Walking

Finally, at the ripe old age of 14 months, Kathleen taken her first steps. Not that I was worried or anything. But she was the first in her group to sit up and the first to crawl, and then ... nothing. All the others have been walking for a while now, but not our Kathleen. Maybe when she started crawling at six months she thought that was it, she'd found a way to get around and she was going to stick with it. She finally took her very first independent steps at the end of March, but it took her until April 20th (a day shy of turning 15 months) for her to actually decide to try walking without mummy or daddy encouraging her. She is still very slow and still crawls a lot of the time, but at least she is giving it a go now. More often than not she'll reach for my finger and ask me to take her wherever it is that she's going. Walking holding on to someone's hand is definitely her preferred mode of transport now - a la the photo above of her with Poppa and Auntie Mardie.

Now I love this photo here. It perfectly captures Kathleen as she is most evenings lately - climbing onto the couch by herself and screaming her head off. Not screaming unhappy. Not screaming scared. But a combination of screaming "look at me" and "I like the sound of my own voice". Sometimes I worry about her falling off the couch, but I can't stop her and hey, a few bumps and bruises are all part of growing up. She's fallen a couple of times but it certainly hasn't stopped her. She's such a clown. No shrinking violet, this one.

We are all doing well. It has started getting a lot colder around here lately and we have the fire going every morning. Kathleen has settled into a good routine of waking up around 8-8.30am, having lunch around 12-12.30pm, a nap around 1.30pm until 3pm, dinner at 6.30pm, bath at 7.30pm and bed at 8.30pm. This is working out quite well for us. I know it's a bit of a late bedtime, but dinner and bath and getting dressed and reading a story take SOOO long. And if we started any earlier, Peter wouldn't be home from work yet. So it works.

-Megz