Alice in February

I feel like Alice understands a lot of what I say now but she still doesn’t say much. If I’m being generous, I would give her credit for saying (in order of frequency) Mama, Da, hi, huh? see, yeah and bye. She’s always been a pretty quiet baby and not much of a babbler but this month the babbling has picked up quite a bit. In fact, she sounds like she is trying to sing. When we’re in the car and listening to music I notice her “singing” along. At first I thought it was a fluke but she consistently imitates melodies and isn’t too shabby. I don’t remember Norah doing that at this age so I’ve jumped to the conclusion that Alice is clearly a musical prodigy. We will watch her with interest.

Here she is displaying her musical talent by clapping (a stretch?) and also displaying a huge blue/green welt above her from a bad tumble. This girl falls ALL.THE.TIME. We should probably get her a helmet to wear around the house. Something very sweet that Alice does is watch for her daddy out the window. When he leaves in the morning she rushes to the window to watch him walk down the street and in the evening she senses when it is about time for him to come home and looks out the window for him again. When Bryan comes in the house she gets excited and doesn’t seem to know what to do. She gives him a quick hug but then points to the window and babbles something and then points back to him and back to the window and so on. It’s as if she’s saying “you were out there and now you’re in here, but just a second ago I saw you out there.” When Bryan was out of town she looked for him the first evening he was gone and got sad when I told her he wasn’t coming home. It broke my heart. This is our next door neighbor and adopted grandma Paula. She hosted a ladies’ coffee party party for women in the neighborhood on Valentine’s Day and I went with the girls. I was the youngest lady there by about 30 years and of course Alice got a lot of attention from all the women. Alice spent the whole party following the dog around and trying to pet him. Paula made Alice this sweet little smocked dress and then paraded her around. I’m not sure who was more proud – me or Paula.Alice has another adoptive grandma named Jeanne. She’s the grandma of the little girl next door and comes to baby sit her once a week. Whenever she does we have a play date and Jeanne and Alice just adore each other. I should probably ask both of these ladies permission to post their pictures but I don’t want to risk forgetting them so I’m going to chance it.  Alice still takes her doll for morning walks around the house and STILL gets stuck where the floor is uneven.