on the road again

so much is going on right now! matt wants to stress that she is not "walking", but madelyn took two steps yesterday going from me to matt! its pretty exciting! i held her up for a step or two to get her going and then let go and she took two more to get to matt's hands. her balance gets a little better everyday. the sensation of walking both excites and scares her - you can just see it in her face.

since her mobility is just exploding right now i have started to give her free run of the house. i stay with her and follow her around, but i don't try to keep her confined to any one room. she is now free to explore her home. two of her favorite things are the stools at the kitchen counter. she has just figured out that she can climb up one and move herself to the other. they are a little wobbly with her pulling on them, but so far there have been no major catastrophes.

i am pretty sure that she is starting to cut her molars. (i think that i am starting to be able to feel them on the upper right.) she has never drooled so much! she has also shown real interest in her teething rings and anything long enough to reach the back of her mouth for chewing. her favorite is the rubber handle of her hair brush. the cutest part about the drooling is that she tries to suck it all back in. you can hear it in this video where she is sucking on her tongue and lips trying to contain the drool. all the drooling has also given her a little cough.

we are also experimenting with a later bedtime of 8:00pm. the thought here is that matt will have a better chance of getting home before she goes to bed for the night and that i will have a better chance of getting some work time in before she wakes up in the morning. we are going to try it for a month and if she still isn't sleeping later then we will go back to the earlier bedtime.

i am heading off to kansas for work tonight so matt and maddie will be on their own until wednesday. matt says that he might try to blog while i am gone, but we'll see - he is really into his tiger woods golf on the wii...

last night we went to a post-holiday party with matt's work peers. we took a picture of the kids together (at least the ones that were there) because there was a baby born to someone in their group every month last year. we lined them up by age and maddie is the youngest on the right (the oldest is 13 months).

be watching for matt's updates and if he doesn't i will be back to posting on thursday. love.

tofu is torrific!

the tofu was a huge hit today! for any of you using finger foods i highly recommend firm tofu. maddie gobbled it up and it was a lot easier to pick-up than the fruit pieces. plus, it can be mixed in with other foods for some extra protein pre-meats.

i forgot to mention yesterday that madelyn has another new desire - to crawl up and over anything in her way. besides just reaching up as high as she can to grab things she is starting to put her feet into the act too. she has been trying to climb up and over one of her toys by stepping up with one of her feet.

today she has started standing all by herself for 1 - 2 seconds and she can take one or two steps while holding on to my finger with one hand for balance. she still has a long way to go for actual walking but we are starting to see signs of it.

today at playgroup she enjoyed chasing around one of their little dogs. she just kept laughing at it and crawling after it. at least that was what she was doing when she wasn't trying to climb over the other babies! she is getting so fast that i can't really carry on a conversation because i have to stay on top of her the whole time. fun, fun, fun!

love.

new games

madelyn and i had some fun today playing a new game. i crawl around the house and she follows me. i would crawl around the couch and down the hall to her room, etc. and she would crawl after me laughing. sometimes she would sit up to see where i was and then would start laughing when she saw me and take off again. i can't wait for her to play this new game with her daddy!

here is a video of our second new game of the day - dropping a beach ball on her belly. for some reason this was hysterical to her and i filmed it because she was snorting when she laughed.



her new trick of the day is that she can get herself back down after she pulls up on something. it takes her a few tries, but she doesn't need me to help her down any more and she doesn't fall to hit her face. i am so proud of her for being such a 'big girl'!



she also started making repetitive "b" sounds last night. i wonder what word she will say next...

just to give you an idea for what a wiggle worm she is, today she sat down from standing and when she came right back up she had somehow gotten her arm out of her sleeve in less than two seconds! and then she sat back down to play again.

on the foods front tomorrow we start tofu as a finger food. the egg yolks have gone over great - she gobbled up her oatmeal/millet porridge this morning when i mixed in the hard boiled yolk and avocado (sounds disgusting, right?). it was almost a full cup worth of food!

i can't wait to see what new things she will have for me tomorrow! love.

improvised movements

madelyn wants to walk so bad. she has now started to crawl with her back legs straight like she is walking on all fours. she starts by standing with the help of whatever she can get her hands on and then can't figure out how to move around once she goes as far as the coffee table/couch/wall/toy can get her. then she works her way down to sitting and tries to crawl/walk to where she is going.

