ten months!

In the past month, she's learned to pull herself into a supported stand; she can take a couple of steps alongside whatever she's holding onto. She notices everything and points to learn what things are. She talks and sings and giggles and shrieks with laughter.

She eats BREAD now! And cheese, and cereal, and falafel (heh), and as babycenter.com advises: "anything small and edible that can dissolve in water, unlike a peanut."

And she drinks from a sippy-cup almost on her own. She'll hold it and suck on the top; sometimes she accidentally tilts it enough to get water in her mouth. If one of us helps with the angle, she can get mouthfuls and swallow them. (She also throws the sippy cup and anything else within reach. I figure if I haven't gotten tired of that game by now, I probably will survive til she's bored with it.)

At her grandma's house on Monday she crawled all over, stood against furniture, waved, laughed, sang, and played. She plays "I'm running away you better catch me!"; she plays "you can't see me"; she plays "I'm gonna eat you up!" -- she gave my mom kisses on her tummy! -- and "oh don't eat me up!"; she plays with food and toys and faces and fingers.

She's got the liveliest, deepest brown eyes there ever were. She sparkles.

The other night Geoff and Jacqui and I journeyed to Wegman's, which is a super-mega-grocery store. I didn't correct the bakery man who mistook her for a boy, because he was so impressed with her that he offered me extra bread samples to feed her.

She's experiencing separation anxiety and stranger anxiety, but when we visited a friend last week she felt comfortable enough to nap in a different baby's play-yard; she also let my friend's mom hold her.

Most nights, her daddy puts her to bed. Most nights, he ends up falling asleep in the rocker with her on his chest. It's the stuff sappy oil-paintings are made of. She hasn't been sleeping through the night lately; today I realized her other front top tooth has broken through. Maybe sometime soon (not tonight), she'll be able to sleep through again.