slow but steady progress

I haven't posted in a while, mostly because nothing "unusually exciting" has happened with Ella lately.

Of course there's lots of small cute things she does every day, and perhaps I should make a point to post more of those. Thinking of that, here's one now:

A couple of nights ago, when Ella got in bed after her bath, she started giggling and shaking her head all over the place while laying down. This, of course, made a giant mess of her freshly combed hair, and I commented "Oh, you're going to be fuzzy tomorrow". She immediately stopped, looked at me, and started stroking my beard. "Yes, fuzzy, like daddy's beard". It was immensely cute.

As for progress, Color wise, Ella's starting to get the hang of identifying and signing black and brown, although these are still a bit rough and she'll sometimes label black things as being brown.

Motor wise, Ella's continuing to get more confident and bold climbing on play structures, stepping over things, jumping, etc. It's all very gradual, but looking back at even a month ago, her ability to navigate barriers is much smoother now.

On the speech front, Ella's continuing to babble, and it's still mostly "Da". However we are starting to get her to vary the sounds a bit. She's sometimes distinguishing vowel sounds to make word approximations. Most of the time it's all just "da" or "da da", but sometimes she'll intentionally shift towards "eh-da!" (ella), "die" (bye), and rarely she'll even make a little twist towards "Dahn" (done) although it's still more like "Dahd".

We've also recently seen a return of B and R sounds, although these are rare just like "tooka" "Ha" and "Ga" are.

At any rate, I hope you all are well! Hope to see you all soon.