Pull to Stand!!!!

Alas, I have no pictures of this one, but HALLIE PULLED HERSELF UP BY HERSELF TODAY.

We had just gotten back from hanging out at a neighborhood cafe with Aunt Renee. Hallie was super duper tired but, at the same time, oddly energized. She's had a pretty good couple of days with minimal vomiting and lots and lots of teething (I swear that she's getting six to eight teeth at once. She has a prodigious amount of snot and drool and this would be quite comical except for the fact that she has this nagging and really painful seeming wet cough). Anyway, I had planted her in the living room on the carpet to crawl around and play with her numerous toys and was pouring myself a soda. I had turned away from her for perhaps thirty seconds to one minute and when I turned back, she was standing and holding onto her Fisher Price Little Peoples Bus. I was amazed and thrilled. I could have run upstairs and found the camera but this seemed rather inprudent. Instead, I spotted Hallie as she held on and explored the world from her new, independent vantage point.

On top of this (and probably related to it), Hallie is increasingly good at crawling. Now, you can leave her in one place and two minutes later find her halfway across the room. We have an IKEA bookshelf in her room that is set up sort of tic-tac toe board style (with individual cubbies; please don't ask me what the ersatz Swedish name of this product is because I am certain that I never knew it). Hallie's onesies, pants, socks, shirts, towels, etc are in wicker bins that slide into
each of the cubbies. This morning she crawled over to her pants bin and began to pull it out. I immediately planted her back in the middle of her rug (perhaps five feet or so away) and a minute later she was one bin over trying to pull out the nasal canula stored in the pulse ox carry bag (I guess he misses her beloved cannula!). Everything is now new and exciting to our little girl and this is thrilling to watch and somehow vaguely terrifying. But we're much more thrilled than terrified.

On the weight issue: she's put back all the weight she lost and so she's back where she was three or four weeks ago. She's also a bunch taller (27 inches or so). We're not at all unhappy about the weight because, frankly, we thought that she was going to be in the 14 lb something range and she weighed in at 15 lbs. 7.3 ounces. So there's still some hope for her being over 16 lbs by her birthday. This does not by any means put her on the actual growth chart, but at least it would keep her around the 25th percentile of the corrected chart.

Hallie does seem more enthusiastic about food these days, though it's still a relatively low level of enthusiasm that she is exhibiting. She likes frozen food above all else (she most certainly does not need Lean Cuisines, though the occasional quart of Haagen Dazs seems like a good choice to us!). We've been freezing baby yogurt (Stonyfield farm brand) with added Carnation Instant Breakfast and Pediasure so that we can feed her this by spoon at least once a day, if not three.

We also met with our new Speech Therapist, Kristi, this week. We're hoping that she's able to make feeding Hallie while she's awake and coaxing consonants like "b", "M", and "L" out of her much easier.

That's all for now and I'll try to get soem pics up tomorrow!