Walking progress..

Well, Ella's still not walking completely on her own, but she's definitely making a lot of improvements. Since Yule we've been having her walk back and forth between us for a few steps at a time, then collapse on the receiving parent. For a while, she regressed and got more hesitant, but recently she's made good progress again.

This morning, Ella will walked a bit over 7 feet ) without touching anything to go between us (10-13 of her steps). We were sitting in the hall and our hands were about 8 1/2 feet apart, but I subtracted a bit for reach-out and push-off. She also no longer needs you to "catch" her. You can simply put one hand up (in a "stop" motion), and she'll walk over, reach out with one of her hands, and grab it for stability while she turns herself around. Most of the time she can turn around with no more stability, but occasionally she gets excited, whips around and falls over.. oops.

We still haven't gotten her to do very much in walking towards inanimate objects, but she will take 3 steps or so to get to something she's really interested in (such as her mother's keyboard so she can bang out some music..). We've had no luck at all getting her to push off from inanimate objects, although we have gotten her to use one of our knees as a push off instead of our hands.