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.