Nora’s learned a few new words this month. She now says “baby” and excitedly points out babies every where we go. She likes to drop things and say, “uh oh.” She says, “bye bye” on the phone, to birds and cats in our yard, and to anyone who leaves the house. And she finally says, “mama.” :) Oh, she figured out how to shake her head “no,” too…

Also in her vocabulary are an assortment of animal sounds. She makes the noises for sheep, pigs, ducks, chickens, horses, cows, cats, owls, and our personal favorite – elephants. And thanks to her brother, she also knows what sounds to make for trucks, airplanes, and trains.

Every week while Jonah is at preschool, Nora and I go to the library for story time. She really loves the singing that they do and wants me to sing the library songs to her before naptime. It’s really fun to see her following along with the songs, stomping, clapping, and wiggling with the other kids. She points out body parts and makes animal sounds when the librarian asks those kind of questions – she’s quite the little participant!

She really likes trying to draw things and always wants the markers and pencils and chalk that Jonah is using. The Magna Doodle is another favorite toy, and she’s often requesting that someone draw her a duck that she can then scribble on or erase and say ‘bye bye’. Jonah’s gotten pretty good at drawing them for her, too. :)

Physically, she’s really picked up speed in the past few weeks. There are times where I’d say she’s pretty close to running, especially when she’s playing her favorite chasing games. She’s still wanting to climb on things all the time and loves to be up on the couch or Jonah’s bed. Two of her canine teeth have broken through this week, too, and again, she’s been completely unbothered by the whole teething thing.

Other useful developments this month are that she pretty much feeds herself all the time and rarely wants my help with the spoon. She’s getting good at it, even though she still wants to put way too much in her mouth at once. And the most awesome development – putting herself to sleep!! Sean or I had been happily rocking her to sleep for naps and bedtime until a few weeks ago when I’d sing a few songs and then she’d start leaning out of my lap, pointing toward the crib. I asked her if she just wanted to go lie down, and she said “YeahYeah!!” So I put her in, and she fell asleep. Every once in a while now, after a few minutes, she’ll whine/cry for one of us to come back in for a few more minutes of rocking (which we do), but for the most part she just happily rolls around and falls asleep. Ahhhh…

Oh, and thank goodness Jonah’s around to capture her attention by jumping all around while I’m trying to take her picture, because this month she’s also learned how to climb down out of the chair by herself. Without his help, things were pretty much looking like this:

If I were to sum up Nora’s past month in one word, it would be “bread.” The girl is crazy about the stuff. She is signing for bread all day long, runs and points to the cabinets where we keep it, looks for pictures of bread in books, even jokes about eating bread while I change her diapers. If I ask her if she wants bread, I get the biggest smile and “YeahYeah!”

She has quite the appetite for food in general – loves all kinds of fruit, pasta, cheese, (and bread) – and has gone through what must be a growth spurt this past month. She’s been eating like crazy, sleeping later in the mornings, and still taking her long afternoon naps. She’s totally off of her bottles and drinks milk out of cups with her meals, just like her big brother. She likes to time her sips so that she’s drinking at the exact same time he is and thinks that’s pretty funny.

A new promising thing that’s been happening in the past week or so is that Nora’s started sometimes telling us when her diaper needs to be changed, by pointing at her pants and saying something that sounds serious. Then when I say we should go change her diaper, she runs away and loves to make me chase her down. She is not a fan of diaper changes in general, so I think it’s funny that she basically asks for them.

Nora still loves books, music, pictures of babies, the outdoors, and now (somehow) clothes. I’m not sure where she gets such a thing. If it’s in her genes, it must be some very, very deeply recessive genes from her parents… Anyway, she has specific favorite pajamas (purple ones with a big green frog) and shirts that she will pull out of the laundry pile when only the tiniest part is showing. She holds them up against herself, smiles, and trots off down the hall to check herself out in the mirror. She will bring me different shoes, hats, jackets, and want to put them on and go look at herself or go show her dad. It is quite funny.

