More Milestones

Vi is now starting to imitate. It's really cute. She'll try and say similar sounds and also move her arms in similar movements as you. I noticed this about a week ago when I was sitting next to her and had my arms over my head stretching and making that "tired groan" noise. She was watching me the whole time and tried to repeat me. I didn't notice it at first, but after a while it clued in that that's what she was doing. So I repeated myself and watched, and sure enough she did it again. Arms up and made a noise. Too cute! When I'm feeding her, I'll put my arms up and shrug my shoulders like "I don't know?", and she'll try and repeat it. I love it.

She's getting to be quite the excellent crawler now, and has just started to push and pull herself up onto couches and things into a standing position. She started with pushing herself up -- but the toy, or whatever had to be at or below her waist and she could push up into a stand, but now (just today, as reported by Marn on the phone this morning) she pulled herself up from something that was higher. It won't be long now where she'll be furniture walking! She really likes to "walk" (while holding her hands and standing over her) with the biggest wobbly high steps ever.

She's also started doing a "cutesy face". Scrunching up her nose with a wide closed-mouth smile and squinted eyes. I think every kid does them at some point, but when it's your own, it's a little cuter than usual, even though it's not really a cute face at all. It's more cute that she thinks it's a cute face. We've been trying to get a picture of it, but haven't had any luck so far.

I've noticed we haven't posted pics of her for a while, so I'll get on that soon....

We are still kind of looking for a new house back in the city. We keep flopping back and forth on it, actually. Do we stay or do we go? Marn thought she decided to stay for another 2 years and try and pound away at our mortgage and then make a move. We would likely miss the dip in housing prices by doing that as well (this region isn't really hurting in the housing market anyway...).
We walked through a house last night that we absolutely love, but it was close the expressway and very loud in the backyard which totally ruins everything about the place for us. It was a bungalow with 2-sided wood-burning fireplace, but also had some "quirks" (ie: only 2 bedrooms, no en-suite, a strange basement...) It's really too bad because we really, really love the house and the yard. The yard was 80 feet wide and 350 feet deep. No, that's not a typo... over half of an acre in the city, backing on to forest (with the expressway after that). In fact, more than half of the backyard is forest -- the current owners decided to cut off their usable yard less than half way and let the forest grow in. We'd have about an 80 x 200 foot private forest, or clear some space out and make the yard even bigger - Echo would have LOVED that! Very, very rare to find something like this in the city, and in our price range (albeit, on the very high side of our limit). But the noise, ugh!! We decided that we couldn't live with it. It was probably a good thing that we went right at rush hour (5:30) to experience what it would be like every morning and evening, but never really going away. You couldn't hear the noise in the house, though. We drove by on Sunday afternoon as well, and there was still a fairly loud "shh" from the highway, so you would have to be ok with constant white noise. The thing that drove it home that the house wasn't right for us was a comment by Marn's mom; "It's not like the Expressway is going to get less busy - in fact it will probably get worse over time". Yup, she's right, and we couldn't do it. Which TOTALLY sucks. We LOVE the house and yard!