she has also developed a means for taking her toys with her when she gets on the move - she puts them in her mouth! its really funny when she does it with a stuffed animal. she looks like a mother animal carrying her young. she also did it with the balloon ribbon at the birthday party over the weekend so that she could take the balloon with her.

today we tried hard boiled egg yolks. i didn't have them ready in time for mixing in with her porridge (because of her nurse appointment this morning for the other half of her flu shot), so she had it for a mid-morning snack crumbled up for finger food. she actually did a lot better than i thought she would. i would guess that she ate at least half of it and the rest got smashed up or dropped on the floor in the process.

love.

just to clarify

i just wanted to let everyone know that i am not crazy - i know that she is not really saying "da-da" and "ma-ma" in the videos. they are just to give you an idea of what she sounds like. but she does say both 'words' clearly (even the skeptical matt agreed that she says them).

oh and we were late to church this morning because it was too cold for our garage door opener to work! yeah - it was like -5 this morning. we knew that we had to warm the car up so that it wouldn't stall (this is normal procedure for all you warm weather folks), but who knew that it could be too cold for the garage door to operate? all i can say is that everyone sitting outside in this for the packers game is crazy! we will be watching from the comfort of our own living room.

love.

she said "ma-ma"!

today she said "ma-ma" for the first time! i was so excited! so we are officially counting "da-da" as the first word and "ma-ma" as the second. she was totally doing the "ma-ma-ma-ma" thing too, but i was in the laundry room and missed getting it on film. i did get her saying it if you listen closely about half-way through this video. you can see how hard she is try to say it for me. the second video shows her saying "da-da", but she's been doing that for almost two months now. (she is covered in her prunes and rice/millet porridge in the video from her breakfast.)





after eating she had a lot of fun with the laundry basket and was so proud of herself for climbing into it (see photo sequence below).
as you can see, we are all set for tomorrow's chargers game! really, we were dressed for maddie's friend's first birthday party. it was a sport themed party and they asked everyone to wear their sport apparel. maddie's outfit is a 24 month size, but we couldn't resist the chance for us all to match (her other option was a padres outfit). the funniest thing at the party was that there was a little boy named brady (9 months) with a patriots jersey on and maddie kept taking his toy away from him. we were joking that the back and forth was a preview of tomorrow's game - and maddie won. (in fact, i felt bad because brady cried at the loss of his toy.)

oh, and did i mention that it was -2 this morning with a windchill of -27? yes, folks. it is a cold weekend here in wisconsin. our highs are going to be in the teens all week. brrrr.

love.

follow the leader

i am happy to report that there was no blood shed today!

the new trick of the day is following us out of the room when we walk away. she has crawled out of rooms after us before, but it is usually because we are calling her and trying to get her to, but today i put her in the living room to play and went into the kitchen for a drink. i looked in at her from the kitchen and she had rounded the couch trying to follow me. she did the same thing to matt when he got home tonight. he left the living room and she took off after him.

we were lucky to have matt home earlier than normal tonight - maddie got some extra daddy time! as you can see, some of that quality time was spent taking a pre-dinner nap on the couch together. the video shows one of the ways they wore each other out - as with all videos, maddie stopped laughing once the camera and lights were on but you can get the idea.



where yesterday was shrieking, today was raspberries! at snack and lunchtime today she was blowing raspberries as hard as she could - there was spit flying everywhere. plus, she would take a huge breath and blow, her face would get all red and then she would take another breath and start all over again. it made lunch take a lot longer than normal, but i enjoyed a really great laugh. she just kept looking at me like, "what's so funny?".

matt may not agree, but i am going to call "da-da" her first word. she says it all the time now. everything is "da-da". i was joking with matt because she was calling the remote control "da-da" tonight. she was standing at the couch trying to reach it and just kept excitedly saying "da-da-da-da-da". i told him not to feel bad because she calls everything "da-da". she will also say "hi" back to me when i say it while she is looking at me, so hopefully talking videos will be in the near future.

she just has more and more of a personality everyday. its so cute how friendly and loving she is with everyone. we keep saying that she is going to be a little social butterfly when she gets older - oh boy!

love.

