Very thankfully this recent teething episode was over as soon as it started, lasting only a few days of the worst of it – maybe a week of troubled sleep. Oh, and I was wrong about it being molar #2; on a hunch I checked her upper teeth and found little points peeking through on both upper molars, too. So now she has one fully erupted molar, and three just starting to come through. Which explains why she was not a happy girl. We resorted to motrin and orajel to get us through a few days, and the day she finally took a 3-hour nap again I danced with joy.

Other things she is doing now…

She can now climb into her car seat in the car. I’m sure this is in large part because our spare car seat (a second MyRide) is in our living room as her “recliner.” It was just sitting off in a corner of the house but she would climb in/on it and refuse to get off. Since we’re not using it in a vehicle I just put it in the living room and I swear it’s her favorite thing in the room now. She loves to sit in it watching TV, she puts her toys in the cup-holders, she stands on the seat to look out the window, she climbs on and off incessantly. So really it was not much of a surprise when I put her in the truck today, closed the door to affix a sticker to the window, and when I turned back she was already sitting in her car seat, looking at me expectantly. Unfortunately she’s going through a phase of protesting being buckled in, but it’s pretty mild complaints that cease as soon as I start the vehicle.

As I mentioned before she is climbing everything. Just today she started climbing onto our rocking recliner in the living room, which is not something she could ever do before (and not something I thought she could do – she’s still very short!). She likes to sit on our AC units, which are currently sitting on one side of the kitchen on the floor after being taken out of the windows. She climbs on the aforementioned car seat.

She’s picked up a couple more words and some signs as well. While we were away I borrowed some Signing Time DVDs from a friend and played them sometimes when we needed a break (which was frequently, given how horribly she was sleeping on vacation and how whiny she was). She LOVES those DVDs, holy moly. it’s the only thing I’ve found – cartoon, educational program or otherwise – that holds her attention for the entire thing… and in fact she wails at me when it’s over. (She gets REALLY unhappy when I turn off the TV and tell her it’s all gone.) I thought teaching toddlers sign language was a good idea anyways, but the fact that she loves them so much is a big bonus! So anyways, I didn’t really practice much with her, though I tried incorporating a couple of signs to our daily routine. She enough a week later she started mimicking three: milk, more, and done. She doesn’t do them unprompted, so right now it’s still not actually useful (she prefers the “screech until mommy figures out WTF is wrong” method), but I can say, “Want some milk?” and she signs milk at me. The signs for more and done she knows and does, but she doesn’t yet understand the concept of either. I say, “More?” she signs more excitedly. I hold out more food and she turns her head and looks at me with a disapproving frown. We’re working on it.

In general she understands a lot of what we say now. “Do you want to go outside?” gets her excited, and when I tell her to go get her shoes on she runs to find them, then either brings them to me or sits down and holds out a foot. Any mention of eating or food has her going over to her highchair and trying to climb in. She knows what certain toys are and will get them for us. Even simple directions, like, “Put your foot down,” which is especially useful when she’s frustrated and stuck on top of something – I basically just have to remind her what to do and she’ll stop whining and fix it. It’s really very cool to see her understanding evolve and grow!

She’s started yelling recently – not because she’s upset, just because it sounds interesting. We were at a restaurant today, she’s sitting in a highchair fidgeting around – she didn’t want her teether or pacifier and tried to eat the damn crayons so those were removed – and she just starts shrieking, “EEEHHHHHHH!” Loudly. And then cracking a big smile. Den and I looked at her, blinking, and we were all, “Where did that come from? And why did you have to start doing it in a restaurant?” Not that it’s brand new, she’s been experimenting with yells for a little while lately, but not quite like that.

I got her a wooden puzzle in the last month and she’s been figuring it out pretty quickly. She likes the overisize puzzle with wooden knobs okay, but she LOVES the chunky wooden melissa and doug one. She will spend a significant amount of time on the floor taking the pieces out and fitting them back in. She can’t do it perfectly yet, some are harder than others for her and she’ll give a short yell of frustration sometimes, but she knows where each one goes by matching the pictures and how to flip the piece over and turn it around until it’s the proper direction to fit in – I was actually quite surprised to see her deftly flipping them around to fit. So that was definitely a good purchase for this age! I’d like to get her a couple more.

The other thing which she just discovered is stacking cups. The only set we had was outside with the water table, but she used them as cups and strainers and never stacked them. Since it’s September now I brought them upstairs and cleaned them and she loves them! It’s really fascinating to watch her try fitting them into each other, she is still quite puzzled as to why some fit and some don’t. She’ll put the smallest cup in a large cup, then the of course the medium one won’t fit and she pushes and bangs and frowns as if to say, what the heck, I know these all fit together just a minute ago!

The other thing that has been sitting in our living room for quite some time without much use up until now is a bead maze. She never had any interest in it, and just last week she started pushing the beads back and forth and now thinks that is very interesting! We have a small one, which for her age is perfect.