Catching up

In the past week or so -- seems like all at once -- Jimmy has figured out how to go from crawling to sitting and back again, had his first tooth (finally) make an appearance, and yesterday he grabbed the play yard fence and pulled himself up to standing without any help. Whew! No wonder he's been a little extra fussy at nap time, there's a lot going on in there!

While Katie stands up nearly every chance she gets (fortunately she's also figuring out how to get down without bumping her head, too), Jimmy seems happier up on his knees than either sitting or standing. He still needs to hold on to something to kneel, either the fence or one of the big toys they have. They are starting to play together sometimes, which at this point consists mostly of touching each other without someone crying at the end of it.

They both enjoy some time outside the play yard, too, either crawling or zooming around in their walker. Katie has mastered backing up and turning around after she runs into something, Jimmy is figuring it out too. They're bothing getting more and more vocal as well. Jimmy is using b's, d's, and m's in his "talking", Katie is following right along with "ba-ba-ba-ba-ba". They also both enjoy shrieking loudly when they're having fun, I'm not sure whether just to hear the sound of their own voice, or to see the funny faces Mommy and Daddy make. We are beginning to teach them some baby sign language, and although neither of them have the dexterity to make any signs just yet, I think they're beginning ot recognize a couple of them ("bottle" seems to be their favorite... no surprise there :-).

Katie has decided she likes soft baby food now (before she only wanted things she could chew on)
, and we are finding more and more foods they both like. We give them little tastes of many of the things we eat, and so far there isn't much they don't want more of. They are slowly figuring out how to get pieces of food into their own mouths, which will make feeding time a bit easier for us -- keeping up with two hungry mouths is a challenge!

I took a bunch of pictures over the past few days of them playing together and just doing what they do, they're in the Month 9 album.