Now that the Birthday fun is over and Grandma & Grandpa Mather have gone home, it's been back to the usual for the three of us this week. Of course as soon as I write that I think of a number of ways it hasn't been usual. "Usual" seems to change from week to week.
So do you want the good news or the bad news first?
We'll start with the good. Lily had her one year appointment and everything is a-ok. She's over the 90th percentile for height and around 40th for height. So she's tall and skinny so far... what a surprise. On Tuesday night as we were getting ready for bed, Lily showed me something I hadn't seen yet. While she had taken steps before, usually to reach for something we were holding and pulling slowly away, this time she really walked. She just stood up and took a few steps over toward a particular toy. She didn't make it the whole way, but it stood out to me as a big step, literally and figuratively. It's been happening more and more over the past few days, and I still stop and watch every time she does it. Clearly it's going to be a long transition from crawler to walker, but it's pretty cool that it's begun in earnest.
On the bad side, we have a vampire on our hands. Lily bites. When she's frustrated it's her go-to move. If she's being picked up when she doesn't want to be up, if she doesn't want to let go of something, or if she's just plain mad, the mouth opens up and then the trap is sprung. This girl has a lot of teeth and a strong jaw, and she knows how to use them. We asked the doctor what to do about this and the answer was to stop, put her down, and walk away. In theory, she wants us and our approval, so she would figure out that when she bites, she gets neither. In practice so far, she seems perfectly happy to have us leave the room so she can do what she wants to do. And what does she want to do? If she's in her room, she wants to pull the outlet covers out of the outlets. This girl must be a plug-in hybrid or something, she is addicted to outlets. We asked the doctor for advice on this one too and she recommended saying no and redirecting her to something else, saying "she should get it after a few times". Unless a few is fifty, it's not working yet. Whatever we redirect her to distracts her for a bit, but then she remembers the fun she was having at the outlet and makes a run for it again. Oh well, it may be time to replace the outlets with the self-covering type.
That's about all the news from Lily. But I'll take a moment to toot Nicole's horn before I sign off. Over the past few months, Nicole's been playing more tennis. More than she's played since college. She's been playing in two leagues and has found a few good hitting partners. And in these leagues she's been kicking some butt. She's beating some quality players here, like club pros, and winning in ways she didn't in the past like coming back from 5-2 in the first set today to take it in a tie breaker. And a couple of weeks ago she beat a woman who was ranked #85 in Division I NCAA singles a few years ago. I think it's pretty cool and if she won't brag about it then I'm happy to oblige.
