feet, tongue, teeth

Gaz has gotten really good at pulling herself up to her feet using furniture and has even started trying to stand up without anything to pull up on, although those experiments havent progressed beyond the funny hands-and-feet-on-the-floor/butt-up stage. Today she was entertaining herself by standing up next to the chair where the cat was curled up. She had a great time bothering him for a while, but then decided that she wanted to come over by me. I was an arm's length away so that I could stop her from being too rough with the cat, but I had been letting her play since she was for once petting the cat nicely. So she turns to me and holds out one hand while holding onto the chair with the other. I hold out my hands to her and she grabs first one hand, then the other with her other hand. And then, I could hardly believe it, she took her first self-directed, albeit Mama-supported steps! I've walked her all over the living room with me swinging her legs in big, floppy steps before, but now she seems to have gotten it down in her head that she can make steps herself! I got out the video camera, but no more walking to Mama and no furniture cruising. I don't think we're going to put the video camera away for a few days, just in case she does it again.

Her other big "holy cow!" trick is what I think is shaping up to be her first word. Now, I'm not talking about the accidental words like "dada cat" and "yeah" and the like. I mean where she says a something and knows that what she's said is attached to something. She was sitting on our bed yesterday while I was getting dressed, looking at the cat curled up with his head and tail poking out from under the blanket. She was feeling mellow and not in the mood to attack him, so she was just patting his twitching tail when she said, very clearly and meditatively, "Puhtah." I squealed and encouraged her as she kept saying "pruhtah" "puhtaaah" over and over, working on the sounds. So I guess the reason her favorite phoneme lately has been "peh" is because she has been working up to "Proton." We've always joked that "Proton, NO!" would be her first word, but I guess we weren't too far off.

We're STILL waiting for that damnable tooth (#8) to come in. It feels very close to the surface, but who knows how long it will take. A week? Two weeks? Our only consolation is that she seems to be in between the worst of the teethy pain for maybe a day or so.