More Milestones

In the Cowart family this past month:

• Claire turned three!
  


• Haley started walking!
  


• Haley got 3 new teeth (2 molars--a little out of order).
  


• To her usual "more" sign, Haley has added "please," "thank you" and "eat."
  
• Haley has also added words to her speech: "amen," "yes," "yeah," "What's that?" (as she points), "don't" and "stop." She must hear me say the last two pretty often—those words were discovered while we were in Colorado. As the four of us girls fell asleep in our room every evening or naptime, three of us would be serenaded by a baby's protesting yell, followed by that same baby sternly barking, "No! . . . Don't! . . . Stop!" ("no! do! Sto!") Last week, she started saying amen, which is usually repeated over and over as soon as we put her in her high chair and (until recently) continues until the end of the prayer, becoming more and more insistent as time passes. I have to say, the first part is a good reminder, because it is not unusual for me to forget to thank God for our food when it is just us girls (and the meals are, shall we say, informal). The latter. . . well, we're training her out of that.
  
• Haley now eats almost 100% table/real food. Last month, she enjoyed her first peanut butter and banana sandwich. I am only needing to chop about 2-3 meals a week in the food chopper, and she feeds herself about 50-75% of the time now, so that has freed me up considerably.
  
• In the car, Haley now faces forward!
  


• And Claire (who passed her car seat to Haley) now has a cute girly booster, on which she proudly sits. A bargain: we paid less than $60 (with s&h) at Target.com and it was delivered to our door in two days! She just has to learn how to put her seatbelt on now. She was able to do her own (very complicated) 5-point harness before. It would seem I've made more work for myself by trading her up.
  


• Ruby writes her name. The order of the letters often changes, but she now puts all the letters together, instead of just her initial, which is how she's signed her name for a while.
  


• Claire recognizes many letters by the sounds they make. ("Look, Mom! There's a C,C, Claire!")
  
• My Birth Blog turned two! The day I started that blog was Claire's first birthday. I went to a friend's wedding that evening (a friend whose wife would go on to have a prodromal labor almost exactly year and a half later . . . what are the odds?!), then came home and tweaked and published my first post
  (Claire's Birth Story) on that blog.
  
• AND. . . (drum roll, please!). . . this week marks a first in our over-six-year marriage: 14+ months without pregnancy! We've come close to 14 months twice (almost exactly 14 months after we got married, we were prego w/Ruby and Claire was 13 ½ months old when we got prego w/Haley), but until now, we never made it over that mark. To some of our friends, this means we are "due" to be prego with number four soon, since we do absolutely nothing to prevent pregnancy. Though I don't argue that it is likely that we will be pregnant again at some point (since every month, I can get pregnant), I challenge this kind of thinking in a post I'm working on for my birth blog, entitled: Yes, I am Fertile; No, I'm Not Pregnant. (I'll add a link when it's posted for those who are curious to know what it's like to live "month-to-month" in this way.)