Busy busy busy

We are all busy beavers around here these days.

Jeff's business is going strong and his schedule is jam packed with paying projects, board meetings and bringing in more new business. I don't think I've said it here before, but Jeff has worked SO HARD since leaving Wamu and while everyone knows that starting your own business is a challenge, living that challenge is another thing entirely. To see Jeff working so hard this last year and now reaping the benefits is very rewarding.

I also recently signed on as a freelancer to plan a big event next month and am hitting the ground at a sprint to get everything lined up with very little time (and no daycare). Posts might continue in this irregular manner until the gig is over in late October.

Perhaps the busiest member of our family these days is Edie though. She is so close to talking. Just today she was pointing at the helium balloons at the grocery store and tried saying, "Baaaabla" which I realize sounds nothing like balloon, but actually - it kind of does. Considering that a week ago I probably could have pointed at the balloon and said, "balloon!" and she would have said, "Pwep!", this is major. Her desire to say "cat" has intensified lately, with her alternating between "tat" and "cac" - now we're just trying to help her combine the two. We're also fairly certain that she is correctly saying "hat". Jeff has a baseball cap that he puts on Edie sometimes as a joke and she will point at it now and say "hat". I think we're only reluctant to say it's officially her first word because it sounds similar to her saying "dat" (which means "that"). "Dat" is used almost constantly around here - Edie essentially spends her entire day pointing at anything and everything and asking "dat?", which means I spend MY entire day just listing my surroundings - Refrigerator! Chair! That's a car!... you get the idea. So we aren't sure if we're giving her too much credit and she's really just saying "dat" or if we're right and she's actually saying "hat" while pointing at a hat. Which would be so exciting!

She also started signing "more" a week ago. The first time was for ice cream, but the second time was because she liked the water toy I used in the bath and when I stopped, she signed for "more". I found it pretty remarkable that she was able to actually understand the concept of more and not just think it was in relation to food.

When "quizzed" she can now consistently point correctly to her ball, her blanket, shoes (in fact, if asked "Where's Dad's shoe?" she'll actually point at Jeff's foot and not mine), books, the hat, and her toes. When I ask her where her nose is, she points at my nose, which is pretty cute and close enough for me to be impressed. She's developed an uncanny interest in shoes lately. When I leave mine laying around she'll find them and try to put them on. She also points at her own shoes while wearing them ALL the time.

One thing she is NOT learning is how to slow down. She runs so fast that she trips over her own feet and bites the dust like 500 times a day. We took her to the outlet mall today and she wanted to walk THE ENTIRE TIME. As in, she completely refused to be carried. This would be fine if she didn't run away from you as soon as you set her down. And run towards the most dangerous thing in sight. If she wasn't trying to grab cigarette butts from the ashtrays, then she was heading for the patch of dirt a dog just peed on, or a piece of garbage on the ground that you just know she wants to taste. I think it's time to break out the baby leash.