Sweet Yet Sour

This post is mostly for Mike, since he’s gone this week and not here to witness what Anna is up to these days.

Yesterday, Anna helped me with the folding of the laundry.  By “helped” I mean “took everything out of the basket” for me.  As shown here:

Laundry Helper

Anna is showcasing her newly acquired ability to pull herself up to stand.  She pulled up on the laundry basket and proceeded to take all items out of the basket for me and dump them on the floor.  Except this one, which she “helped” me with by chewing on:

My "helper"

Sometimes she tried out standing on her own without the laundry basket.  And then she fell down:

More laundry help

Eventually she took all of the items out of the basket.  While I was frantically folding them she was crawling around undoing my folding.  I gave up and folded everything after she went down for her nap.

Today, we went to The Hornet for lunch with Aunt Jen.  I put Anna in a nice dress and she managed to get a sweet potato snack mashed into it just prior to the picture taking.  It’s a talent:

Lunch with Aunt Jen

I spent most of lunch retrieving items that Anna dropped (most of them purposefully) on the floor.  There was a 3-foot wide span of dropped chicken, cheese, sweet potato fries and other snacks on the floor around her.  I dutifully cleaned it all up, but as soon as I would sit down, another gravitational “test” would occur.  Anna must have heard about Newton’s law of gravity at playgroup and decided to see it in action for herself.

Later on today I was talking to Mike on the phone when I turned to see Anna on the second stair up to the second floor.  She was rapidly making progress up the stairs.  She’s never done this before, but was able to move pretty quickly up to the landing while I crawled behind holding the phone and my hand behind her butt in case she fell.  We’ve already put one baby gate up at the top of the stairs, but it looks like one needs to go in at the bottom too. I have no pictures of this because she was moving way too fast and I was holding the phone.  I’m sure even when I have both hands free the pictures will only be of Anna’s butt getting farther and farther away.

Yet again, my mother laughs at the glory of the fact that I have indeed gotten a kid that moves as quickly as I did.  Karma is apparently laughing at me as well…