Sara Beth has gone beyond merely wanting to eat "big people food." More often than not, she now demands to feed it to herself, and will try to grab offered food instead of letting us feed it to her. When I sit down and feed her her morning bowl of oatmeal on the weekends, I use two spoons. One for me to use, and one for SaraB to hold and chew on. If I omit her spoon, she will regularly grab onto the spoon I am using, and, of course, in her mind, the best spot to grab is the end that has all the oatmeal on it.
She does like her frozen bananas. Heather sticks a straw through it as a handle before freezing it. The straw handle does mitigate the mess that Sara Beth will invariably cause during the frozen treat's consumption.
This is a new outfit that came in the mail from Heather's aunt this past week. Sara Beth loved it, and was even able to wear it. It is sized for an 18 month old, so it is a little big, but considering the rate that Sara Beth is growing, she will get a lot of use out of this outfit as summer approaches. SaraB has begun the habit of pulling bows out of her hair. At this point, we don't think she is doing it out of a dislike for hair accessories, but more out of a curiosity for what is attached to the top of her head. Since head bands, like the one Sara B is modeling below, are harder to pull off, they remain properly affixed for a longer time.
Now that she has crawling all taken care of, Sara Beth has moved on and is working on the next milestone: pulling herself up. This might take her a while. She will crawl over to her little toy table, and then grab onto the table top and pull. This causes either the table to tip over, or for her to just hang there with her back arched while her arms ineffectively strain to bring her up. She hasn't quite figured out that standing involves leg muscles too.
With so much crawling practice, her form has improved as well. Most nights, in preparation for her bath, I will strip her down and put her on the floor in the nursery while repeating phrases that include the word bath in it. "Sara Beth, are you ready for your BATH?", "I think it's time to take a BATH" and so on. She knows what to do and will start racing as fast as she can to the bathroom, while I try to get ahead of her and start the bath water. She has stopped using the "army crawl" method of locomotion using her forearm to brace her weight, and will now crawl on her hands. It gets her to the bathroom much easier. She then reaches to try to pull herself up to the bathtub using just her arms.
Yesterday, our church hosted an easter egg hunt. Sara Beth took the name literally, and was content to find an egg and be done. Attempts to convince her that the activity is more accurately called "easter eggs hunt" fell on deaf ears as she happily played with her one egg and ignored all the other eggs around her. It was such a nice day that we spent quite a bit of it outside. I got sunburned and Sara Beth got some color in her cheeks. At this point I should state that I was the one that took Sara Beth outside; Heather wants to make it clear that she was not involved in the nearly sunburning of our child. Today, Heather went out and purchased some baby sunscreen. However, as the below picture shows, it was not all that serious, just some color in her cheeks.