A second tooth

Quick news update:

We reported earlier on the sighting of the first tooth in Lexi's lower gum.

Now, just after the first tooth has begun to poke through, a second one has suddenly appeared!

We have each put a finger in her mouth to feel these teeth coming through, and they seem a bit sharp!

Hard at Play

Lexi plays hard. She has SO much energy and is always on the go. If there was a competition on emptying laundry baskets, she would be one of the speediest. And crawling up the stairs would be another contest she could enter. I think her speed has increased...though she still hasn't figured out how to go down, even though I keep showing her.

On our walk to the grocery store today, she didn't want to sit back in her stroller but kept craning her head around to see everything that was going on. Was I ever this curious?

She looked at Stephen a little blankly when he came in the door this morning. He had been away for over a week. She warmed up to him quickly though.

I'm so hungry I could eat the plate!

In the first days of feeding Lexi solid foods, I shot this video after she ate with us. Believe me, we didn't starve her to the point of forcing her to eat the plate!

Learning to clap

By popular demand, the video everyone's talking about, the one where Lexi is trying to clap. After much practice, she can now get her hands together, but this was in the early days of learning how to do it. She's standing on the lap of Lora, Stephen's sister, while we were all riding in a boat on the Victoria Nile River in Murchison Falls National Park in Uganda, where we went for Easter weekend this year.

Lexi crawling

Soon after Lexi started crawling. In the background, the sound you hear is Jane, our nanny/housekeeper, telling Lexi to come (kuja in Kiswahili)

What a noisy eater!

In her younger days, when she was just a little thing and when she first started eating solid foods in her high chair, we were so amused at how noisy Lexi was.

Lexi's daily exercise routine

Because Lexi quickly got the hang of crawling and from there wanted to move right into walking, she's taken to climbing and pulling herself up on things to move toward the walking stage. Often she'll head straight for the stairs and try to climb up them, so we've taken to just allowing her to climb the stairs a couple times a day while we watch her just so she can be satisfied with doing it and to get her exercise. Fortunately we live in a tall three-story house, so she has plenty of stairs to climb.

Now that I'm in Chicago, where I have access to a decent Internet connection, I can upload some of these videos I've taken of Lexi over the past few months and share them with everybody here. Enjoy!