Oh yes, the first Fatherly Post.  Brought to you by me.

Liliana is a very strange child.  She likes to clap at strange times, and there are things that interest her that we haven’t taught her to be interested in.  Her walking improves daily, and she continues to be quite social, at least when she’s not hungry.  And we believe her teeth are coming in finally, though we’ve believed that everytime she’s been unexplainably grumpy and drooly.

We have this wooden circular board that is used for hot pans on our table.  It has little square holes and grooves on each side that run perpendicular to the other side.  Apparently its quite interesting.  Even more interesting is that when Liliana saw it, it had a little plastic cap on it from her feeding bags.  And oooh, this plastic cap just happens to fit into the holes.  So she grabs the plastic cap, and starts sliding it back and forth across the board while standing up with one arm propping her up.  Keep in mind that no one showed her this.  Next, we moved her closer to us so we could make sure she doesn’t do anything silly with it.

So she was then sitting right next to me, and we started talking about how interesting it was when the peg went into the holes.  I put my hand out and said, “Here, let me try” and she placed it gently into my hand.  Grandma’s been showing her how to share things and how its more fun that way.  I started sticking the peg really well into the holes, and that was really a challenge, because now Liliana HAD to get that peg out.  She would pick up the whole board with one hand and tug on it with the other.  It was funny to watch.  We did this several times.  I also pointed at one particular hole and said, “Here, put it here” and she tried to!  It became boring though, so she stopped and went on to what she wanted to do.  She played with this one thing for probably 15 minutes straight before we had to start feeding her.

She really really likes to stand up and walk.  She stands up using anything:  Mommy’s chair, mommy’s clothes, daddy’s clothes, low tables, couches, and her inclined bed.  She will sometimes sit back down and crawl just so she can stand up using something else.  Even more scary is that the other day when Mercy went upstairs briefly for something, Liliana followed her, attempting to go up the stairs.  As Mercy came back down, Liliana was already on the first step up, and crying.  She has also started to forget, when really focused on something, that she needs to use both hands to stand.  We tried to get her to walk the other day by standing a couple feet apart and seeing if she would be willing to let both go to walk to the other person, but she mostly just got upset.  So Liliana the Problem Solver sat down, crawled over to me, grabbed my hands, and stood up to much personal applause.

Socially, she really likes hanging out with a group of people, but it takes her a little bit before she warms up.  Especially in unfamiliar environments, she likes to look around and absorb it all first.  Though she looks like mommy, her attitude and personality is definitely more similar to Daddy’s.  Once the initial “Where am I — ooh, a chicken” phase ends, she’s as social as a butterfly.  She likes to clap her hands and talk to people.  She likes to tell them about things.  Most of her speech is still “Dada” and “yehyeh” but she often strings nonsense sounds together that end up sounding like sentences. She also makes the strangest expressions, and will sometimes twist around so she can put her head on her shoulder when she meets new people.  Its like she’s being shy, its incredibly cute when you see it.  We call it “shyface” but its much cuter than a Mario character.

She also likes to play with others as I mentioned above.  She plays a game similar to “Peek a boo” but with toys with Grandma.  First, grandma puts out her hand and asks for the toy.  Next, she covers it up in her hand and says “Where is it?”  Liliana then touches where the toy’s supposed to be, and Grandma says “Yup, there it is!”.  I took the game a little further by giving her choices of hands.  I would take the toy in my left hand, move my hands behind my back, and then bring them back, but then there were two hands!  I wouldn’t switch them, because that would be unfair, it was more about shape recognition and memory recall.  She always picked the correct hand, though she did have a puzzled look on her face.  She probably didn’t understand the point of the new game.

Oh, and lastly, she now likes to try to wave at people when they wave at her.  Its not exactly a wave though, and looks more like just a hand squeezing, but that’s how daddy does it.  When she first started doing it, she would just flex her fingers, and would look at her hand while doing it, so it looked like she was waving at herself instead of you.  She’s getting better at it though, its super cute.