We had a fantastic 4th of July swimming, boating, eating, running and playing with Holly. It was very hard to return to work on Tuesday and realize that I wasn't going to spend my whole day playing with a baby. But I really do like my job and these days it keeps me so busy I can only sneak peeks at Holly photos once or twice a day.
In addition to the excitement of vacation, Holly had a few exciting happenings of her own. As you know if you're a regular reader, Holly has been repeating syllables for quite some time ("dadadada", "mamamama", etc) but they didn't seem to really mean anything to her. She was just as likely to say "mama" while looking at me as she was while popping Frank-the-cat's tail in her mouth. But a while ago she started holding up her rubber duck and saying, "DUH!" in a loud voice. We wondered if she was saying duck, but figured it was just our parental imagination running away with us. But now it's pretty clear that "duck" is her first word. She also looks for her duck wildly if we say, "Holly, where did the duck go?" And will hold it out to us when we ask that question if she has it already in her hand. She's also become a bit clearer with the "-ck" so you can understand a bit more than she's saying "duck" and not just "duh". We've tried to capture it on video, but she clams up and smiles every time we turn the camera in her direction.
The next thing we have to report is that Holly's learned to wave hello and goodbye. Often times she's a bit delayed and will be waving goodbye to Chelsea from our car five minutes after we've left her house (like she did today). But sometimes she gets a good wave in when someone says "Hi, Holly!" or "Bye-bye, Holly!" and it's so incredibly cute! She waved hello to several of her great aunts this weekend.
She continues to scoot around the house at an amazing speed. It's hard to describe for those who haven't seen it. She's not crawling or walking. She twists her legs back and forth and uses her hands. She can travel all around the house this way and nothing is safe. She's wonderful at finding stray bunches of cat hair, dirt, grit and goodness knows what else on the floor which, of course, heads straight for her mouth. I have no idea when I'll fit in vacuuming every day. This will have to go along with baby proofing as something we'll have to figure out as we go along.
She eats three "solid" meals per day now and seems to be quite fond of blueberry season. She's a musical little girl. She waves her hands, bounces and sways to any music. She seems to prefer
The Carolina Chocolate Drops, The Beatles and anything Tom plays. Her sleeping is still a daily adventure. She slept very well last night and today. But there's no guarantees for tonight. We have learned to just accept this as a fact of our life. And of course, she's still full of smiles and giggles. Honestly, pretty much the only time Holly isn't happy is when she's tired and we're trying to get her to sleep. If that's the worst of our problems, we have nothing to complain about.