bumps and bruises

one of the challenges of having a child who had a lot of teeth before they can even crawl is keeping those teeth from getting knocked out. madelyn had another tooth slamming adventure this morning. she was crawling around the living room while i ate breakfast and watched the morning news. she then got up on the laundry basket, walked/cruised over to the coffee table, and then to her toy basket under the table. she continued going between the coffee table and her toy basket in a 'walking' fashion getting toys out and putting them on the coffee table where she could better see, taste, and shriek at them. she was having so much fun that she started waving her hands around and let go - resulting in her top teeth hitting the edge of the coffee table on her way down.

this time i was more upset than she was. she cried initially, but as soon as i picked her up she was fine and started chewing on my fingers with no signs of pain. her gums were bleeding again around the same tooth where there was bleeding the last time she slammed her mouth like that (right before we went to Kansas when she was trying to crawl on the hardwood floors). there is still a little dark blood spot on her gums right above her right, front tooth from today's falls (yes, "falls" - plural - keep reading).

then when i went to pick her up from her nap i noticed the long scratch on her face that you can sort of see in the picture near her eye on the side of her face. after feeding her, i clipped her finger nails for the second time this week to try and limit the number of marks on her face.

and madelyn was not done injuring herself yet. her new thing is to crawl her hands up the walls so that she can stand leaning up against them, but the catch is that she can't figure out how to get down. i guess she was trying to get back down when i heard a thump and then crying. she had a nice red mark on center of her forehead the size of a quarter from where the wall texture scratched her a little on her way down (she caught herself during her fall and was just kneeling with her hands on the wall when i went to get her).

but, wait, there's more! at playgroup today she slipped while crawling on their hardwoods and knocked her tooth again!! there was a lot more blood this time, but she quickly recovered and was biting my finger as hard as she could while i was trying to figure out where the blood was coming from. its not like she isn't a stable kid. i think she was just so excited by everyone running around (there were about 11 kids between the ages of 3 and 5 months) and got ahead of herself.

her mouth started bleeding again tonight while she was chewing on her pack-and-play but best as i saw, she didn't hit her mouth again because there was no bang and no crying. what can i say, the girl is fearless and wants to try everything. i am just going to try and keep her scaring injuries to a minimum...

maddie's preferred method of communication today - shrieking. from the time she woke up until the time she went to sleep shrieking was the way in which madelyn expressed herself (she did throw in a few raspberries, grunts, "hi", "da", "ga", and nose snorts, but the day was mainly shrieking). i never know what she will sound like from one day to the next. here is a video of her shrieking today with her toys and the crawling to the newly discovered printer stand in my office and the 'fun' reams of paper underneath it.

yesterday she pulled an open ream of paper off the shelf, shook the paper out and proceeded to play with the plastic wrapper. of course i had to be the party pooper who threw it away.

hopefully, tomorrow will be much less bloody! love.

catching up

i have been super busy with mom's visit and work and that is why there has not been much blogging over the past few days. mom got home safely last night and even got to see some more snow falling on her way to the airport.

oh and can i just say "yeah chargers!"? it was a happy sunday at our house when we saw that the chargers had won! we had spent the day outlet shopping and matt did everything he could to avoid the score until he could get home and watch it the dvr copy of the game. he even made me turn maddie's chargers bib backwards so that no one would be tempted into commenting on the game at lunch.

here is video of madelyn using her non-walking toy for walking yesterday. it just kept sliding away and she kept right up with it. now i can just move her to one side of my office and let her 'walk' to the other side over and over and over - you get the idea. at least she is slower at this than crawling.




she is also trying really hard to 'walk' and cruise along the furniture. she was trying to get from the laundry basket to the coffee table but couldn't quite reach. instead she settled to reach for the other side of the laundry basket and found herself stuck with both feet in the air. i started laughing and she started crying because she was stuck. which just made me laugh more because she was so cute.

now for food news. yesterday we started brown rice and oatmeal porridge. she will finally eat the rice porridge! i think that the oatmeal either helped the rice grind finer or just evened out the overall texture. she has also taken to peas, but today we tried green beans and she hated them! she was choking on them, making awful faces and finally spit them up. i guess that we will just have to try them again in a few weeks. tomorrow we move on to carrots.


you might have noticed that in the posts from january 1 through january 9 maddie was wearing puffy painted onesies. these were lovingly made at my baby shower in florida this past summer. the fit her perfectly now and she really liked to feel the texture of the paint on each of them. thanks to everyone who helped make them for her!

