Wednesday, December 27, 2006

Olivia's Second Christmas!


Merry Christmas! We're just recovering form Olivia's second Christmas. It was great, and very different from a year ago! Olivia has been interested in, and a little frightened of, the tree that came into our house just before Christmas. How amazing, then, for her to come downstairs on Christmas day to find that it had laid a whole pile of Christmas presents, most of them for her!

We had a fairly quiet Christmas at home, starting with just the three of us. We had Grandboo's Christmas coffee cake (a longstanding Hawley tradition) and opened some presents before we invited our neighbors Joanne and Cathy over for brunch. It was great. These pictures represent only a few of what we took, take a look at our flickr photo page for more.


Olivia had a great time opening presents. She couldn't always get the tape off, but she was great with the paper! Sorry Dad, we weren't able to save much of the paper for next year :) She also had a good time deciding which presents to open. The whole present-fest ended up taking a long time, since she would pick a present, open it, and then proceed to play withh it for a while (no matter who the intended recipient was!), before deciding it was time to get another present to open.


But we made it through the pile in the end. Thanks everyone for the great things you gave Olivia, and for the nice cards! We were able to get out on our traditional Christmas day walk, but saw few people, and no Chinese Water Deer, of which we saw one on last year's Christmas walk, which was a treat. Dinner capped off the day with a (traditional?) meal of Butternut squash soup, from a recipe that Ingrid gave us after she so kindly brought it to us while we were still in the hospital with Olivia. And then to bed after a very busy day for all, especially the little girl who was probably aware of Christmas for the first time!

Sunday, December 24, 2006

2 Great new developments!


Well, Olivia is almost at her second Christmas (although she was mostly unconscious for most of her first Christmas), and it's amazing how far she's come this year! She's been crawling pretty well for a while now, but has never been interested in the stairs until today, when Suzanne was upstairs and Olivia and I were down. She decided she wanted to be up there too! And on she went, with hardly a pause for breath, climbing (spotted by papa of course) happily toward mama. And to prove it wasn't a fluke, she did it again later in the day. Fortunately, she's still not terribly interested in trying to go _down_ the stairs. She's quite cautious in that regard- she'll come up to the edge (spotted), reach down and seems to say, "hmmm- that's quite a drop. But I really want to go downstairs... maybe this big guy here will carry me?" then she looks at me and away we go down the stairs together.

Which leads directly into... This communicating thing is something she's getting lots better at. We've been working on signing with Olivia, and she's definitely got some simple signs down for important things like "milk" and "more". But for me the breakthrough was that the other day she was able to tell me that she was hungry. It wasn't the sign equivalent of a complete sentence, but she crawled over, pointed directly at her high-chair, and signed "more" very specifically while looking straight at me. It was pretty clear to me. So off we went to the kitchen and we fixed her something to eat. It was tremendously satisfying to feel like she was able to tell me what she wanted, and I was able to respond. Definitely a connecting moment.

Monday, December 04, 2006

Sweet Interactions



I just couldn't resist sharing a couple of, what Bob and I think are, really cute pictures of Olivia. The first is Olivia's impression of a flower.



Here, she is touching faces with Kate through a hole in the cover of her book.
In the third photo, she tossed around during a nap, leaned against me and promptly fell back asleep.

Saturday, December 02, 2006

Tumble Tots


Not having Olivia in daycare at all means that we have to look for special opportunities to introduce Olivia to dynamic situations involving other people. Tumble Tots (Gym Babes) is a baby activity group that I decided to start going to with Olivia in order to help her be more comfortable with movement and get some social interaction.

This exercise helped Olivia learn to crawl. She can crawl up the slope herself now, climb over the top and back down the other side.




Lyra and Kate have been going too. Here, Lyra is in the background watching her mama take pictures.