Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!

We will be leaving early Wednesday morning for Thanksgiving travels, so we wanted to leave you all with a post to enjoy over the break (including some video content, naturally).

Simon & Zoe enjoying dinner together

This past week we were able to have dinner with Jen, Adam, & Zoe. It was great to see them again--Zoe is now crawling all over the place! In fact, despite their almost-3-month age gap, I'd be willing to bet that Zoe will be walking before Simon. She's much more interested in standing, and is about ready to cruise at 8+ months old. Simon, while he can pull himself to standing, rarely bothers. As long as he can reach the toys, he's perfectly content on his knees, or sitting, or crawling around! Time will tell, I suppose :).

Babies' receptive vocabularies (what they understand) are much larger than their expressive vocabularies (what they can say)--actually, that's true throughout life, but its particularly evident in infancy (& when learning a foreign language). I teach this fact in my class, and now finally have a baby to see it first hand. Simon doesn't use any sounds/words in a consistent way that we could call a "first word"...but he uses four signs pretty consistently, and indicates in other ways that he sometimes understands what we are talking about. For instance:

Get Your Ball (22 seconds):



What is really fun about an older infant is that they are highly entertaining--to themselves, and others. Simon is pretty good about playing on his own (for a little while, at least) while we try to get things done around the house, and now that he can follow us around, he's a little less fretful when I leave the room, as he is able to come find me. He is finding all sorts of things, in fact, as he can open some drawers, cupboards and doors in the house now. Before bed Simon sometimes gets pretty giddy, when he is tired but still wants to play. The other night, for instance, he made up this fabulous game to play with Daddy (make sure you have the sound on, you really have to hear the giggles coming from this little boy!):

Simon's Game (almost 2 minutes):


(by the way, thanks to Ellie & Ben for the pjs...he was wearing a matching set, but at some point some sort of mess meant a half-change was required)

We wish everyone safe travels over the holiday. I'm sure we'll have some photos to post upon our return, as Simon is spending two days in the company of these two trouble-makers (I mean, these two sweet, adorable, always-well-behaved ladies):


Happy Thanksgiving!