September 16-23

"Any day now" in regards to the walking turned out to be last Friday and Saturday.  Olivia would stand in the middle of an open space and could be persuaded to take a few steps before she dropped to her knees.  By Sunday, I would occasionally catch her randomly walking from a couch to the middle of the room for no apparent reason.  As of the time I'm writing this blog post, though, she's still wobbly in the balance department (probably because she prefers to charge, rather than walk), and crawling is still faster.  So although we're seeing more steps more times throughout the day, we still don't have a self-acknowledged walker.

In a major accomplishment, on Sunday Olivia finally managed to get herself into a standing position without using any furniture or other props.  She had been trying all weekend, but couldn't figure out how to get herself from bear-crawl position to standing.

*Update from slightly later in the week: Olivia now walks about 50% of the time.  As long as she doesn't need to be somewhere quickly, she generally prefers walking to crawling.  :)

Tuesday I had another half day off, and I used it to go shopping ALL BY MYSELF.  It was wonderful.  The first thing I did when I turned off the car was sit and read for five minutes without listening to kicking and squawking from the backseat.  When I stopped at the library, I was able to run back out to the car to get extra money to print a few things.  When I was at Aldi and noticed that I'd forgotten the mayo, I just went back and got the mayo.  No wondering if it was worth the extra two minutes, no worrying that something else might get tossed out of the cart on the way there...  Just turned around and picked up the mayo.  I putzed my way through Meijer, checking prices and calculating the value of my coupons.  I stopped at Kohl's to browse their sales so that I could use my $10 off card to procure a shirt for myself for only $1!  I breezed in and out of JoAnn's to grab some material I needed.  It was so quick and painless.  Then I came home, and Bryan and Olivia were both glad to see me, but apparently had a grand time playing together all afternoon.  :)

In addition to the phrases mentioned a few weeks ago, Olivia now says something that sounds like "up" when she wants to be picked up, something that sounds like "Jesus" when we're in church (and she's pointing at all the icons, paintings, and/or statues), and something that sounds like "hey" when she pretends to answer all of her various phones (most of which are not actually phones at all -- see this apt diagram that we found on the internet).  I'm also pretty sure that I heard "I need that" last Friday.

I've been feeling very accomplished this week.  Tuesday morning I canned four jars of apples.  I had some orchard apples, and ended up throwing out almost as much apple as I saved, but I went through the whole bag anyway.  I canned them in a light cinnamon sugar syrup, so they'll be quite tasty in oatmeal this winter.  Olivia and I like the apple cinnamon oatmeal, but no one sells it in bulk tubs like regular oatmeal (they figured out how to do that with marshmallow hot chocolate, why can't they figure out apple cinnamon oatmeal?), and it seems silly to buy the little packets all the time.  Wednesday morning I canned five jars of peaches.  They were on sale last week, so I got about five pounds so that we can have those this winter, too.  Next year I'll probably can more things (and in greater quantities), but it was a last minute decision this year, I had to borrow my mom's canning equipment, and I didn't have anyone to help with the canning and/or babysitting.  I did learn that Olivia will still tolerate being in her flying saucer, which was useful when I had to move back and forth with jars full of boiling water.  In addition to canning, I went shopping (which counts as an accomplishment because our pantry was practically empty!), made bread, and made cookies.  It doesn't look like I did quite as much when I list it all here, but canning makes one feel exceptionally accomplished all at once.  :)

Olivia is not allergic to peanuts.  I was tired of having to keep her from eating Joe cookies, so I let her try a little bit of peanut butter.  Then we happily ate cookie batter and later she had a cookie.  No ill effects, unless you count a love of cookie batter.  What a monster I've created.  While the batter was in the bowl, she was very good about not touching it and waiting (not always patiently, but waiting nonetheless) until I gave her some.  Once I started putting it on the cookie sheet, though...  The sight of all those perfectly sized little globs of batter was too much.  She immediately started trying to eat them right off the pan.  I now know how Justine feels when I'm around while she bakes cookies.  I would be more apologetic if cookie batter wasn't so tasty.

More Pictures and a Video:
The sunset on the way home from William's baptism.  It was even prettier in person:

Olivia experiences crayons:

Picture courtesy of Olivia:

Going AROUND the chair would make too much sense:

10 points to the person who can figure out the shape and color of the missing piece:

Standing up:

Being talented: Walking