So Proud of Herself

Walking makes Hallie very, very happy. Over the past two weeks, her walking has really taken off. Instead of just walking a few steps back and forth between me and Sharon and collapsing in our arms, she's begun pivoting to return on two feet to the other mommy, and has been sighted walking between two toys or two pieces of furniture (instead of getting down and crawling, or figuring out how to cruise between them holding on). Yesterday, she started walking away from us and towards other people and things. And every time she does this successfully, she gets really, really proud of herself and smiles her beautiful smile. And then tells you all about her journeys---her talking is really taking off with her walking. She has a lot of jargon and we've heard things that sound like "kitty kat", "Hallie," and "bye-bye." We are pretty sure that the final word is really a word, since she uses it after someone has left. It sounds more like "dye-dye" than "bye bye" and we're trying to get her to use it before the person in question leaves the room, but hey, we'll take what we got.



On other fronts: we still don't have a weight on her. We tried to get in this morning to visit the scale but too many kids had signed up for flu shots during the short hours our ped's office is open on Saturday. We'll stop in on Wednesday evening to see how our kid is doing weight-wise. She is definitely liking her new formula better than anything else we've ever given her (at least, as far as we can tell, since she will cry if you remove the bottle from her mouth while she's sucking on it and heading into nap or sleep state). And she's drinking more and more of it awake each day (two to four ounces/day, on average). We credit Ami, Hallie's nanny, for much of the progress there. So hopefully it has enough calories in it to have our kid gain weight...

The one potential complication we face: Hallie's definitely has a little cold. Not a miserable one (yet, and hopefully never). But she is definitely snotty and sneezy and this is probably not helping her reflux. We hope that we can nip this in the bud, somehow. But it is pretty frightening how little in the way of immunity our little girl has. Sigh. Right now she does not sound congested, and we are hopeful that the eartubes will keep that from being an issue this time around. But in the meantime, we are keeping our fingers crossed that this is not going to be a major setback and that it's not going to keep our smiley little girl from growing and making progress.

***EDITORIAL NOTE: Sharon just informed me that Goat Milk does not promote mucous formation the way that cow milk does. This is already evident in her course this time around and may explain why she isn't quite as choky as she normally gets when she has a cold. This alone seems to be reason enough to validate our switch over to Goat Milk, which, by the way, our GI is fine with. As long as she is taking vitamins and getting a varied diet, there's no problem with using the stuff. The only form of 'milk' that they do not approve of, under any circumstances, is Rice Milk because it's not milk at all.