Time is flying!

Yet again it is time to catch up. It is amazing how fast time is flying and how big Kaia is getting. She has been working on her crawling and walking like crazy. Now she will walk around the house only holding one of my fingers so she can stop, squat, pick something up and stand back up to keep walking. Bryn has seen her let go and actually take a step or two. She is also graduating from crawling (the army crawl on her tummy) to creeping (on her hands and knees- Bryn hates that I am using the correct terms:). She is also "talking" like crazy. I noticed a huge difference in the clarity of her talking between this morning and this evening. We think she said mommy today too. And while she was interested in a stuffed flower in her room today I was showing her the sign for flower and telling her it was a flower and multiple times she mimicked me and said a variation of flower, but started it with an M.

We had a break in our activities up here. Our classes took a couple of weeks off between sessions. Today we started back to sign class. It is amazing to see the difference in her in class in a few weeks time. She is still taking in new signs, but isn't giving us a lot of signs because she is so busy with walking and crawling.

Since we had a break we decided to escape to the warm weather of Florida. So last week Kaia and I flew to Orlando to visit my sister and her husband. Kaia was very excited to meet Aunt Sharon and Uncle Ken. Actually, she screamed at Ken the first few days, but finally warmed up to him. She has never done that with any other men, so all I can come up with is that Ken has red hair. Being in such warm weather (it was in the 80's when we left), Kaia got to experience many firsts. The first first was the plane ride to FL. I was really nervous doing her first flight by myself, but she did great!!! Once we were in FL Kaia got to don her new watermelon bathing suit (for those of you that don't know we have called her watermelon since before she was born) and go in Aunt Sharon's pool. She also got to experience her first ride in a swing and got to walk barefoot in grass for the first time. She actually had a couple of days in a row that she didn't even wear shoes:) I got to dress her in shorts and t-shirts and she was not so excited to be covered in non-chemical sunscreen every day.

A couple of days ago Kaia noticed that we had stairs and then decided that she wanted to figure out how to go up them. We diverted her attention and she hasn't noticed them since. But that did force us to go online and order all of the various gates that we need for her.

This is a huge travel month for us. We haven't traveled since our cross country trip and now we are making up for lost time. Last week was FL, next week we are going to CA during Bryn's spring break and a week after that Bryn needs to be in PA for a few days. So we are all driving down to MD and Kaia and I will stay there while Bryn goes to PA. During that time my sister, Sharon, and my brother, Steve, will be in town. This will be the first time all 5 of us kids will get to be in the same place together in years. It is also good timing because my dad is just now recovering from pneumonia and is really looking forward to it.

I promise to try to decrease the lag time between posts:)