OK, finally: Onto new Veronica progress!

1) Mobility:

First off, she's sitting up in bed every night now. For a while there, she was waking herself up every night, getting stuck in the sitting up position, or getting stuck AFTER that position - she would get sleepy again, then droop down so she was asleep with her head between her feet, THEN wake up and realize she was stuck in THAT position. That was annoying for all parties involved.

She's still not walking but has become quite adept at scooting on her butt all over the floor, pulling herself forward with her arms and scooting her little heels. She's now all over the living room, forcing us to start childproofing really damn fast and start teaching her exactly what "no" means. Which leads me to....

2) Behavior:

You pull her away from something, and hello, temper tantrum. She cries. She shrieks. She stiffens her entire body, which is sometimes disastrous, as it causes her to throw herself back onto the floor or forward into whatever hard surface she is facing. I comfort her. I hold her. I tell her I understand she's upset. But I never give her the thing she wants. So far, in the past two days, the "thing" has been our cable modem; the electrical cord to a lamp; an electrical outlet (since childproofed with those little plastic things); a photo album that was way too available on an end table; and the doors to the aquarium stand (which really isn't too big of a deal until she starts slamming them repeatedly and scaring the hell out of the fish.)

On the opposite, though, she amuses herself a lot more too. My mom brought her up a stuffed doll her last visit, and Veronica will start laughing if you just hand her the doll. She adores it and has named it "Barbara." (Actually, she says "bah-bah" or "bah-bar" when she sees it; hence the name. But she doesn't call anything else that. She has named the doll.)

She's got a lot of common sense too, which makes her toys a lot less fun for us to watch her play with. For example, she has one of those block sets where you have to put the certain shape block into the certain shape hole to get it into a bucket. Well, within minutes she was showing us an easier way: Hey mom and dad, check it out, if you take the top off this bucket, you can just toss the blocks in and not worry what shape they are! This makes her LeapFrog basketball hoop a lot less fun too; when you throw the ball through the hoop, it hits a litte switch and makes sounds - counting, ABC's, etc. She's figured out that if she just reaches her hand in there, she can repeatedly hit the switch and not worry about the balls. So she just sits there, flicking the switch and watching it go. *sigh*

3) Vocabulary:

She said "dog" one evening when we were taking a walk at every dog she saw. We're convinced she's a genius. Then we get home and everything was "dog." Jason. Pictures on top the piano. Pita, the cat. *sigh* again.

Her new favorite, which she learned from the other kids at the babysitter's, is "uh-oh." She says it when she drops something...or at random. Whenever.

The funniest use of her language had to be last weekend, when we went to the zoo. Now, she really didn't care too much about the animals, instead preferring to watch the other people there, especially the other babies and little kids. But I finally got her attention to notice the otters in the new Australia/Pacific Islands exhibit. She sat up. She watched them. She grinned. And she said, plain as day...."Kitty." Too, too cute.

4) Physical development:

We think she's finally teething - she is drooling a lot, and chewing on EVERYTHING, mostly her own hands.

She's also growing like a weed. She's filling out and getting longer. She's just getting so BIG....

Her hair is getting really thick too, and long enough so that people have asked if we've cut it yet. Although it's also growing unevenly, making it look like it HAS been cut, and poorly. :-P

That's all I can write for now, as groceries need to be purchased, and dirty laundry doesn't clean itself.