Thursday

Yesterday was a normal day, but a good day. It was a nice Thursday. I was pretty productive at work, and had time to run a few errands after work before I went home. Its not really that hard to run errands with Abby, but its easier to do it alone. So, I was glad to have those things crossed off my list.

Abs and I played for a while when I got home. She is learning new words everyday and is getting so good at mimicking me - just this morning she said "lotion" after I said it. It was freakishly clear. She's also adding new animal sounds at a rapid pace. It seems that her vocabulary has just snowballed over the past few weeks. She's also getting *really* good at saying "thank you" and signing "please" This makes me and Kyle very happy. Abby actually probably says Thank you too often - but how are you supposed to correct that? Yeah, exactly. So, we're ok with being thanked for every little thing. I'm sure it won't last forever. :)

As far as animal sounds go, here's a list. I should probably get them all on video.

dog: "uffff"

cat: "meow"

cow: "oooooo"

monkey "oo-oo, aah-aah"

sheep: "baaaa"

duck "cak-cak"

tiger "rar"

Anyway. I'm really enjoying her new vocab skills. We took a few pictures yesterday, here she is rockin' the headband.

pointing at the cat - she now says "meow" for cat and its adorable.

saying "woah" as she unlocks the phone

Abby has turned into a little climber. She loves to climb on the couch, in and out of our storage ottoman, her toy baskets and especially her duck.

what? doesn't everyone check their mail this way?

Abby has a shelf in our pantry that is kind of her shelf. We keep our things on it, but she routinely plays with those things. Yesterday, she decided to rearrange and clean house. Here she is having cleared most of the shelf, discovering a hidden bag of marshmallows.

here she is pretending she wasn't just holding the marshmallows. Even at this young age, she knows that she probably shouldn't be doing what she's doing. All I said was "Abby." and she dropped the bag, sat down, and started putting things back on the shelf.

In other, non-abby news, I tried two new recipes this week. Last night, I made my first eggplant parmesan. It was pretty good, although I think I still prefer meat to eggplant. Abby, on the other hand, looooved it. loved.

I used a no-fry recipe so I breaded and baked the eggplant, and then arranged the casserole

it tasted better than the finish product looked. :)

the other new thing I tried was prosciutto wrapped asparagus. I used cream cheese and spread it on the prosciutto and then wrapped and baked. The key here is to not overdo how much prosciutto you use per stalk since it can be rather salty. I found that using 1 slice to wrap 4 stalks was a good ratio, or .25 - .5 of a slice for 1 stalk. Either way, they were good.

Ok, back to Abby things. Yesterday we bought Abby her first real ball. I know, I know - how could this have taken so long? Well, because we don't often go to stores that sell them and when we do, we forget. But yesterday as we were all at the grocery store, I spotted a bin of them and so we grabbed one for Abs. The video doesn't do justice to how excited she was over that thing. She had so so much fun playing with daddy last night.