Progress, Progress, Progress..

Whew.. it's been a month since my last update! I've definitely been too busy..

Those who have been following mentalmother know that Ella started crawling on September 14th, 3 weeks ago today. Since then, Ella's been an explosion of progress.

So far Ella has picked up the following new motor skills:

Cruising - We've had her cruise short distances on the couch, that was new this past weekend. She doesn't do this often, but if motivated to get a toy she will creep her way sideways to get it without any help other than the couch itself.

Walk-behind - On Tuesday, Ella was walking in straight lines across the kitchen by pushing her music table around. (with nobody touching her or the table) This has a bit more resistance than your normal wheeled walk-behind, which makes it a bit easier.

We're still working on pulling up to standing (although she can pull up to kneeling..), and of course we're now working on refining our walking/cruising skills. She's also very confident walking if you hold both of her hands, but doesn't walk if you hold just one. (She's been doing this kind of for about 2 months now, but we'd been holding off practice to get her to learn crawling and pulling-up.)

On the communication front, Ella still isn't talking, although recently she does seem to point and me and say some variant of "da" which the D is a weird mix of D, T and TH sounds.. However, that's hard to distinguish from her general babbling. She makes da, ta, and ba sounds an awful lot these days.. But it is still quite cute when she looks me in the eye, grabs my nose, promptly says "tha da" and grins.

There are now 31 words that we are sure she knows the meaning of. Most of these are nouns she can point out if you ask her where they are, or verbs that she'll act out. It is likely there are many other words she knows from her books that we've never thought to test her on, but overall this is good.

Of the 31, four of her words are colors that she'll reliably point out something of that color if you ask (red, blue, purple, green). We also think she's gotten the concept of "my ear" versus "your ear", but we're not sure of these so we didn't count them.