Weight: 22 lb 4 oz
Height 29.5 in

Nora’s walking gets faster by the day, and she’s trying to climb herself into new places all the time. I’m pretty sure she could land herself in the bathtub if we let her (and boy, does she love the bath!) We’re realizing that there is pretty much no way this child will still be in her crib on her second birthday.

She also got all four of her molars in January! It is so nice to somehow have kids who are not bothered by teething. She’s been sleeping just as well as ever and isn’t any crankier because of it. Phew.

Nora’s started to really like to draw (which I’m sure is largely due to observing Jonah’s big train-drawing phase right now). She is pretty good about keeping the crayon or marker on the paper and enjoys seeing the lines show up. It’s so cute to see her and Jonah working side by side at their little table in the kitchen. Nora will usually go for about 15 minutes or so before trying to eat the art supplies. It’s also been fun to give her stickers to play with. She is quite determined as she attempts to peel them off of the paper and her fingers.

Books are one of her favorite things, too. She will sit down in front of her bookshelf and page through books for quite a while on her own. Just as often, she’ll pick one and excitedly walk over to one of us and ‘demand’ to sit in our lap to read it. She continues to love any books with pictures of real kids and babies.

Nora has a few new official words. She definitely says, ‘Dad’ with much excitement when she sees him, and has expanded her ‘caaa’ sound to not only mean ‘quack’ and ‘car’, but also ‘coffee’. (Nora wakes up every morning with Sean around 6, if not before, and they hang out and read and play while he has coffee. She points out his mug in the dishwasher and says her word for coffee.)

As funny as it seems, Nora now has at least three new songs she ‘sings’. Of course, she’s not singing the words, but she picks some syllable like ‘da’, ‘va,’ or ‘ba,’ and totally sings the melody and rhythms for Jingle Bells, Twinkle Twinkle, and the Thomas theme song, in addition to Wheels on the Bus. It’s possible she’s trying others that I don’t recognize, too. I would love to get this singing on video, but she just won’t do it for the camera.

She also signs ‘music’ now, and sometimes when she hears a word that reminds her of a song, she’ll run to the computer, signing ‘music’ until I open up iTunes and start playing the right one. She requests ‘more music’ when Sean is playing the guitar and when songs end at the library storytime – we’ve started going while Jonah is at school. It has been so fun to watch her dancing, clapping, and squealing at all the songs and stories there!

Nora has decided to really commit to walking in the last week or so. She has been trying really hard to get from place to place on her feet, and if she falls down, she’s slightly more likely to stand back up and try again than she is to just take off crawling. On her longest trips, she’ll go from the kitchen down to Jonah’s bedroom and is getting better at changing direction and turning corners, too. She also loves to be ‘chased’ and just absolutely cracks up when I catch her. Jonah enjoys watching this game, too.

We’re also seeing a new little side of Nora coming out, which is her testing/taunting side. She seems to like seeing what reaction she can get out of someone, especially Jonah. Sometimes, she will crawl over towards him really fast with her mouth open as if she’s going to bite him, but will stop short and just put her face against him and not really bite. Or she will come quickly over to his train tracks like she’s going to grab them or knock them over, but will stop with her hand just above them. Both moves almost always elicit a “Nononono Noranoranoranora!” or my favorite “Silly Noooraaa… Jonah is not a snack!” and she will crack up and hurry away. (Of course, sometimes she does actually bite or knock things over, but still…) She also likes to pretend she’s going to climb on the brick hearth, and then giggle with one leg up on it until I say something, and then the same thing – cracks up and runs away. Oh my…

Nora has a new ‘word’ – quack! When she sees a duck or we ask her what a duck says, she’ll say, ‘Quack!’ When we sing ‘Five Little Ducks’, she happily fills in the quacking parts. She also says ‘car’ (which sounds a lot like her ‘quack’) but she knows what she means. :) She also loves making loud, growly noises that make us laugh, and she is starting to sound uncannily like Jonah with some of her protesting/whiny sounds, so that from another room it’s almost impossible to tell who it was.

