9 Months of Belle

I finally found the time to create Belle's 8 and 9 month pages! I also did lots of updating on our websites including updating my main page, updating Annabelle's growth chart and milestones, and adding a page of some of the graphics work I've been doing. I have some good videos of Annabelle and driving in Italy to add, but I can't find the cord to download them. :( Hopefully I'll find the cord soon!

These past couple of days Annabelle is really doing well with sign language! She does "more" quite often, does "fan", and does this one sign (opening and closing her hand toward herself) that depending on the context is either waving, "all done", "milk", or "light". It's like she knows that she should be doing something, but doesn't know exactly what to do (even though all of those kinda resemble what she's doing anyway). But tonight she did start doing "all done" with a fluttering arms-type gesture, just like she did a while ago. This ambigious context-driven signing is similar to how a baby might say "ba" for bottle, baby, blanket, or whatever. And, just like with speaking, I just have to realize the context and encourage the correct word/sign. Since she's picking up on these signs, it's probably time that I add a couple more signs to our dictionary to keep the learning going. I've heard that "help" is a good one to know, and I think "music" would be a good one for us since she loves anything musical. Speaking of that...

Belle has a guitar that is supposed to be only for kids 3+, but we let her play with it supervised. It is just like a miniature guitar, except that it only has 4 strings. Tonight she was picking the strings really well, and after the guitar she crawled over to our bongos and played those. She loves to shake her maracas too. She's definitely got the musical bug!

Annabelle is really started to get interested in books. She will bring them to me and sit on my lap to read them. Her favorite book, "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you see?", is one that we read often. This book has a different animal on each page and for most of the animals I make a sounds that they make when I turn to the page, but one of the pages has a goldfish on it. For the goldfish, instead of making a sound I always tell Annabelle to look at me then I make fish lips. Today, as soon as we turned to the goldfish page she turned around and looked right at my lips! It's amazing how these little things are such a big deal, but wow! :)

I've posted a few new photo albums, including some precious pictures of Annabelle enjoying playtime at the playground.