long time no post

Wow. Charli is always go-go-go now, and work has picked up too, which means I not only have no time to blog, I apparently don't even have time to take pictures! The amount of pictures I take each month has been declining by about 50% each month since December. Horrors!

So what's been happening? Well, we had some more visitors. My family was all here for spring break, and that was great. They cleaned our deck! It looks awesome! Then Sam had a friend out this past weekend, and that was nice too.

During all this visiting, we found all kinds of new foods for Charli to eat: we found Charli-sized bananas (Golden Fingers, they're called) and Charli-sized grapes (champagne grapes - they're delicious!) at the farmer's market, so that's really cute. Charli likes to pick the grapes off the vine, and she's very careful about it. Sometimes the stem stays on the grape, and she's very careful to pick that off, too. Then there are the things that we weren't so sure she would like, but she did, such as... seaweed (keem)! She loved it, and ate several pieces. Of course, she eats a lot of paper, too, and this is just sort of like black, funny tasting paper, I guess. She also liked the grilled portabello mushrooms we had for dinner last night, along with the tremendously successful pesto we had. It's great; we're totally raising an adventurous eater!

Charli is communicating like crazy now. She tries to imitate the things people say to her, and has lots of words she can actually say. She still says babu, and she says hase (ha-zee, german for bunny), duck, baby, boom, bump, cheese (sort of... I think sometimes she means cereal when she says this), push (she says "psh", it's so cute). Whenever she drops anything, she says "uh-oh!" She likes to sit on things now, but she has to kind of line herself up with her little chair or your lap, and then back up until she sits (sometimes she misses, and says "oops!". Brian would go "beep, beep, beep" whenever she did that, like a truck backing up, and it only took her a day to pick that up. Now when she wants to sit on your lap, she points her butt at you and says "beep!" Charli can also sign more, milk, out, cereal, and eat.

Today Charli was able to go up and down some stairs by herself, too. Her motor skills are really coming along. She likes to kick balls around, although she's not so good at throwing them. She's pretty good at stealing them, too, since I never remember to bring any to the playground with us.