But now we face the bigger challenge. Yesterday she officially climbed UP the smaller flight of stairs from the family room all by herself! Good job Heidi! Nice skill development! I discovered her practicing this new skill and repeating her performance this morning, with encouragement from her brother.

Why is this a challenge? Only because the “climbing stairs” skill comes months before the “climbing down stairs” skill–which means the former is unsafe when not closely supervised. That means I have to keep a gate at the top of the stairs when upstairs, and at the bottom of the stairs when downstairs. And I only have one gate. And every adult in the house gets annoyed with the gate already, and it’s only up when I’m upstairs and Heidi’s not in her high chair.

Funny how exciting and frustrating one simple accomplishment can be, no?

I need to remember that puzzles do almost as much good in terms of babysitting Degen and Maggie for me as TV. Only a little messier. But less guilt!

Heidi ate baby food peas today for the first time. She wasn’t quite as excited about them as she was about the squash, but pondered the first bite for a minute or two before resuming her scream-before-each-bite routine. She’s having a little more trouble eating people food than I recall with my older two. She shakes in excited anticipation of each bite and will only open her mouth for a millisecond for me to put the spoon in, I can only assume because she thinks I’m going to take the food out of her mouth before she gets to swallow it. One big plus this time around–Sonja has her trained to ignore the bib, where my other two tore them from their necks as quickly as I could put them on. Saves me a lot of grubbiness.