A Big Week for Abigail

In a few short weeks, Abigail will be having her first birthday — it’s hard to believe she’s been around a whole year already!
Last week she hit two pretty big milestones — on the same day…
– She’s started using her first words. OK, they’re more an intelligent grunt than articulated words, but she knows what they mean and she uses them in the right context. For awhile now she’s been grunting “uh-oh” when she drops something. We’re sure she picked that up from Benjamin, because that remains one of his favorite words. Probably his second-most common words are “What’s that?” which still sounds kind of like “Wh-wh-whatsZat?!”
Abi copies him almost exactly, and likes to be carried around the house so she can point at things and grunt “Wha-wa-waZAAAA?”
– She started walking. One day she couldn’t walk, and the next day she could… and the day after that she decided she didn’t want to. She totally blew us away when she took 3 or 4 steps on her own, so we kept at it with her — maybe even pushed her a little too far. At one point, she took 5 steps, turned left and took 3 more steps!
Unfortunately, she’s not as quick to get back up and try again after a tumble as Ben was. We got some video, but most of it is the tumbles. She’s apparently concluded that walking on her own is just not worth it, because she’ll walk around holding onto only your pinky finger, but if you take that away she’ll immediately sit down.
We also had a particularly tough week with food. We concluded after a few explosive poops that went up her back, that she must have something of an upset tummy, but until we figured that out, it was very frustrating. She’d eat a bite or two of her food, then refuse any more, shaking her head back and forth if we tried, and screaming with red-faced rage if we managed to sneak some in. She wasn’t even doing that well with the bottle. Fortunately she seems to be getting back to her normal eating habits.
Ben and Abi play together so well, we’re very blessed to have kids that get along so well. If she was big enough to chase him (which he calls “kicking”) we could just sit back and let them entertain themselves for hours…