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.