Her signing is a lot of fun, too. The signs she will do are: more, please, thank you, bird, sleep, change diapers, socks, shoes, up, eat, drink, orange, bread, light, fan, all done, loud, book, and bath. One day she woke up before I finished my naptime sewing, so I stuck her in the pack-n-play for a few minutes, and when I was putting my machine back in the case, Nora squealed and signed ‘all done’. Pretty great.

At mealtimes, Nora is very interested in eating what the rest of us are having. She will still eat pureed food, but is doing great with chewing and feeding herself all kinds of little pieces of things on her own. She absolutely loves bread and any kind of crunchy cereal and a few times this week has had exactly what the rest of us were having for dinner, just cut up smaller. Hooray! She’s even had a teeeeny bit of cheese for the past three days and seems fine with it, so that’s a great sign!

As far as her interests go, she’s still really into cars, trucks, and trains, and is actually starting to get pretty good at driving them on roads and tracks just like her big brother does. She also really loves to see pictures of babies, and often wants us to take down picture frames and photo albums to squeal at. She got a couple of dolls for her birthday and Christmas and likes to give them hugs spontaneously throughout the day. What a sweetheart. :)

Here’s Nora for her first eleven months. (If you click on it, I think you’ll be able to see the whole thing larger.)

Of course, the big news of the month is that Nora started walking! In the day or so since I took the video, she’s hasn’t taken more than a step or two – she’s definitely happier with her crawling speed, but she’ll get the hang of it soon, I think. She likes to walk while pushing chairs around the kitchen and while pushing a walking toy that we borrowed from a friend. Mostly, it’s just nice to see how controlled she is as she goes from standing to getting back down on the floor. She rarely just totally falls over which makes us worry far less about her cracking her head on something every time we turn around.

She’s picking up on more signs, and the cutest thing is if we stay out in the mornings a little past her naptime, she will start signing ‘sleep’ to me. Much nicer than just getting cranky! :) We also love how excited she gets when she sees a meal getting ready and starts signing ‘eat eat eat’. I need to really get on top of teaching her more signs now that she’s learning them so quickly, especially since she is generally very vocal and insistent when she wants to get something across to us.

Jonah, of course, is a major influence in Nora’s life, but lately it’s become increasingly obvious how much. Whenever she sees Thomas the Tank Engine on books, DVDs, or toys, she becomes absolutely giddy with excitement, and she can spot him nearly an aisle away at Target. It’s ridiculous. She loves the school buses that drive by our house and now cries when they turn the corner. She’s also started to ‘sing’ the Wheels on the Bus. She doesn’t have the words – it’s more of a ‘eh eh eh’ – but the rhythm and even some melody are definitely there. For a week or so, I thought maybe I was just making it up, but then she did it at lunch and Jonah said, “Hey! Nora’s singing Wheels on the Bus!!” So it’s not just me. Sean’s heard it, too. And when we ask her if that’s what she’s singing, she gets the biggest smile. She also does the hand motions for Itsy Bitsy Spider, and loves that song, too.

Nora had her first long car trip to go up and visit family in the Seattle area for Thanksgiving, and she did great! She napped well in the car and was totally happy to play with toys, read books, and watch Jonah in the backseat. It was also her first time sleeping away from home somewhere that was not a hospital, and she slept through the night the whole time we were gone (thank goodness!) She wasn’t too anxious about meeting all the new people and let everyone have the chance to see what a happy little girl she is. She’s doing well with her eating, and even got to have turkey with us on Thanksgiving.

We’ll be mainly celebrating her birthday tomorrow since Sean will be home, and she’ll get her first taste of cupcake then!

Happy birthday, Nora!!!