This kid is amazing. Just blossoming away like a little peach and hitting all kinds of developmental milestones. Why, just this week, she passed two of them...

1. She is really good at pushing buttons. We have a family tradition at our house of playing on the be every morning. Elli loves to walk all over our bed, fall on the pillows, jump, look at the ceiling fan, play with our alarm clocks. The usual. It probably feels like an expansive field compared to her crib. So, yesterday morning my alarm clock goes off. I feel like a truck has run over me. I can't imagine why I'm waking up so tired. I hit snooze a couple of times, and then turn the clock off. Then I make the cardinal sin of falling asleep again after the clock has been turned off. Don't do that. After a period of time, I wake up panicked. I grab my clock and it reads 7:25am. Stink. Not a problem for the guy who has to go into work at noon, but certainly a problem for his wife who should have been catching babies at the hospital at 7:00am. But then I come to a startling realization...It's still dark outside. Hmmmmmm. I look at Stacy's alarm clock. 5:20am. Interesting. So Elli knows how to push buttons in a way that resets daddy's alarm clock. That's gotta be a developmental milestone.

2. On Monday, Elli was taking her bath. I usually am an active participant for the first 15 minutes, and then I grab a magazine. The kid loves to romp around in the tub, and so I let her play until she gets tired of it. Well, as I'm reading I look over to see Elli extending her hand out to me. Not an empty hand, mind you. A hand holding a piece of poop. A piece of poop that she is giving me. Good for her. She is wise enough to know that poop doesn't belong in the bathtub. Certainly a developmental milestone. This wisdom came at a price though, because she then finished her dirty work as I was depositing her gift in the toilet, thus creating a lot more work for us. It seemed like the appropriate time to clean out the tub and start bath time over again. But certainly, our first bath poop ever was a great milestone.

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