Announcement for Chapter 8: 2/11/02

The latest update to Sarah's website, sporting 20 new and recent pictures [age 16-17 months] for "Chapter 8: These Feet Were Made For Walking: In Which Our Heroine Stands, Walks, Runs on Her Own Two Feet, and Sits Herself Right Down on Her Potty" is now available.

Sarah began New Year's Day with a bang, taking her pal Emma Jo out for Dim Sum brunch and then cruising up and down the halls between big girl cousins Ella & Leah. Two weeks later, she began flying solo: walking on her own, without tumbling down, and getting herself back up. Being a Virgo, she waited til she could do it perfectly before committing herself to this precarious bipedal transportation concept.

A week later, we brought up the potty from the basement, just to get her used to its presence in the bathroom. Hah! She took one look at it, looked at us like, "Why didn't you TELL me we had a potty?!", then sat right down and used it, much to our astonishment. She deigns to grace it every few days, especially since she discovered how successfully it can stall bath or bedtime.

Sarah's spoken vocabulary is increasing by leaps and bounds. Every day she picks up a few new terms, like "penguin" yesterday. Many of her words are intelligible only to her highly-initiated handmaidens, but they are speech. Yesterday we wrote down the 109 words we could recall hearing her say (see SarahWords.html).

As she talks more, she signs somewhat less, although she still picks up signs we've only used once or twice, like "lamp" and "cheese". Recently she got a spot in a Seattle Times article about signing with babies because she uses signs shall we say creatively...

Her favourite outfit these days is some combination of hat, pearl necklace, cool sunshades, backpack, diaper - - and nothing else. Preferably, ditch the diaper. She would like to go outside in this, which would be fine if it wasn't February. As our friend Bonnie, wise mother of the elegant Lily (now age 7) remarked about the Accessories-Only Look, "Then you know you're stylin', but you're still comfortable."