January 27-February 3

Olivia knows eight animal sounds now.  In the order she learned them, they are as follows: lion, monkey, dog, sheep, cat, horse, duck, cow.  We didn't catch sheep right away, since she has a gentle lion and an aggressive sheep, making them sound very similar.  My siblings were quite dedicated in teaching her horse and duck while we were visiting last weekend.  My favorite noise that she makes is monkey; Bryan's favorite is cow (and it became even more of a favorite when I commented that it sounds a bit like a steamboat).  There are videos below which document her talents.

There's also a video below where she shows all the body parts she knows.  Right now we're working on leg, as she recently discovered that she has two of them.

Olivia no longer pulls hair out of the top of her head!  Unfortunately, she now pulls it out over her ears, so the mullet look has actually gotten worse.  :(  I asked the pediatrician about it the last time we were in, and he said to distract her whenever she's pulling on her hair.  That would be great, except she only pulls it out in her crib at night.  Right now we're hoping she'll grow out of this phase completely once the hair above her ears gets too short to pull.

Every now and again, Olivia decides that she is going to use her own utensils.  This means she takes longer to eat, since she won't let us help her but still isn't very good with a fork.  At our house we have toddler sized forks to use and she'll spend the entire meal trying to stab food, getting food about one in every ten tries.  Whether said food stays on the fork long enough to make it to her mouth is an entirely different matter.  Eventually she gets frustrated and/or hungry enough that she'll let us feed her, so she doesn't starve.  At my mom and dad's this last weekend, James couldn't find any Olivia sized forks, so he provided her with only a spoon.  Of course, this caused problems: her spoon skills are worse than her fork skills, she wouldn't accept a big fork, and this was one of the times she was determined to feed herself.  So there she sat, valiantly trying to stab her egg noodles with a spoon.  :)

I have decided that kids should be like software upgrades.  Reggie should be just like Olivia, only with fewer glitches.  It sounds good to me.  All the good, and less of the bad (not that Olivia has ANY bad, of course... :-P).  Bryan thought this was a great idea, pointing out that by kid eight we should have a professional athlete who cures cancer.  Then we were struck by a sobering thought: on kid 9, there will be a total interface overhaul.  We'll know the upgrade is supposed to be better, but we won't know why and we won't be able to figure out how to work it.

Pictures and Videos:
Josef took these videos while we were visiting:

Not knowing that Josef took videos, Bryan made sure to document some animal noises at dinner on Monday:

...But he forgot horse and duck and was disappointed with the faintness of cow, so I took one last animal sounds video at breakfast on Tuesday:

And since I had the camera out, we decided to do body parts, too:

Bryan lent her his sweatshirt when she was cold:

Snuggled up with Uncle James:

Another picture of Eva's chair that I forgot to put up last week:

Using her stroller like a shopping cart:

For my grandmother: proof that I'm pregnant.  These pictures were taken at more or less the same week as the 6 1/2 month pictures I posted in the July 24-31 post.