Generations

Gordon Fraser Richards 1918 - 2009

Toes in her nose (or mouth)...

Juniper is such a charismatic, smart wonderful little girl. Even in the past couple of weeks, she has developed a number of useful life skills - for instance, as you can see, she is now a big fan of putting her feet in her mouth. Unfortunately, she can only manage this when her diapers are off, because otherwise there is just too much bulk in the way. But it sure makes changing easier - Juniper lifts her legs out of the way for you as soon as the diaper is undone!

She has also now purposefully rolled herself from back to front three times (the time I had mentioned earlier was, we believe mostly a surprise for her), although I have yet to catch that on film. And she is trying very hard these days to sit up on her own, although she can only manage it for about 10 seconds at a time. She is, however, very comfortable sitting if she's supported. Here she is, for instance, just chillin' in our living room chair:

More than just getting smarter and stronger and prettier on a daily basis, however, she is also getting bigger. We had a check-up last week, and she tipped the scales at 16 lbs 11 oz, which (according to those charts that keep track of such things) is in the 96th percentile for her age (she turned four months last week!!!) Our doctor told me to stop feeding her so much. I'm still not sure whether she was joking or not, but I'm not listening either way. Juniper can eat when she's hungry, thank-you very much! She's breast-fed after all. I say celebrate the triple chins and thunder thighs!

And in other news, there have been some nice visits lately - Juniper met our friends Tracy, Dan and their son Benjamin for the first time a couple of weekends ago. Here she is with Tracy - we might have gotten a better picture with all three of them, except that Clark very suddenly and unexpectedly got sick while we were visiting, and so we had to cut it short. We realized, in retrospect, that it was almost certainly a delayed reaction to the H1N1 shot (yes, Clark and I finally broke down and got them - a hard decision), but at the time it was a little scary. Anyway, here is a picture of Juniper and Tracy:

Lat weekend, Bill and Barb (Clark's dad and step-mom) came up for a very nice visit. Juniper was an absolute angel, and gave Barb, in particular, lots of snuggles. We were even able to skype with Barb's mom Helen, which was the first time Juniper got to "meet" her final great-grandmother.
And finally, here is a nice shot of Juniper and Erika, our next door neighbour, who was over for a visit the other day:
Alright, that's all for now, but stay tuned, because I'm still putting together those video montages (I'll finish them, hopefully, no later than this weekend), and before then, I'll also post some new duds that I made for Juniper. There is that hat an mitt set that I knit, and another pair of (very colourful) overalls that I just finished tonight (my fancy snaps finally showed up in the mail today!)
For now, I will leave you with a rather delightful video of Clark and Juniper competing for the Saturday Globe and Mail.