Catching up

Blah blah blah... insert typical apologies for not posting more frequently.

When I say "catching up," I mean that Petra is catching up to us! She is definitely crawling around, though usually in a 1-foot/1-knee crabwalk that is cute but not super efficient. She literally crawled circles around me in the living room this afternoon (ending up with her hand shoved into the VCR tape slot and dumping some DVDs on her head). She is becoming somewhat more independant, and at the same time more needy. While she will sit/crawl/stand/cruise/play on her own quite contentedly for a long while, she will also start pouting and crying the second she sees Mommy leave the room, or if she doesn't pick her up fast enough. We've been trying to get her to sleep on her own more (leaving us with lavish amounts of time in the evening to do the dishes, pick up, and pass out), sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Daddy seems to have a slight edge on knocking her out, probably because she focuses so intently on Mommy when she is there that she won't fall asleep. Daddy just shushes her while she cries and squirms and conks out.

Germs are also catching, and Petra has caught her share. A little fever over the weekend, a phlegmy cough, and rivers of snot would have given it away, even if the fussy crying all night hadn't. She's already somewhat better, but the rivers continue.

You can see in the picture the piles of crumbs that now reside on the carpet. Petra likes to eat solid foods, and has been crunching on teething biscuits for a couple of weeks. Very little seems to go inside- she either breaks them up into crumbs (actively pounding them on the floor sometimes), or chews on them then blows them out in slimy strings as she blows raspberries at us. Between the dirt Petra is generating, and that already in the house, I decided that it was time to get a Roomba! Sure, the robot pool and battlebots and MAKE hacks might have had something to do with it too. We turn it on as we leave in the morning, and when we get home we empty out a scary container full of dust, cat hair, dirt, cat hair, Mommy hair, and cat litter. YIKES! Boy do we have a lot of dirt in the house. The little Roomba really does work! We can already see a difference in the house, with fewer hairballs and dustbunnies hiding in corners. Hopefully, Petra won't have to wear that dustmop onesie I was going to make for her!

Nothing too exciting in the last 10 days, other than our little darling. Don't worry, if something really exciting does happen, I'll post it!