouts of crying, and could see some whiteness beneath the gum next to her first upper tooth. More crabbiness, more waiting. Finally, last night, while putting her down for the night, I felt the new tooth. And by the feel of it, it's been out for at least a few days now. That explains why her mood and sleep habits have improved lately.

Evelyn used to be so cute with her gummy toothless smile. Then she got those little tic tacs in her bottom gums, and she was just too cute for words. Now she's going to have 4 teeth?! She (or I) might actually explode from cuteness overload.