Since her birthday Kate has started pointing at everything. I had been chatting with a friend about how her son was pointing at things and I mentioned that Kate wasn’t. Of course a day or two later she just started doing it. Now every time we pick her up she points to the ceiling and says some nonsensical toddler word like, “Jish,” or “Da.” And then she starts pointing at anything she sees. A picture! The TV! The fan! The cat!

The sounds she make continues to evolve, though no more actual words have emerged… it just sounds more like english words. She is always babbling toddler-ese sentences that are pure gibberish, but we answer her in english. “Oh yes, that’s the cat! He’s a good kitty.” (Usually followed by “Gentle… GENTLE!” and sometimes “Do not step on the kitty!”)

A lot of the new things she’s doing are little mannerisms that are difficult to describe. Like she’s doing this thing where she lowers her chin to her chest and tilts her head into her shoulder, sometimes while pointing at something or someone, often whispering something like, “Dat… dat…. dat…” It’s just so funny looking, kind of coy and quizzical and silly-like. I have no idea what it means, if it means anything at all.

She also has this new silly laugh – mouth wide open, breathing quickly in and out for a breathy “ha ha ha.” She does it all the time now. Yesterday while she was eating dinner Den got the video camera out and managed to capture a lot of the silly laugh, along with her hilarious attempts at feeding herself yogurt using a spoon – a process she apparently found terrifically exciting and absolutely hysterical.

Her obsession with pushing things around has expanded from push-toys and objects with wheels (strollers, the highchair) to random furniture pieces. Today at dinner I went to sit down and just as I was lowering my butt Kate pushed the chair right out from under me and across the room. I’m lucky I didn’t fall right on my ass, but I grabbed the table and saved myself (while Den laughed). The other day I saw her flip our coffee table right over (it’s a light one). Now I understood that pushing things is fun for toddlers. The moving furniture was a little unexpected, but flipping things over? That caught me entirely off-guard. This takes baby-proofing to a whole new level.

Speaking of baby-proofing, it’s like as soon as I think we have everything out of her reach she sprouts up again and we have to rush to move things. I was watching her little fingers reaching up to grab the remote controls off the TV stand, which previously was too tall for her, and said, “Oh shit.” It’s clear that she’s been growing inches recently. When she started walking at 9 months she could just walk under our kitchen table, though soon after she was hitting the top of her head. Now the bar hits her in the forehead, she has to duck 3-4 inches to get under. And even when I just look at her walking around in her diaper and shirt I can’t get over how long her legs look now. Kate has always been petite and on the skinny side, but now she looks so leggy!

My mom discovered her thighs are ticklish. I can get great squeals of laughter from her by squeezing them. Easy to do, since they – along with so much of her body – is so squeezable!

Having a futon on the floor in the house is such a fantastic thing. Not only does it let me crash in her room when I need to (ie, when she doesn’t want me to leave but I’m just exhausted), but it makes a most excellent play mat. Kate and I regularly go into her room to read books and then have big tickle-wrestle fights on the mattress. She loves to crawl on me and I will tackle her, roll her over, nom her with kisses, hold her in the air, and so on. We just have so much fun! I know I can do that on the carpet in the living room, too, but you know… it’s easier on my back. (Am I getting old? What?)

Books have always been a favorite of Kate’s, she loves flipping through them and touching the pictures, but just these last few days she’s realized that mom and dad do stuff with books. I’ve always let her explore books at her own pace, she never had any patience for just listening as I read, she was way too hands-on for that. But now? She wants me to read it to her. She’ll even sit on my lap after handing me the book, waiting. Of course her attention span is still very short, to the point where I often don’t even make it through one of her board books before she’s grabbing another book and giving it to me. But she keeps wanting more! If I finish a book and close it she grabs it from me and shoves it back in my hands expectantly. Or she’ll reach over to grab a different one and give to me. It’s now her trick to getting my attention when I’m doing something else: she walks over and shoves a book at me. It’s so fun watching her interest in books grow! She’s now enjoying the Sandra Boynton books we have, which previously were not interesting enough for her. But I find that they’re short enough with cute pictures to keep her attention the whole way through (except Birthday Monsters which is a SUPER cute story but too long for her right now). She also found some lift-the-flap books on her bookshelf. Instead of trying to tear the flap out she’s actually lifting the flap and putting it back down, staring at the pictures quizzically. It’s quite cute how she is very precise about pushing the flap ALL the way up, and then pushing it all the way down and patting it into place.