Milestones up the wazoo!

Well, we've finally made it home from our Christmas adventures (a few days ago), and I'm working on getting back to business. For me, this partly means back to blogging, of course. I'll start with a list of milestones and updates on Julie.

• Julie is a quick scooter now. She gets across the room before I know it. Gates have definitely got to go up at the stairs.
• In addition to scooting, she pushes up on her knees and rocks back and forth on them, working on balance, strength, and momentum. No actual crawling yet, though.
• Having learned to sit up on her own (finally), she's loving her new perspective and being able to play with things while not lying prostrate. I'm really excited about her sitting up because now I can take her into the store with me and sit her up in a shopping cart, or in a high chair at a restaurant.
  
• Julie is learning to make choices. Like between toys...this one or that.
• She is also learning cause and effect. When she drops something, we pick it up for her.
• She finally had a breakthrough while on vacation. Two, in fact. On December 28th (my anniversary), her first tooth popped through, and on Monday (this week), her second one pushed out. So now she has two lower front teeth.
• Julie has made associations and has begun reaching out to people. At the beginning of our trip, we visited with a lot of friends in Maine, and Julie was introduced to lots of new people who all wanted to hold her. She was fine with this, but combined with long days of travel, she started to develop a little bit of parental separation anxiety after a day or two. Combined with that came reaching out for me, for Ben, and after about a week at my parents' house, reaching out for my mom as well!
  
• Julie is learning to not avoid the camera so much. It used to be that if the flash was on, she'd stop smiling when the camera beeped and the light came on, so her pictures were more confused than smiley. Now she keeps smiling!
  
• I have taught Julie something. Much of what she has done up to this point in her life has been part of normal development, even though it's really exciting to me. However, this week she started signing the word "milk," which is something that Ben and I have taught her. Yay!
  
• While we were visiting with my family, Julie discovered a love for "bling." She loves shiny and/or sparkly things -- jewelry, mirrors, you name it.
  
• animals
• She's getting much better at letting us wipe her hands and face off when she's messy. She used to hate it and scream when we did it. She still doesn't like it much, but she's learned to deal with it.
• Having mastered the arts of sitting and scooting, Julie is doing a lot of standing now, in our laps. She's developing good leg muscle strength.
  
• My sister introduced Julie to the game "peek-a-boo" during Christmas vacation. We had previously played it with Jules by throwing a cloth over her head, and waiting for her to pull it off. She now enjoys playing it while we hide and peek around a corner, or while we cover our faces.
  
• Sleep. Ugh. Julie used to sleep anywhere from 10 to 13 hours at night. Then we went on vacation. There were two problems with this. (1) She hates the pack and play. (2) She got sick right at the beginning of our trip. When she's sick, she's clingy and Ben turns into a total softy. So she slept in the bed with us for several days while she was sick. By then she'd gotten used to it and wouldn't sleep for more than five hours in the pack and play. After Ben left to come home, it was only me, which got really tiring after a night or two (pardon the pun...it was intentional). We've been home for five nights now (I think), and two of them she has actually stayed asleep until 4:00am, so that's improving at least. However, somewhere along the way, Julie discovered that she has the ability to resist going to sleep. Nap time has now become exhausting for me. Literally. She refuses to go to sleep, and instead is just really really cranky. It's a new and rough situation for me, but I'll work through it. Eventually.