Growing

This is Piper at just about eleven months.

Yes, she is a scamp, or couldn't you tell? This cheesy photo was a pause in her pursuit of the kittens to point out to Mom just how ridiculous we can be.

Piper is starting to talk (see previous post for a list of identified words beyond "hey"), and she's running on in sentences and paragraphs of whatever comes to mind. This morning she was lying on my bed singing some little song of her own while she waited for me to get up.

She is unstoppable. She has been crawling everywhere for about a month and a half now, and she learned to climb stairs the week we moved out of our townhouse - thank God we have only one floor now!

She spends her days climbing up to stand up:
up on the end tables to play with the lamps,
up on the woodstove (non-working) to push buttons on the VCR and DVD player,
up on Mom's chair to try to reach the computer keyboard,
up our legs to help us cook,
up on the bedside table to empty the drawer...

She is actually standing on her own now. It won't be long before she decides to walk, I think.

Every day, we discover more personality and she becomes more a little girl than the helpless baby I had almost a year ago. I am glad. It is both harder and easier to deal with her - she understands a lot of what I say to her now, though she is more insistent on getting what she wants.

We progress through tired stages and teething stages and tantrum stages, and she still gives the best hugs in the whole world. She's affectionate and tender-hearted, and loves to be where the people are.

I am starting to wonder if I'll ever sleep through the night again, if Pete and I will get to go to bed around 8:30 p.m. when we feel like we need to go, if I'll ever get to sit down to a meal again without having to worry about feeding her first and eating my food cold. I guess it does happen, much like the inevitability of labor - they must grow up!

She's still a little pee-wee, though. She has her doctor worried about her weight, but then, this doctor never examined her mommy, daddy, aunts, uncles or cousins when they were her age - she's tracking right on our growth patterns! (The question remains as to whether we turned out all right, and was this really a good thing?)