She’s growing and changing (and moving) so fast these days! Nora’s crawling has really taken off, and she’s always following family members all over the place. It’s kind of funny because when I just watch her crawl, it doesn’t necessarily seem like she’s going that fast, but if I turn my back for a few seconds, I’m always amazed at how much ground she covers in a short time. Her fine motor skills are coming right along, too, and she can pick up the tiniest scrap or crumb of something off the floor, which means I’m sweeping the kitchen many times a day so she’s not munching on Jonah’s leftovers. Luckily, she has a very specific squeal she does when she spots something to go after, and I can usually beat her to it. She also loves peeling up the edges of our rugs to get at the stuff that gets trapped under the edges. Nice.

Nora doesn’t care about surfaces either – concrete, grass, dirt, playground mulch, sand – she’ll just take off and crawl. When we’re in the yard, she’ll find tiny patches of dirt and just dig and dig and dig with her little fingers. She likes crawling over my legs when I’m sitting on the floor and has started to pull herself up to kneeling.

Nora also had two new teeth (top middle) break through over the past two weeks, which means her days as a fanged baby are numbered. She’ll be happy to have more for eating, though, as she loves her food. We’ve been going slow with introducing things to her – one new thing every five days – but she’s finally getting enough to have a good variety of choices. She’s had carrots, peas, broccoli, squash, sweet potatoes, bananas, pears, applesauce, rice cereal, and oatmeal. Some of the veggies take a few bites to get used to, but then she cleans her bowl every time (except for squash – not a fan). Once I say and sign ‘all done’, her little face crumples and she cries, poor girl. She eats breakfast and dinner every day with the family, and sometimes eats lunch depending on the timing of her afternoon nap.

When I’ve taken the kids grocery shopping, Nora’s always been in the carrier while Jonah rides in the cart, but the past few trips, we’ve had Nora graduate to cart-riding status, and she loves it! She just squeals and kicks her way through the whole store and particularly loves the produce section. Jonah is equally happy to be on foot.

Nora is by far the happiest person in our house at 5:45 am (her preferred wakeup time). For a few months, it was rare for her to wake up in the middle of the night – lucky us! – but lately she’s been giving us one or two wakings and then still wants to start the day before 6 am. Ugh.

She’s definitely a bit of a sensitive kid who’s easily startled to tears by sudden loud noises, and will cry as if I’ve hurt her feelings when I need to take away things that she shouldn’t play with. She’s solidly in her stranger anxiety phase as well, and sometimes even the friendliest, gentle approaches make her cry or bury her face in my shoulder. She will usually warm up before too long, though.  A majority of her day, though, she’s in a very happy and cheerful mood!

We’ve noticed lately that Nora is definitely recognizing certain words. She loves the balloons at the grocery store checkouts, and when I asked her about balloons when we were home, she looked up to the ceiling, like she was trying to find them. She recognizes lots of words associated with eating, and knows things like car, truck, ball, etc. – she’ll grab at pictures of them in books or crawl over to them. And it could have been a fluke, but I swear she signed ‘more’ today while she was eating. (Jonah saw it, too!)

I don’t think she’s saying any real words yet (maybe ‘dad’?), but she loves experimenting with her voice in really loud ways and then laughing at herself. She does lots of silly bubbly, growly, squealy sounds that amuse her quite a bit.

Weight: 17 lb 10 oz
Height: 27 in