Xiaoniu 小妞

Emelia continues to amaze. She turns 10 months old Tuesday and has made so much progress that I’m surprised she isn’t able to read and write. Here is a picture of her playing with one of her Christmas presents that we let her have early. Not that she knows the difference yet.

BTW it is a nice Vtech toy car. They make pretty good toys. Entertaining and they work well. Unlike the Little Tykes, which seems to be crap.

A couple weeks ago she got her first set of “walking” shoes. They’re white with small pink stars. I’ll post a picture of them soon. She wears them at daycare and goes without them at night. That way she can learn to walk with or without them. So far she doesn’t mind them. She lets us put them on her and she leaves them alone all day. Doesn’t even play with them unless they’re off her feet.

Xuemei’s speaking still revolves mostly around mama, dada and baba, but now includes meimei. She also occasionally sings the dada song. That’s the one where you repeatedly say dada dadada over and over again until somebody realizes that you’re doing it. I wish I could get it on video, but she usually does that one in the car on the way home.

Standing up and pulling herself up onto things seems to be getting easier for her by the day. Standing for long periods of time and sliding along things like tables is now common. She’s only tried to stand without holding something on two occasions. Both times she tested out the cushioning ability of her diaper. Plopped right down, but didn’t hit anything.

Tonight she made her way to the stairs and actually showed interest in them. Mommy was at the top of the stairs and Emelia wanted to be with mommy. So, she pulled herself up and proceeded to lift her leg onto the first stair!! I’ve seen her do something similar when she’s tried to climb onto/into the dishwasher. However, this time we let her do it and she made it up the first stair.

We then let her try out a couple more stairs. I played safety net ready to catch her at the slightest sign of slippage. She only miscalculated twice and the result was slipping to her knees. Not bad for her first try. She made it up 5 stairs before calling it quits. She was tired and all the work was probably more than she expected. Not bad for a 10 month old.

As I mentioned she likes to play with the dishwasher. Once she hears us opening it up to unload or load it she’s crawling into the kitchen to “help”. By that I mean she likes to grab onto the door and try to climb in. Finding that we don’t let her do that she moves over to the side and proceeds to push and pull the bottom rack. She’s even good enough to pull the rack out of the dishwasher. No need to pull it out for her. She’s sell sufficient and can get it herself.

She also likes the dryer. Doing laundry interests her. She knows that when we are in the bathroom doing laundry that we are likely to open the dryer door. When we do Xiaomei is right there to pull herself up and proceed to play with the clean laundry we put in to dry. It’s quite cute. She really likes to play with it.

As I said it seems like she’s doing something new or doing something else better just about every day.

Oh and she really loves to eat. Fruit, crackers, cookies, Oatios, whatever you have on hand. The only thing she won’t eat are bananas, but I think that as of last weekend that may be changing. She actually ate some of Sue’s banana instead of gagging when it reached her mouth.