The Maxted Family: Elizabeth's extra milestones

Elizabeth has made some really cool progress this month. I seem to remember with Vanessa that there were a few weeks where leaps and bounds of development happened all at once. I think this must be one of those times! Elizabeth has been practicing more complicated communications of her thoughts. For example, the other day, she said, "close door," and then closed the door! Sometimes she shakes her head and raises her eyebrows, meaning, "I don't see it, where is it?" and makes a noise for a clock, or a fish, and then opens a book, finds a picture of the thing, and points to it. I love when she does this for finding her own bellybutton -- she shakes her head, says something that I guess sounds sort of like bellybutton, and then lifts her shirt to find it. She'll also play peekaboo now by covering her eyes with her hands (except for a teeny tiny space where she peeks through), and then takes her hands away.

We just took Elizabeth to the zoo for the first time -- too bad we forgot our camera! Her favorite animals were the gorillas and the elephants. I set her down just on the other side of one gorilla who had his back up against the glass. He eyes got SO wide, and she kept signing gorilla and staring. Then she got so excited she needed a hug! When we went to the elephant house, there was a little more room to maneuver, and she kept stomping around like an elephant, signing elephant, and pointing with gaping mouth and wide eyes at the ENORMOUS elephants! These ones really were huge, and they were quite close. I think I honestly have forgotten how big elephants can be! When we asked Vanessa what her favorite animal was at the zoo, she said the tiger. We didn't get to hear it make the loud "A-roo" kind of roar she was hoping for, but I guess she thought it was pretty cool anyway.

This was both girls' first time actually going to see fireworks. We went down to the Iwo Jima memorial and watched the fireworks across the river over the Washington Monument. Elizabeth was awake and in awe of the first burst of fireworks, and then promptly passed out. Vanessa stayed awake for the whole thing. Her favorites were the blue ones, of course!

Elizabeth and Vanessa with Jaeger, whom we dog-sat recently. They pretty much adored him, and kept trying to feed him his dog food.

Elizabeth and Vanessa playing dress-up in some of my clothes. Elizabeth loves dressing up just like her big sister.

Vanessa seems to be spending more and more time upside-down these days. I think this handstand of Vanessa's was part of James's motivation in getting a moon bounce for inside our house! (Well, that and Vanessa's new addition to her bedtime routine of doing 100 jumps on her bed every night.) It's a small quiet one -- the moon bounce holds the air without constantly running an air pump. I can't believe she did 100 somersaults in our moon bounce today. Maybe we need to give Vanessa gymnastics classes instead of dance classes! Vanessa has just started dance class two lessons ago, but is still too shy to try to follow along with the other kids. She gets SO excited about dance class at home between lessons (especially her noisy new tap shoes), so maybe this week she'll break out and actually do "I'm a little teapot" with the teacher this Friday evening.