fourth st payphone: 12 months (told by Daddy)

I can't believe my little girl turns 1 today. She's growing up so fast its kind of depressing but at the same time also more and more fun every day to see her learn and do new things. I don't see her all day like Caitlin does, so every morning or night now it seems like I'm telling Caitlin "Hey she just made a new word" or "Look what shes doing!" usually only to be told it's not as new as I thought. But she is figuring out new words now almost every day. And she's putting signs together to form sentence fragments. She must have been pretty hungry earlier this week because she signed "more" "milk" "please". She's actually abusing the "milk" sign a lot now that she figured out she can get wants she wants quicker with it. Being able to express to Caitlin that she wants to eat right away is making for veeery short feeding times with not much time in between them. She also seems to be eating less real food recently but I'm convinced its because her molars are coming in and her mouth hurts, despite her not seeming to be in any pain. It hurts both of us just to look in her mouth and see the poor baby's gums all messed up.

She's running all over the place now too. It seems like she went from a few steps to running around nonstop all day in just a week. One of her new favorite thing is going up stairs. The other morning I was watching her while Caitlin ran into work to pick up Henri, and Ellie must have been bored/mad after a while because she was standing at the front door crying and trying to get out. I decided to walk the halls with her until Caitlin got back so we ran up and down the hallway and took the elevator to the ground floor and I showed her the stairwell. She immediately started climbing and didn't stop until she got to our floor. We live on the 5th floor! I can barely walk all the way up myself so I don't know how she did it. She wanted to keep going up the steps to the roof but I had to stop her.

Even though she's changing every day and developing faster and faster she's still my little peewee. I can't wait to see what she's like by birthday #2, which is probably when I will write on Caitlin's blog again.