By Leaps and Bounds

Katia has developed so much in the short time we've been on the road! She will be 11 months next week, and her brain and body are suddenly making all kinds of connections at once. She has had a lot of social interaction with a variety of family members, which I'm sure is feeding her development. Here are some of the milestones we've seen in the span of a week:

First steps!
Katia took her first step last week at Grammi's house, and can now go 2-5 steps at a time. She laughs and seems so proud! Crawling is still way more comfortable and fast for her--and so cute! I will miss her little puppy crawl when she starts walking full time. I will not miss worrying about all the things she finds on the floor.

Games
Katia has actually been playing a few games with us for some time now (like hide-and seek, peek-a-boo), but lately she is especially playful. Great Grandma N. taught her "pat-a-cake," and she now claps along if we start reciting it for her. She will even initiate the game when she wants to play--yesterday my mom said she clapped and said "puh," like she wanted to say "pat-a-cake." She also likes to raise her hands when we ask, "how big are you? -- SO big!"

Signing
We've been casually introducing some basic ASL signs for several months, but suddenly Katia is showing lots of interest and is picking up on them quickly. Tonight at the dinner table she signed "more." She is so eager to communicate right now, I think she'll pick up on many more signs.

Words
Katia is responding and showing us that she understands certain words. She is very excited about animals, so she is catching on to some animal words--doggie, kitty, bird. We stayed at Aunt Angie and Uncle Preston's house over the weekend, where there are cats. Katia was so excited by those kitties! As she was going to sleep for her morning nap, I greeted one of the kitties that walked in and Katia popped up to see!

Annika's new bedroom has a tree mural on the wall with some fake birds glued on it. Katia seems to think they are real! She begs to be picked up to see them and points to the birds when we ask where they are. With all this interest in animals, we thought it was a good time to pull out the animal board books. My mom read one to her tonight and had her saying "duck" (du-du-du)

Lately we've suspected that she says "Da-da" and "Ma-ma," but it's hard to say for sure when she tends to babble those sounds so much anyway. Today, though, she was fussing and reaching for me and blurted out, "Mama!" She's been saying da-da-da for even longer, so I think Zac and I will probably both claim to have been her first word.

Toddlerhood, here we come!