14 months

Delly, you are 14 months old. To celebrate, you decided to FINALLY sprout some teeth. Yay! You went to bed with one tooth popping through one night, and woke up with a second. About a week later, a third popped. And just this morning, about a week after your last tooth, the fourth came through. Full steam ahead! I must say that so far -- knock on wood! -- you are handling it like a champ. We've had a couple rough nights, but those were really because you also happened to have gotten sick during your first week of teething. But really we're all pretty much sailing through teething so far with minimal tears. Though I probably just jinxed it by saying that.

You are a really good walker now and can reach all sorts of completely not childproof things now that you've got all this height working for you. You love animals, you want to hug our cats all the time and you love seeing dogs when we're out. You are fearless, if a huge dog gets in your face and sniffs and licks you, you just laugh. All animals are "kitty" to you, including dogs and even the goats and llamas at Bishop's Farm. You also say ball ("baaaaah") and shoe ("doooooo"). This morning you started pointing to other round things, like the button's on Daddy's coat, and saying ball. Your sweet little brain is working very hard.

You are off bottles completely now, only drinking your milk from sippy cups. You also don't get any milk at bedtime anymore -- you were only getting it out of habit and weren't drinking much, so we stopped doing it one night to see how you'd deal with it, and you were fine. So now we just read some books, sing the Shema, and plop you in your crib and wash our hands of you entirely til morning. Again, I fear I'm jinxing us, but you are so great about going to bed. No matter how crazy our day is, we know that we just have to hang on til 7pm, and then you'll be tucked away in bed and we can spend the rest of our night doing special mommy/daddy things, like fighting over who gets to play Ratchet and Clank.

I think my favorite thing that you do right now is hug our legs. As you run around playing and getting into things, you'll just come up to one of us and throw yourself against our legs in a huge tight hug, and sometimes toss in a bonus of rubbing your facecrazily against our legs. I know what you're doing, you're trying to burrow into us to get a little closer. I know that feeling, of hugging and squooshing and never being able to quite get close enough, that's exactly how I feel when I hug you.

Love,
Mommy