that's all for tonight. love.

packers saturday

so on the day when everyone is glued to their t.v.s around here, i decide to host a pampered chef party. i wasn't thinking about the playoffs and i should have been - oh well. we even went to church tonight instead of tomorrow morning. i was seriously worried that we would be the only people in wisconsin not watching the packers game, but surprisingly there was a fairly decent turnout - not great, but decent.

we spent the whole morning cleaning up the house, then the party went from around 12:30 to 4:00 and after that we were at church by 5:00. not a lot accomplished today, but we did get a lot of fun maddie pictures for your viewing enjoyment. love.

maddie riding on her new toy lion from grandma and big pop. we tried to have her walk with it first, but she didn't like when it moved. when we sat her on it she was accidentally rolling herself backwards.

here she is standing in her crib for the first time. well the first time she was able to stand herself up in her crib anyway.

just hanging around with daddy.

my little volleyball baby.

standing in her church dress from grandma and big pop. she is getting to be such a big girl!

madelyn and grandma

on a side note, the pampered chef party was a gluten-free one because a few of the kids in the neighborhood have allergies and i wanted to know more about cooking snacks for them when i hosted playgroup. i have a whole new level of respect for anyone who has to prepare meals around allergies. one of the mom's even got a little teary-eyed talking about it - granted she is pregnant with baby #2 - because her daughter is 16 months and has some severe allergies.

grandma has landed

as you can see grandma is here! and she brought a late Christmas with her. she is spoiling us all rotten and madelyn doesn't know what to do with herself she has so many new toys to look at and play with.

we spent all afternoon shopping today. i am exhausted! maddie did really fantastic. we were out from 12:30 until around 7:30 without any really crying from her. she ate two meals and snacks on the road. napped a little in her stroller, in the car, and in grandma's arms.

i love these disposable place mats for dining out. it is so great to just stick them on the table and maddie can eat her finger foods by herself, just like at home. i had a whole lunch box to carry around with all her yogurt, bananas, avocado, snacks, and water today. it actually worked out better than i thought. i think it helped that it was pretty cold today so the car itself was like a refrigerator as we ran around.

grandma is having fun feeding maddie:



grandma is also really having fun making maddie laugh! here is some video of them playing in maddie's room while i was working. i could hear them laughing so i went to see what was up. later grandma told me that she was teaching maddie to dance.



in un-grandma news maddie was grinding her teeth yesterday! i checked my "what to expect the first year" book immediately to see what i should do about it (because i am that sort of spaz). i guess it was just a new fun trick for her. she did it off and on during the day, but didn't do it at all today so maybe she is already over it. i hope so - that noise makes me crazy.

maddie continues to sleep pretty soundly for 10+ hours so i think we might be out of the bad trend i had created of feeding at night. cross your fingers for another good night tonight!

love.

play yard standing

tonight madelyn stood herself up in her play yard. i was probably a little too excited about it (i scared matt). i was getting dinner ready and looked up and she was standing. while we were eating at the table (right next to the play yard) she fell down - well she tripped on her lilly doll - and we got to watch her get herself back up again. she just worked her hands up the side and over the top. and she was pretty quick about it too! she was pretty proud of herself and could even walk end to end - back and forth. what was a little concerning is that she is already trying to get her legs up and over too. i can just hear her little brain thinking - "i am so out of here"!

i like this picture of her smiling because you can see most of her teeth. (you will need to click on it to really see them well.) it is crazy to see all those teeth in her mouth! i almost don't recognize her - she just looks so different.

maddie got her first paper cut today. the only reason i noticed was because she bled on the product catalog she was turning pages in under my desk. i couldn't figure out how she could have started bleeding because she didn't cry at all. and then i found the paper cut on her finger. boy is she tough. i have seen grown men make a fuss over a paper cut and here my six month old doesn't even make a peep.

she is also starting to get more daring when standing by letting go with at least one hand and trying to move between objects by reaching. luckily she doesn't cry every time she falls. i'm telling you, she is one tough kid. i think that she has to be tough in order to keep up with her active lifestyle!

oh, one more random maddie story from today. she crawled out of her nursery and into the guest bedroom out of pure curiosity - not to follow me. we had better get the baby gate on the stairs this weekend (or sooner).

i have to go get my mom at the airport tonight. she is going to be here until monday. love.

