Do you hear what I hear?

Yesterday Sierra made the connection that her ears hear things. Grandma and Grandpa had taught her to be able to point to her ears the other day, but they didn't talk about the fact that she hears things through her ears. She must have figured that out all on her own. She was playing with her wooden blocks in the living room and she was banging one of them on the floor pretty hard. Every time after she did it, she would point to her ears. I didn't get it at first, but a few minutes later she made her little high-pitched scream that is rather ear-splitting (and that we are trying to discourage her from doing...) and after I commented that it was rather noisy, she pointed to her ears again.

My piano, your piano

Sierra loves to play on the piano, and sometimes I hold her on my lap, but other times I just put her on the bench and let her sit by herself. When she sits alone I usually put her at the Baldwin, which is the piano my students play on when they come for lessons. I put her there because the bench is at a better height for her (I sit very low, so the bench at the Steinway is always set super-low and the keys would be at about eyebrow height for her). Because of this routine, she has somehow come to think of the Baldwin as her piano. Now when I sit her on my lap at the Steinway, she'll point and point to the other piano until I put her over there on her own bench!

Sometimes she's ok with being on my lap, and I often take her fingers and pluck out little tunes. Up until about a week ago, she would usually yank her hand out of mine so that she could do her own thing, but just the other day she let me play all of "Twinkle, twinkle" and she seemed rather intrigued by the whole thing. The next time we sat at the piano, she held one of her hands back to me, and had this look on her face like, "Lady, don't you get it? Aren't you going to make my hand do something here??"

Words

Sierra's first reliable word (besides Da Da, which has been pretty much her solitary word for months) appears to be "dolly." She is really into finding her dolly and giving her kisses, and the other day when she spotted her and started heading over, she started saying "Dolly, dolly, dolly" --it sounded a bit more like "Dah-wee, dah-wee, dah-wee," but nevertheless unmistakable. Also when I was on the phone with my mom, she got on and when she heard grandma's voice her eyes got bright and she said "Ga ma." She also started saying "Mama" again this week. She figured the sounds out a couple of months ago, but then apparently forgot about it because she has not been saying Mama all this time. I think this time around she really has it.

It's amazing how many words she understands, though. She points or responds correctly to a whole slew of things.... it will only be a matter of time before she figures out how to say everything!

These feet were made for walkin'

Well, I think we have a walking girl now!!! She's been taking one tiny step from one hand hold to another for several weeks now, but today she took two consecutive steps from a free standing position over to Jonathan. He brought her immediately upstairs to where I was and set her down a bit away from me and she took three steps over to me. This evening she has not had that much interest in demonstrating her new skill--she still prefers to crawl, but I'm sure it won't be long until she's racing around!

Toy Ahoy

Sierra recognizes a whole bunch of her toys by name now. If I ask where her ball is, she'll search around for it, dig through the basket or whatever, until she finds it. (She LOVES her ball and she will play with it for half an hour or more, throwing it, chasing it down, and then throwing it again.)

She knows her dollies so sometimes I'll say, "Where is your dolly? Are you going to give her a kiss?" and she crawls directly over to her doll and starts kissing her. Actually, whenever she notices the doll, she goes and gives her a kiss--she is very affectionate!

The other new game that she has gotten really into is looking through things. She has a set of large blocks that have spaces cut through them (to fit smaller, different shaped blocks). Her new thing is to hold those up so that she can look through the hole. She thinks it is so funny when she can see you on the other side, and if you stick your fingers through the hole to give her a poke she about dies laughing!

Speaking of looking through holes, she discovered not long ago that when she holds her knitted or crocheted blankies close to her face, she can actually see through them. When I put her down for her nap, I always put one of her blankies over her and the first thing she does is pull it up over her face to play peek-a-boo, but she thinks it's quite funny that she can still see me even though she's "hiding"!

Cushy landing

Sierra found a great new feature in her stuffed animals yesterday. She had pulled a bunch of them out of her toy basket and they were in a pile behind her. I'm not sure if she sat down on purpose, or if she sort of fell back onto her behind, but nevertheless, she landed on the pile of stuffed animals, and she was so surprised at the soft landing that she started laughing and laughing. She bounced up and down for quite a while, laughing and making sure that I could see what she was doing. She was so pleased with herself! Then she got up a bit and kept throwing herself down into the pile. I can see that we are going to have a lot of fun with leaves next fall!

Hello World!

One of Sierra's favorite things right now is looking out the front window. She recently got tall enough to see out the window on her own without being picked up, so she loves to stand there and watch the cars go by. She has a really loud, deep voice and she shouts at the cars--I think she's saying "Hello, Hello" or at least it sounds vaguely like that in "baby-ese". She also waves almost constantly as she's doing this.

She's also very tempted by the plant that sits very close to her window post. She knows that she's not supposed to touch it, so I often see her reaching out for it and then she shakes her head "no," I guess to remind herself that it is off limits. Then about half the time she touches it anyway, but it's a start at least! We're trying to improve those statistics over time.

Baby steps

Sierra is really on the verge of walking. She frequently will take one small step from one hand hold over to another one, and yesterday she actually took a tiny step when she was standing in the middle of the room not holding on to anything. She also is able to walk now holding on to me with only one hand, and that is a new development of this week. She has a little yellow chair in the living room that she pushes around and around. She gets frustrated about the rug, though, because it's in the way and she can't push the chair on the rug. The other day when she got over to the edge of the rug and the chair stopped against it, she was leaning over, rubbing the rug with one hand with this very perplexed look on her face, as if she was trying to figure out what was wrong with this crazy thing, that it wouldn't let the chair keep moving!

Puzzle Mania

This morning Sierra worked hard on her puzzles. She was obviously concentrating very hard on figuring out which pieces go into which spots. She was pretty accurate with the circle every time since it doesn't have to be turned any particular way to fit in, but she was able to get the triangle and square in a lot of the time too.

I think this is the day of figuring out what fits inside what. In her bath she has two cups that stack, and that's all she wanted to play with during her whole bath--putting the smaller cup inside the bigger one, taking it out, putting it back. Once we got downstairs every single toy she picked up had that theme. She was trying to put things inside of other things. She was even taking all sorts of toys and trying to put them down inside the bars and beads of her bead racer--it's amazing how much will fit in a bead racer!