Learning New Things

At 10.5 months, Emma is becoming a little person more and more. Emma demonstrated this in several ways just in the past week.

On Saturday morning, Kurt was getting Emma's breakfast ready and Emma said "nana." He didn't think anything of it until around her morning snack time when I asked if she was hungry and she said "nana" again. She wanted a banana! She was very excited when I started cutting up a banana for her. This is the first food that Emma has distinguished using words. Recently, whenever she gets hungry she makes a "MMMM" sound or says "Mom." To her, this probably means food since I was the sole provider of food for 6 months! How exciting that she is starting to be able to communicate with words what she wants/needs!

During diaper changes, we usually have tickle time before we get Emma dressed again. On Sunday, as Kurt was changing Emma, she reached out and tickled his stomach! She was so proud of herself when he laughed in response!

The other night, we planned to skype with Kurt's parents following dinner. As we wrapped up dinner, we asked Emma if she wanted to talk to Grandma and Grandpa. She immediately turned the laptop and smiled!

When we visited family in late January-early February, Emma's uncles were very disappointed that Emma didn't know how to high five. She was 8 months old afterall! We worked with her on that for about 20 minutes and she's been able to high five ever since. We high five a lot....whenever Emma does anything cool...which is often! We've also been working with her to start waving. Her daycare providers also wave a lot. She has been very timid about it and would just open and close her hand down at waist level so you could barely see it. Lately though, it's been getting higher and higher and more pronounced. It's really cute to watch. Today, as we were leaving daycare, she even waved to a little girl.

Yesterday, we got Emma a wagon that we can use for walks so she doesn't have to sit in her stroller all the time. We think that she will like more room and enjoy looking around a bit more. Since Emma had a 2 second ride in the living room last evening and liked it,we were excited to take her outside in it this afternoon. She LOVED it! She liked feeling the wind in her hair and being able to turn around to look at things we were passing.

This evening, in between tantrums (see previous post), Emma decided to climb the stairs.The first time, I helped her get her footing and she made it up 4 stairs. The second time, Kurt went to the landing and told Emma to come to him. She made it up all 5 stairs with very minimal help from me! I know our lives will be forever changed once she masters stairs, but it's so exciting watch her figure things out!