typical tuesday

today we broke out a new toy that maddie got for Christmas from her papa and nana. it combines three of her favorite things - a mirror, music, and flashing lights. we call it her "american idol toy" (it has a toy microphone with it too). here is a little video of her playing with it.

other than that, we had a pretty quiet day. her schedule got a little off because i had a meeting that went from 9 - 10 this morning which is normally when she would have breakfast and instead i had worked it so that she was napping (and crying a little). i would have felt guilty, but she was smiling and playing in her crib when my meeting finally ended.

so since there isn't anything too great from today, here is some more video of maddie just doing what she does from sunday after she had been stripped down from her cottage cheese snack/mess. love.

now we're moving

madelyn can get herself up to the top of the coffee table and walked down to where she could reach some magazines and matt's wii controller. i started filming after she got down to her basket of toys and started reaching for everything on the coffee table.



so then i pulled her down to make her try again so that i could film her getting herself up and down the coffee table. but then she fell this time - oops. (she stopped crying quickly and went down for a nap.)



yesterday, i let her have some cottage cheese as part of her finger food afternoon snack. she really got into picking up the little curds and getting them into her mouth. it was, however, very messy and she had to be stripped down. i didn't get her dressed again before dinner (avocado) which was just as well because - as you will see - dinner was very messy too. she had been biting the spoon as hard as she could (with all four top teeth and three bottom teeth) and wouldn't even let go when she would pull the spoon herself and that is what i was trying to film. instead you get to see how excited she gets for every spoonful and how she 'helps' get the spoon into her mouth.



today we introduced millet porridge for breakfast and it might be a new favorite! i was really doubtful that she would eat it since she doesn't like the texture of the rice porridge, but she really liked it. now that she will eat two grains, i can mix the oatmeal and millet with some veggies to create true "super porridge" for a complete meal. yea!

i also let her try a straw cup today and she was able to suck her water up. i was actually surprised that she was able to drink from it.

now that she can get around better - and quicker - she crawls over to my desk chair when she is ready to eat or nap. no, really. i know it sounds crazy, but all day she would play by herself in my office and then crawl over to my chair at the exact times when she has been eating and napping since we got home from Christmas in kansas.

sleeping update: saturday night maddie slept from around 7:30pm until 6:30am! and then last night she slept from around 7pm until 4am. the good news is that she went right back to sleep after i went and cuddled her for a minute at 4am. she was just sitting up in her crib and crying. i think that she couldn't figure out how to lay back down again. progress!

love.

the trouble with toys

madelyn is napping so i thought that i would come and blog about the trouble with toys right now...

with all the recent recalls for safety reasons and the much more publicised lead content in toys from china, the moms in the neighborhood were discussing whether or not to even accept any toys made in china for Christmas this year (one mom said that she was going to ask relatives not to even give toys). it just takes so much work to research each toy and make sure that it is safe for your child/children. not only do you have to worry about choking hazards, but now there are unseen dangers in toys. to help ease your mind about the toys in your house, here are a few sites that might help:

http://www.healthytoys.org
http://www.cpsc.gov/cpsclist.aspx (thanks, kellie.)
http://www.toyinfo.org
http://www.recalls.gov/cpsc.html

okay, now that i have had my serious moment. here is a cute video about this serious issue and an email that you can send to your state's lawmakers.

to change the subject all together - i have gotten some requests for the book title in last night's video. it is "copy cats animal noises" by richard powell, published by tiger tales and is available from discovery toys. i read/played it with madelyn today and while she laughed she didn't like my animal noises nearly as much as daddy's. she did enjoy trying to do the spinner all by herself (it is sort of like an old school phone wheel - i don't know what it is called).

i have to run. time to restock my freezer with baby food cubes - man, this kid eats a lot! love.

reading is fun

i wasn't going to post tonight because we spent the day running errands and had nothing too major to report, but then i got this great video of matt reading madelyn her bedtime stories. i was starting to clean up the kitchen after bathing and feeding maddie when i could hear her laughing. matt was reading her an animal sounds book where you spin the wheel and make the animal noise. maddie hasn't really liked this book in the past (i think that she was just too young), but tonight it was a hit! i think that she knew that it was funny that daddy was making all these noises. you can tell that she is laughing at him because she keeps looking up to see what he is doing.



