Stairs and spoons

So they had a little set of practice stairs at day care, with a hand rail. Well, guess who's now making a beeline for the stairs in order to go down them. She practiced a bit on a set of three stairs at work, which was ok because they were shallow and deep, and only three of them. And her butt-scoot method works pretty well there. It doesn't work so well on wooden stairs with socks on. She doesn't quite sit down before sliding off the stair to the next one. Well, I had her upstairs while I was changing, and before I could get to her, she'd slipped off the steps and rolled - fortunately, there's only three stairs there, so she didn't fall far. However, after bawling for about a minute, she asked to get down - and pretty much ran to the stairs to go do it again! Sigh. This time I held her hands and she made it most of the way down before getting tired. But we're clearly going to have to teach her to get down safely now.
We had visitors this week - Vicki came down to give a colloquia talk and my old room mate Pam came out for a conference. So we went out Friday night - got a baby sitter. Went to the climbing gym with Pam. Isabella appreciated the company, and so did we.

We've moved her bath to just before bed, which seems to have helped in the go to sleep department. Tonight she almost fell asleep on my shoulder, and only took a few minutes of flip-flopping to settle down. She's sleeping somewhat better - a pat back to sleep once or twice and a nurse back to sleep around 4. And not so much in the screaming department. She's coughing a lot at night when she just goes to sleep, and she's got the endless runny nose. We're off to the doctor tomorrow for her yearly checkup, so we'll see what she says then.

We're losing the cute two front teeth - the third tooth on the bottom has made its appearance. Which might explain some of the lack of sleeping and drooling.

She's got the hang of the spoon. I've been giving her breakfast in a bowl, and she can handle applesauce, sort of. Doesn't always make it in the mouth, but not too bad.

She hasn't been eating quite as much as usual, but she's been nursing a lot. And pooping endlessly - three times a day for the last several days. With no warning. Ugh. I managed to catch this morning and evening's, which is better than we have been doing...

I think she's starting to really understand what's being said to her. At the gym today she was toddling towards someone's water bottle - she pointed at it and said "bo' el" and I said "yes, that's a bottle but it's not yours so no touching" and she burst out in tears! She was pacified by being given Pam's bottle, fortunately. She's also starting to respond to things like "where's your shoes?" and "stop, please" and "can I have that?".

We put Bill on a plane today with all the snowboarding gear. I am not looking forward to flying by myself - fingers crossed that the plane stays empty...