Teeth at Last! (and other toddler tales)

We're going to begin this post with a disclaimer. My original purpose for starting this blog was so my family could see Caitlyn as she grows up even though we're living far away from them now. SO...if anyone reading at the moment happens to be non-family and therefore maybe not quite as interested in all the happenings of Caitlyn's life...um, sorry! :) That's probably been about 99% of the content of 99% of the posts on this blog...and will probably continue to be!
Ok, now we've got that out of the way I will proceed with every detail of every milestone Caitlyn has reached lately.

Caitlyn's first birthday seems to have been a magical milestone for her. Soon after that she started developing in warp speed. (ok, not really.)

She finally got her first tooth on August 23rd. Yippee! (Maybe that was her baby-style birthday present to Grandma Sitthichai and Uncle Colin?) Her second tooth followed close on its heels on the 29th. So she now has both her top front teeth and is our little chipmunk.:)

The same week she was getting her teeth she started to stand by herself (Incidentally, she's started loving a binky again now that I've started to wean her from nursing -- since she was about 6 months old she wouldn't even accept the binky.)


Then, just this past weekend, she started walking! Woohoo! (I think.) Her first few steps were toward some baby clothes I was holding while shopping Labor Day sales at Sears (a true girl). Then on Sunday Quinn, who just got called to the senior nursery, had her in nursery with him and she seems to have figured that if all those three year olds could do it, she could too -- she's been taking lots of short distance walks ever since then! We took this video on Monday, so her third day taking steps.


Here are some other things she's been up to that delight me every day:

She can now say dada, mama, baby, yay! (while clapping her hands), and uh-oh (but she says "uh-uh")

She can do patty cake and itsy bitsy spider (well, you know, the baby version of the hand actions, but still! it's so cute!) I'll have to get a video of it with Quinn's camera (so there's sound) and post it later.

She blows on her food. ANY food. Even cold watermelon. :)

She hugs her stuffed animals and says "Ooooh" with a little round mouth and then holds them out for us to hug and says "Ooooh" again while we hug them.

The day before her birthday she suddenly folded her arms and bowed her head when we were getting ready to pray over dinner. Ever since then she's been folding her arms during family, mealtime, and bedtime prayers. Not the whole time of course, but the fact that she even does it has been really quite amazing to me.

She now likes to copy us a lot. Like she'll push on the top of any bottle and then rub her hands together (to copy me pushing the pump of the lotion bottle and rubbing it on my hands). Or the other day I went "Ugh!" in frustration about something and then heard the same little "Ugh!" come from over where Caitlyn was playing with her toys. Hmmm...a good reminder to be very careful about the things I say and do...

Something I love about Caitlyn is that she LOVES books. Ever since she could crawl, several times a day she crawls in to her room, pulls all the books off her bookshelf (ok, so we only actually own about 10 that we read over and over. And over.), and sits in the pile of them, "reading" them one by one.





She's also developed quite the little independent personality. The day after her birthday Quinn had his hands on top of hers to help her steer her new "alphabet train" push toy we got her for her birthday. She stopped, gave him a little scowl, removed his hands one at a time, and then continued pushing without his help. We got a video of her doing this to me a couple days later (so this video is about a month old -- now she's whippin' and steerin' that baby around like it's NASCAR).


Alright folks, well, if you're not family you may not have even made it to this point in the post, but anyway... That's the latest in the (to me, VERY exciting) life and times of Caitlyn Disparte.