Over the past couple weeks Ember has become such an active baby! The bouncer and swing are out, the exersaucer and play mat are in. She loves toys and I am amazed at how much she plays with them. She doesn’t just sit passively in her exersaucer – she owns that thing. She lunges forward to grab things, she spins the spinny thing and pushes and pulls the horse, she grabs the toys we put on the edge so she can crumple them, hold them, chew on them. She’s already figured out how to do things that Kate never did! (Not that Kate didn’t have the ability, but she was too timid to push or pull things very hard.) She reaches out all the time, touching my face, grabbing my mouth and hair. Nothing is safe from her little fists. That stage of sitting on my lap without grabbing my plate went by rather quickly.

She also has started shrieking. Sometimes randomly, sometimes in the middle of a laugh. Her cries are also getting louder and more piercing. As I was changing her diaper before bed tonight she was both tired and hungry and she was very dramatic in her shriek-cries and gasping. Then when I am done and pick her up she smiles at me through watery eyes as if to say WHEW, glad that horrible thing is over!

As busy and active as she is she does not really care to stop to eat or sleep. Sleeping in the swing in the middle of the living room? Hahaha… no. Nursing in public? Sure… as long as I’m okay with her pulling off to smile at me and look around every few seconds… and she doesn’t eat a full meal, just a little snack before she’s too distracted to keep going. She nurses really well when I lay down with her in a dark room when she needs to sleep. Big meal, a sigh, then she comfort nurses to sleep. That means she’s waking up frequently at night to eat, because she’s going 3-4 hours without eating during the day! Gah. We need to work on that.

At night I’ve been leaving her on my bed rather than trying to move her into her own, since Den is gone and I can give her half the bed at night. (I will probably regret that one when he gets home and I have nowhere to sleep! Maybe I’ll make him sleep elsewhere, haha.) She still isn’t as light a sleeper as Kate was, when she’s asleep I can get up and leave the room or come back in and not wake her up… but I had to get some white noise for in there because house noises kept waking her up. And I’m back to being unable to read on my phone at night because the light definitely disturbs her. Damn. But she sleeps great from 9 until 1am, but then she’s up every hour or two until the sun comes up, at which point she sleeps great… just in time for Kate to get up.

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Kate’s language is still crazy. Every day I’m amazed and laughing at some new thing that she says. Currently her favorite show on Netflix is… The Story of 1. Thinking to yourself, That’s a funny name for a kids show? That’s because it’s not. It’s a documentary about math. Kate thinks it is awesome and hilarious. They have a lot of computer animation in the documentary, mostly various forms of the number 1 doing things like jumping, pushing other number 1s, etc. Kate watches with rapt attention shouting things like, “Where 1 go?! WIGHT DERE!” and “1 fall down!! Oh no!”

The whole “Where it go? Wight dere!” phrase is very common right now. Hiding/seeking/looking/finding is a big deal to her right now. She will frequently ask me where something is only to go and “find” it while we gasp with amazement at her skills. :)

A skill she has picked up: playing catch. She has some inflatable balls that she loves to play with. She is so-so with her throwing, but she can actually put out her arms and catch the ball. I try to toss it with one bounce so it lands properly in her arms, but even tossing it underhand to her she has a pretty good reaction time and can trap it in her arms. Funniest thing about playing catch is that she’s very specific about where I need to stand on which side of the room.

Actually that’s true of a lot of things right now. She doesn’t just want to do something, she wants to do it a specific way, and she wants to do things by herself. She’s started getting upset and crying when I put the lid on her sippy cup, because she wants to do it. (But she doesn’t do it right, so I have to do it.) She also insists on “eye coob” – that took me a while to figure out, ice cube in her cup of water, I assume because I always have ice in my water bottle. Then there’s things like she asks for milk but pitches a fit when grandma gives her the milk, she says, “Mama! Mama milk!!” So I have to get the cup of milk from grandma and give it to her.

She’s doing really well with Den being away, and this time she totally gets the Skype thing. In April when he was gone she would just kind of stare at his picture and wander off after a minute. Now she’s climbing up onto my chair saying, “Daddy! Daddy! Slide! Party!” She’s getting the idea that we tell daddy about what we did today so she’ll start telling him things she remembers from the day – and it’s not always necessarily what I am thinking of. She likes to stick her tongue out at him and act silly. She says goodnight to him every night and blows kisses. I think it’s really helping her with adjusting because it maintains some normalcy and she gets to see and talk to him. Though of course she will be super excited when he’s home! Just over a week to go.