Brooklyn

This girl...

First off, you can call her "Vampira" since, well...

Top two side teeth before top two middle teeth.  It is HIL-ARRR-IOUS-looking.  

She nods her head "yes" all the time.  I think she does it when she sees something she wants or likes, though it's hard to tell, since she's done it pretty constantly for the past month or so.

On Monday, all of a sudden, (which seems to be the way babies do things around here.  No sign that anything out of the ordinary is coming, and then...boom!  Climbing stairs! Crawling!  Eating ALL the food!  Understanding the English language!), I noticed her shaking her head "no" when I said the word. 

Though she's a little rusty on the actual concept.  Sure, she'll shake her head from side to side when she hears me tell her (or Caden) "no", but then goes and does exactly what I was telling her not to anyway.  Yesterday I watched her crawl towards the blinds, which she knows she is not supposed to touch, and as she got closer she started shaking her head "no" with a big grin.  So...yeah.

The blinds are really the forbidden fruit d'jour lately.  She'll crawl right up next to them, and then just sit there, facing out, with a big grin on her face.  Like, "Yeah...I'm not doing anything wrong here, lady.  Just chillin next to the blinds."  (Caden on the other hand, will often barrel right on through at this point, and she'll laugh and grin as I tell him not to touch and haul him away, like, "Yup, he did it!  Not me!  I'm still innocently sitting here!") Yesterday she had been sitting there for awhile, with her back to the blinds, big grin on her face, when I looked over and saw her little arm behind her head, with all its little fingers caressing the blinds behind her.  The little sneak.

Yup, this grin, right here:

One of her favorite things lately is to cuddle: wrap her all up in a blanket and take the whole bundle up in your arms and she hugs and snuggles and strokes the blanket.  If you say, "Hug?" she'll give you a hug.  That is she'll lay her head down on your nearest body part (shoulder, lap, knee cap...she's not picky) and snuggle up while you hug her.

I think this cuddle streak is also what led her to climb up into the basket of laundry, fresh out of the dryer right before her bath the other day...

(Whenever she's naked lately, she also likes to stroke and pat and pinch the fat on her belly, which is hilarious.)

(Not pictured: right after this, when I didn't notice that she was balanced somewhat precariously on a heap of laundry that had bunched together in the middle of the basket, and she fell spectacularly backwards, taking basket and clean laundry over with her.)

She's also EXPLODED in her "vocabulary" lately, babbling on and on and on with strings of sounds, one right after the other, just nonstop.

And then she'll crawl on over, pull herself up by my legs or pitch herself back onto her little knees, and stretch out both arms to the very tippy-tip-tops of her fingers, her eyes as wide as they will go, just imploring me to pick her up.

And so I do.

"Hug?  Brooklyn, give mama hug?"  And she does.  Until she sees Caden doing something that is much more intriguing (getting into the blinds, perhaps?), and she squirms on down and off, back in action again.