Things Lennie’s done this week, some of them quite possibly repetitive from previous entries:

• Had cartoonish image made of her Daddy and her for Daddy’s work from one of Daddy’s favorite photos.
• Said something close to “Andy” (her uncle)
• Said “Deda” in reference to her Aunt Fleda
• Continued to say something moderately close to “kitty cat” when looking at the cat
• Started pointing at things (I taught her to do this)
• Said something pretty close to “duck” when looking at the ducky shower curtain rings in our guest bathroom. (She did this on several occasions during potty time with Daddy, which occurs any time I’ve got her and have to pee, when I just take her in there and make the best one-handed effort I can)
• Said Abbey last week on the way to the airport to go to New York, which utterance thrilled Aunt Abbey, who was kind enough to take us to the airport and was sitting in the backseat next to Lennie and who absolutely melted.
• Returned from her first airplane ride. Daddy didn’t board an airplane until he was 21 years old, so Lennie’s got a jump.
• Stood up unassisted for a pretty substantial time. This happened while we were in New York, and we’ve got it on video. Uncle Willem was playing with her and had her standing up. When she seemed pretty stable, he let her go, and she stood there unwobbling like a real person for upwards of ten seconds. We’ve got it on video, and, let me tell you, it absolutely rocks. Just this week, I’ve started to be able to see her as if she were a real child rather than a beetle-ey sort of baby. I can for the first time almost picture her toddling around, and it’s weird and awesome and a little sad because she’s well on her way now to eating without help and driving and dry humping with unworthy little assholes of boys whom I’ll have to uncharacteristically intimidate. For now, let’s just celebrate the milestone and deal with this other standing-baggage later.
• She’s crawled two or three steps a time or two over the past couple of weeks, but tonight, she crawled pretty much across the room. She was going for the poor kitty cat (which, let me note that though she has said something pretty close to “kitty” and “kitty cat,” she usually says “DUH-dn-Duh,” which label she applies to other things as well), and she crawled from my big chair over maybe five feet across the living room to the poor unsuspecting DUH-dn-Duh, who was none too pleased to receive the hand-smacky attention. So but she crawled, and this was real crawling, the kind that you can write about and put down in the scrapbook as the official crawling.

That’s all that comes to mind right now. Words in her vocabulary so far (and let me note that when I say “words,” I mean big-hand-quotes “words,” as in things loosely equivalent to words) are as follows in aproximate order of appearance:

• Mama
• Dada (referring not to the avant garde art movement but to me)
• Ella (usually “Edda”)
• light (M was flipping the light off and on and saying “light” over and over again, and Lennie mimicked it twice; this one might not really count.)
• kitty cat
• Abbey
• Andy
• Deda
• Bo (for Uncle Bowman and really more like “Bah,” but close enough, unless it in fact refers to sheep, an entirely plausible possibility given Lennie’s fondness for Lela the stuffed sheep, which was given to her by my former coworker Debbie Miller.)
• duck (more like duh, but there’s a definite word-thing association there, so it counts)

A year or two ago, a friend of mine who had had a baby recently told me that the baby herself was the best thing she had ever done. I didn’t really have the perspective to be able to understand it at the time, but tonight, as I was indulging in a solo potty time with Daddy, it occurred to me that, yes, my lovely lovely child is the best thing I’ve ever done, barnone, hands down, and nuff said.