The Girl Taking One Step Forward, The Boy One Step Back

The Girl is going up stairs now. I stepped away for a couple of minutes and she had made it up three stairs. Her brother was up another three steps encouraging this action. I don't mind all of that except that The Girl has not figured out the laws of gravity just yet. I know this because a few days ago I heard a thud downstairs (of course, this was on daddy's dime) and she had fallen off the first step. She is also "talking". She's started to use jibberish (for lack of a better word) and she thinks she's really talking. She's signing now too: "done" "more" "bye bye" and "1" (when you ask her how old she is).

Keep an eye out for video of brother teaching his sister to walk. It's adorable. Dad has to format it for me.....

Speaking of brother, he's been extra ornery lately. I guess it's his age but he's been doing things specifically to get into trouble. For instance, I was changing the baby and I heard running water - the bad kind of running water sounds - and I went into the bathroom and he'd put his hand under the faucet and had water everywhere... the ceiling, all over the walls and the floor. He also does not listen and insists upon doing just about everything himself: getting dressed, buckling himself into the car seat, making his meals....somehow though, he doesn't feel like cleaning up his toys fits into the "do it yourself" environment in which he's attempting to surrounded himself. He tells me he "can't" and the time-outs and bribery have ceased to work. Arg. As I write this, The Boy is in time-out for pushing his sister over.

On a humorous note (because sometimes I forget why I decided to have children), we had a big discussion this morning about bird poo-poo in the driveway. It was very interesting to him and I kept having to tell him to leave it alone. About 5 minutes went by and he said, "Mommy, the daddy bird needs to come back and clean up that poo-poo." I'm glad it's not me he associates with cleaning up poop.