Mommy finally finished Emily’s baby blanket. It was a big one so she can still enjoy it. She snuggles in it with her bedtime milk and plays on it on the floor. It has lots of different fabric types so the textures vary and are interesting to touch. In general, Emily is a blanket girl. She wants her blanket when she sleeps and when she goes for a trip in the car. It is one of her accessories!

(18 months) Emily had her first blueberry picking experience. I put her down to walk around among the blueberry bushes, and she was fascinated immediately. She wandered around visiting the other pickers while I picked for a little while, and then she noticed what I was doing. She was amazed to find those tasty blueberries on the bushes and even on the ground. After a while she discovered that I was putting blueberries in my bucket and wanted to carry my bucket around. I was worried that she would dump all of my hard work on the ground, but she never did. She did, however, like to put the bucket about three feet away from me at all times so I had to take handfuls of blueberries to the bucket. She made friends with a little boy who was enjoying feeding blueberries to Emily. It made for a very fun day!

(18 months) This was a very fun week for Emily. Late in the week we found two new teeth in Emily’s mouth. She now has two more on the bottom. We have 10 total (6 top/4 bottom). It is pretty hard to eat with only two on the bottom and I’m not sure how much easier the new two will make it, but it is getting better.

It is blueberry season and Emily tried fresh blueberries this week. She got so excited about them and can’t get them in her mouth fast enough. I have had to limit the quanitity that I give her because a whole meal of blueberries isn’t the best for her system.

Emily is learning to jump up and down. She is able to bounce in her bed when she is holding on to the side. On Saturday she watched a tv show where they encouraged the children to jump with the characters. I watched as Emily tried to obey the request. She was not holding on to anything and she jumped up. She didn’t get very high and was off balance. She could not catch herself and fell to the ground. She got right up to her feet and tried it again. I was laughing so hard. It will not be long until she can hop!

Thanks to one of our friends and a Baby Einstein video, we have encouraged Emily to communicate with us via sign language. She has adopted some signs into her daily communication. The signs that she has used most are ‘Daddy’ (Granddaddy), ‘more’, ‘please’, and ‘eat’. If you ask her to sign ‘kiss’ and ‘baby’ she will, but they are not words that she uses on her own.

Examples of how she uses signs:

• Yesterday at the store she handed me the baby food container out of the shopping cart and signed ‘eat’. Instead of opening the baby food container we headed over to the deli section and got some free samples of bread to get a snack.
• While eating food Emily will sign ‘please’ or ‘more’ and sometimes both to ask for more food. The other day she was signing ‘please’ and I tried to get her to sign ‘more’ and ‘please’. Instead of imitating me she nodded her head up and down with much excitement. It was like she was agreeing with me that she wanted more.

That’s Wet!, originally uploaded by Robby Edwards.

Emily had a play date with Mommy and a friend at a local park with a water feature. She really seemed to enjoy it.

(17 months) After I looked at this photo I was shocked to see how big Emily has gotten. She is becoming our big girl with each passing day. We love our big girl, but we also miss our little girl!