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!