Ok, quickly, some things Lennie’s been up to.

She walks across the living room pushing her hippo walker. If you turn it around for her, she’ll pivot and walk back in the other direction. She stands on her own for long periods of time. She took a couple of steps last week (only one at any given time, but she’s done it several times now). She makes a little tennis-ball-smack popping sound with her mouth and looks at me expectantly; when I reciprocate, she giggles. I think she’s actually trying to communicate humor here. She’s telling her first real joke.

One of the funniest things she does now is to imitate us talking on the phone. We can give her the phone or one of our phone-like remote controls, and she’ll hold it up to the side of her head (usually kind of behind her head on the side), get an intent look on her face (or more like a middle-distance absent stare — the talking on the phone look, basically), and start talking with a different intonation than her usual. She’s picked up that our behavior differs when we talk on the phone, and she does a really pretty good imitation of grown-ups. Sometimes she says things that sound vaguely like hello and goodbye when she first gets and before she drops the phone.

At a wedding we were in last night, she saw a picture of a lion on a wall, stared at it pensively for a little while, and eventually came up with “kitty.”

She knows “ball” and is actually pretty good at throwing a ball. She pretty quickly picked up her cousin Hannah’s name this weekend at the wedding.

She likes to bang with a spoon on pots and pans we spread out on the kitchen floor for her. She’s actually fairly discriminating about her noise-making, choosing to experiment with different sounds rather than just banging with reckless abandon. She’s got a way to go before she’s keeping rhythm for a rock opera, but it’s fun to watch now, in any case.

She’s pretty good about saying and waving bye bye now.