Our little mountain goat

We have a climber.  Sara Beth was crawling in the living room floor this week and then pulled herself into a standing position while holding onto the seat cushion of the couch.  Then then proceeded to pull herself up as tall as she could up on her toes in hopes of getting on top of the seat cushion.  I placed my hand as a little footstool about 4 inches off the ground.  She used that and clambered right up onto the couch. Giddy with triumph, Sara Beth proceeded to the back of the couch to climb on top of that as well.  I would put her back on the floor once she reached the top of the couch, and she would go right back to scale the heights of the couch once more.  Now, she practices her climbing skills at the park.  There is a green plastic thingey that is part of the playground equipment with steps at irregular intervals from 4 to 15 inches high.  It is like a rock climbing wall for toddlers, and Sara Beth will shimmy up that, crawl across the play structure, and come down the slide (with some guidance from Heather or I working to prevent her from eating the stray wood chips and from falling).  By the time she is done playing at the park, she is exhausted and would be ready to go to sleep as soon as she gets home, if she didn't need a bath.

Now that she can pull herself up, Sara Beth can get into her toy containers on the shelves on the second level of the book shelf.  She typically will reach in and pull the toys out one at a time to spread across the floor, but occasionally, she will take the quicker approach and just pull the entire toy container off the shelf.

Thats not to say that Sara Beth has forgotten about everything on the ground level.  She will crawl in and make sure there are no toys that have been mistakenly cleaned up and put away.

Here we see Sara Beth showing off her multi-tasking skills.  She has a stuffed "Chatter Bug" in one hand, food in the other hand, and she is somehow also finding ways to play with her musical table.

This week, either due to teething or allergy season (or more likely a combination of both), Sara Beth has had a bit of a stuffy nose.  It has made feeding times extra exciting.  She still preforms her chipmunk impersonations, stuffing as much food as she can into her mouth, but now, since she can't breath through her nose, it causes problems.  While storing her entire meal in her mouth, she will inhale some air as well; needless to say food starts to go down the wrong pipe, so she starts gagging and coughing and spitting the food all back out.  But she never leans, and as soon as she catches her breath, she will proceed to place all the food right back into her mouth again.  Picture is unrelated.

Stupid Camera

She is working on growing two more teeth, so for a majority of this week she has been teary eyed and snot nosed, with copious amounts of drool streaming from her mouth.  So she has not been rather photogenic this week.  And of course, the one day that Heather takes Sara Beth to the park, our camera starts to act up.  Below is the one picture that was actually recorded this week, but Heather talks about quite a few other ones that were really good, if only the camera would have snapped the picture instead of shutting itself down.

Sara Beth has realized that we clap when she does something good. So now, any time that she hears anyone clapping, she looks at whomever is doing the clapping with a proud look on her face and will start to clap for herself too.  SaraB and I will start clapping contests.  I will start clapping.  Then she claps.  Then I clap out a musical beat.  She gets a wide eyed look on her face and tries to imitate the pattern. If only I had a picture to go along with this... sigh.

Cheese sticks are now Sara Beth's favorite food.  Or yogurt, or blue berries, or garbanzo beans.  She eats most things we put in front of her.  She actually likes eating food too much some times, as she will stuff as much as possible into her mouth, chipmunk style, until she starts gagging.  She will then drop half of the food from her mouth onto her tray (or the floor), swallow the remaining amount, and then start cramming more food in her mouth.  Each time she starts to gag we get ready to pull her out of her high chair to preform CPR in case she really is choking.  So far, they have all been false alarms. I have tried to tell Sara Beth the story about the "Boy who cried wolf" and that it has a moral to it.  So far, she hasn't caught on.

Sooner rather than later we will really get a new camera, preferably one that is able to preform tasks like taking pictures.

Also, we are taking Sara Beth up to Wisconsin in a couple of weeks, and would appreciate suggestions on things to do to make the plane flight as comfortable for every one as possible.  

Party like it's Easter

This week was full of Easter activities.  Heather took Sara Beth out to a field and took pictures of her in her Easter dress surrounded by blue bonnets.  Sara Beth wanted to pick the flowers.  Heather explained that it was illegal to pick the state flower of Texas, and that if she had an issue with that then Sara Beth needed to take it up with the state government.  Sara Beth didn't care and wanted to eat the blue flowers.  It didn't end well.  Heather and Sara Beth spent over half an hour trying to take pictures, and only a handful turned out.  It didn't help that our camera now has a lens cover that will occasionally stick.  That is why the upper left of the below picture is all dark.

On Saturday, Heather took Sara Beth to the book store.  The mouse from the book "If you give a mouse a cookie" was there to take pictures and stuff.  Sara Beth absolutely loved it.  She pulled the whiskers and stared at it the whole time she was there.

For Easter, Sara Beth got her first Easter Basket.  Heather had found some books, including one on the true meaning of Easter, but SaraB was more interested in the sand toys that she got for her trip to the beach this summer.  She picked each piece up, one at a time to examine.  She is getting more dexterous and was able to pick up the toys and examine them using just her right hand, which is good, considering she had a death grip on her snack container in her left hand, and was not going to let go of that for anything.

A couple weeks ago, I predicted that Sara Beth would take a while to successfully pull herself into a standing position.  I was wrong.  Not only can she pull herself up, but she also has a tendency to balance on her toes. 

Here is another shot of her after she pulled herself up, this time on a book container.  She can now dig through the books to pull out the ones that make noise.

The problems with being mobile

Sara Beth can move much more easily now.  Her play room can now be considered her base of operations as she begins in there, but will quickly move out into the living room or the kitchen to go exploring.  Here is a picture of her at her table laying out her plans for her next living room adventure. 

Also, on the left in the background of the above picture is one of Sara Beth's new toys.  It is the classic stack-of-colored-rings toy.  But the thing that bugs me to no end is that they are not in the right color order.  The rings should go red, then orange, yellow, green, and finishing off with blue.  Well, this one messes up that classic formula and puts the blue ring between the orange and yellow rings.  Apparently the toy designers have never seen a proper rainbow.  I have tried to come up with some sort of solution to fix this egregious color error but Heather says that I might be overreacting.

Every day, Sara Beth wants more and more big people food.  Heather cut up some pieces of apply and placed them on Sara Beth's tray.  Sara Beth decided she wanted to bite her own pieces off of the apple.  Since, she does not have a full set of teeth yet, Sara Beth experiences some difficulty extracting apple bites.  In order to both placate her desire for eating the apple like a big girl and my desire for her to not choke on a too large piece, I have come up with a new way to feed her apple.  I will pre-bite the apple, nearly taking off a small bit of apple.  Then I hold the apple up to Sara Beth and her little mini-teeth are able to knock off that preapproved bit of apple.  It does get a little messy if she has had any food before the apple; she left some drool covered muffin crumbs on the apple for me. 

It isn't even Easter yet, and Sara Beth has already been on two Easter Egg hunts.  It was cold and windy so we put a hat on her.  True to form, she picked up her one egg, and then was done for the day.

Ignore the fact that I am wearing short sleeves; I will typically wear shorts until it gets into the 40s.  

Also, Sara Beth doesn't know what to make of the Easter Bunny.