Holiday baby!

Well, I finally got our Christmas cards from Shutterfly -- featuring Annika, of course, and my brain-fried choice of black text on a brown background (ehhh, I was typing it into what I thought was a white text box ... whatever, it's readable even if it doesn't pop!) -- and sent a bunch of them off yesterday. The photo is so cute, and the cards turned out really nice. Gone are the days when I had time to handwrite a note on all of them ... eesh. 

Anyhoo, Annika's Grandpa & Grandma M. are in town for awhile, and they have all three been enjoying each other's company hugely. And meanwhile, the pace of discovery keeps charging ahead: 

--She's saying "Thank you!" now ("dak-koo!"), and seems to like handing people stuff so they'll say it, and taking it back so she can say it. "Please" is next, of course -- heh. 

--Not that she doesn't love knocking over stacks of things -- because she does, she's like Godzilla in Tokyo! -- but she's now discovered the fun of stacking them in the first place. She makes towers of the blocks our friends I&K gave her for her birthday, and piles of pretty much anything else; she spent a good half hour stacking, unstacking and restacking a bunch of her board books tonight, every once in awhile applauding herself for a particularly fetching arrangement. 

--She's taken to standing around with one or both hands on her hips, deciding what mayhem to get into next -- it is beyond hilarious what that looks like! I think she may have gotten it from me (I do spend a fair amount of time looking for my own mind, after all ...), but who knows with this here baby!

--The greatest thing lately, though, just happened today: She asked specifically for the food she wanted! At lunch, I asked if she wanted more sweet potatoes, and held up the Tupperware I was getting the little cubes from; she looked at it, thought for a second, and said "apple?" with a searching look toward the kitchen countertop. I said, "You want apple?" and she repeated "apple!", clearly psyched that I got her meaning. So I got her some apple bits (she had LOVED them at breakfast), and she ate those till she couldn't eat anymore, and then -- proving it wasn't just a fluke -- she said "teess?" R. and I were like, "Teess? That doesn't sound like 'done' or 'down,'" (which she says when she's finished eating). She said it again, with that one-hand-clapping gesture and a look toward the fridge, and I said "Could she be saying cheese?" Her enthusiastic reaction to that was the confirmation -- she wanted a pack of string cheese! Wow! So she did the same type of thing again at dinner (and ate half a can of green beans, pretty much the only green thing she's really liked) -- awesome new development! It's just so much fun seeing the way her mind puts things together, and to watch how fast it's happening. Yay baby!

PS: She doesn't really get that it's Christmas time, but she loves the lights and the obviously different schedule around here, and she was almost as thrilled as I was by the outdoor decor of our neighbors' house one street over toward the ocean -- she loved the moving lighted deer shapes, and I just about died laughing at the leg lamp in the window. FRA-GEE-LAY -- that must be Italian! :-)