Victory

Harper must be part vine, or mountain goat, or aspiring CEO, because she seems to have an innate desire to climb things. First is was the stairs at my parents' condo, which she scaled successfully at first glance, never having encountered stairs before. Then she just started to climb on anything around the house. She likes to sit on our bathroom scale (not a challenging climb), on the crate I keep tutoring materials in, on the step ladder (which we now know we can't leave out), on boxes, and on the treadmill. Of course we keep the safety key out of the treadmill and out of her reach, so it will not start when she's on or near it. I let her climb on it originally because I felt badly that we didn't have anything else for her to climb on safely. It's not too high off the ground, and she is so proud of her ability to get on and off it.

Now Harper seems very intelligent in many ways. It does, however, take some things a while to occur to her. She has never seen us use the treadmill (because we don't let her around it when it's on), and it was only a couple of days ago that she apparently discovered, to her great joy, that she could actually stand on it. Again, it wasn't on, but she's quite the actress:












































She also seems to be practicing her victory stance for when she finishes her first marathon. You go girl!

I talk to Harper all day long, show her things, and hope she's learning and on her way toward meeting those "milestones". As I've said before, she seems to do things in her own sweet time. Usually just as I'm starting to worry that she's taking too long to learn something, she does it. That's how it was with signing, we tried for a long time to teach her the signs for "more," "please," "thank you," and, "all done," and she finally started using them. Now she has pretty much dropped "more" (the first one she learned) in favor of "please," which works just as well. She also seemed to take forever to learn how to crawl, then to walk, and now I find myself missing those days when she'd stay in one place! I am not too big a worrier, as a mother, but it's hard not to be aware of where your kid is on the timeline of accomplishments, especially if you know other people with babies. People ask me all the time if Harper is able to this or that. And we wonder how our kids get so competitive. . .

Today Harper did two things I've been looking for her to do for a little while now. At breakfast, I was asking her where various parts of her face were. Usually she just looks at me and waits until I touch, or help her touch, her nose, eyes, mouth, hair, etc. She's been able to find my nose for some time (which I'm trying not to take as a dig on how big it is), but never seemed too confident about finding her own. Well at breakfast she correctly identified her eyes, nose, mouth, and hair! We fell apart on the ears, but she'll get it.

Later today, while we were playing in her bucket of blocks, she actually stacked three of them. She loves to knock down towers that we build, but had never shown any interest in building her own. I think the building question is one the doctor might ask the next time we visit, so I will happily be able to tell her, "Yes, Harper can stack at least two blocks." What did I do when Harper built her tower? I clapped and cheered and then knocked it down. Ha! That's pay back kid, you'll think twice before you knock down my next pyramid. Fortunately, she laughed.