since i am already blogging i will also mention that she had her first bath in the real bathtub tonight. i picked up a mat at babies-r-us on friday because she is really too big for her infant tub and the last time i tried the real tub she just slid all over the place. being in the real tub was definitely more fun for maddie and me. and it made it a lot easier to make sure that she got really clean!

we tried mango this morning but it must be an acquired taste that maddie doesn't have yet. this is the first food that she has truly rejected. i guess i will wait a week or two before trying it again (it is really expensive to by organic mangoes and they don't make much). on a brighter note, she can't get enough yogurt with pears! she gobbles it up and gets mad if i take too long with her next bite! this is a major shift to the sour face she made after every bite earlier in the week. still no luck with the homemade rice cereal. i think that it is a texture thing. we are going to try the millet next and see what happens...

love.

eating and sleeping

maddie had a big day of eating and sleeping today! she took a 2 hour nap in the morning, a 3 hour nap in the afternoon, and then one more one hour nap at 5. and she ate a lot too! after a pretty normal breakfast of a 1/4 cup of rice 'porridge' with 4 tablespoons of butternut squash, she had more than 1/4 cup of yogurt with 4 tablespoons of pears and then 6-7 tablespoons of sweet potatoes plus 2 tablespoons of avocado for dinner. she is just a growing girl, what can i say...

the video is of her 'talking' to her toys. i had put her on the floor with a few toys and pulled out the basket with the others - she did the rest. she crawled herself over to the basket, got up on her knees and started trying to get her toys out while 'talking'. this isn't her word talking (i.e. da, di, ga, goo, ya, etc.) it is her happy sound talking. she did eventually get her toys out of the basket i had just turned off the camera already to clean up the kitchen before daddy got home.

i don't think that i mentioned it or not, but my solution to her waking up at night is to just let her cry herself back to sleep. so far we have tried this for two nights. she doesn't really 'cry' so much as call out and wait for me to come and then call out again. the longest it has taken for her to fall back to sleep is 8 minutes (i keep track), so i don't feel too guilty. when i was trying to get her calories up so that she would go back to sleeping through the night i think i overindulged her and got her used to snacking and now i have to break the habit. she only woke up two or three times last night so i think we are making progress. what did i do to my little baby who has slept through the night since she was two weeks old?! i'll keep you all posted on if this works or not. love.

standing up

maddie was crawling all over my office today from one toy to the next. so i got to filming. i was disappointed because as soon as i turned the camera on she got sort of tied up in her book and stopped crawling around. i almost stopped filming, but then she grabbed on to her toy and stood up to play! and when it started sliding she walked along with it. i was so glad to have caught it on tape. she has pulled herself up several times, but this was the first official 'stand'. enjoy! love.

oops-a-daisy

as you can see maddie wore herself out playing in my office today. i turned around to check on her and she was just chillin' like this taking a break from crawling all over the improved floor space in my office and checking out all the office furniture that she couldn't reach before. she was particularly fond of the wicker baskets on my bookshelf and the magnets on my file cabinets.

she was sort of cranky today, but we still had a good day. she has finally gotten the hang of peek-a-boo. if i put a burp cloth over her face and say "where's maddie?" she will pull it off and smile/laugh. since she finally gets what all the excitement is over saying "peek-a-boo" i started hiding behind the furniture and peeking around the corner. she thought that this was a lot of fun and sat herself behind the ottoman so that she could peek out after i poked my head out from behind the couch and said "peek-a-boo". she would even go back to 'hiding' after she saw me.

with all the traveling and Christmas excitement i forgot to write about her first major accident - there was blood. i was running around trying to get everything ready for our trip and we were getting ready to get in the car for dropping Christmas cards and other items off at the neighbors' houses. i was trying to sign a birthday card and maddie kept grabbing the card and the pen so i set her on her back on the carpet. she rolled over and crawled out onto the hardwoods. since we were going out she was wearing sweatpants and her knee slipped resulting in bloodied gums and lots of tears. it was her first experience on the hardwoods. i didn't even notice the blood until i got her to stop crying, but then i was a little upset. i think the fall just caused one of her top teeth to push all the way through the gum causing it to bleed. i figure that this is the first of many injuries to come and a pretty minor one at that. plus, she was chewing on hard toys only moments later without any hesitation.

i am happy to report that she now catches herself when she starts to fall. love.