Notice... the pigtails

They are kind of hard to see. But you must look. This was the only day I have ever been able to get CiCi to sit still long enough to attempt pigtails. And they really looked cute. And they were gone within 15 minutes. Oh well!!!
8 years of raising only boys and whenever I had a difficult day and all my other friends (all moms of girls) seemed to be breezing through mommyhood I found comfort knowing that while my time was now their, time would come.
And then CiCi decided to shatter my boy vs. girl beliefs.
She is a mess!!!!! She gets into everything!!! She opens every drawer and counter she can reach and she proceeds to empty the contents. She shoves things in random places - between cushions, under couches, in toilets, in air conditioning vents. Never did I buy safety latches and other seemingly important items for my boys. They were not necessary. Once I placed those little outlet covers in the outlets in our den. Before that day my oldest son had never even noticed the outlets. Once he saw those things he found a new game. Picking the plugs out of the outlets. From that point on I decided there was no need for all those safety things. Neither Arby nor Kenz ever gave me a reason to doubt that theory. I never even put gates up. With Kenz we lived in a house with stairs. He was walking at nine months and his room was upstairs. I had Arby teach him how to crawl down the stairs on his tummy. I was not about to put a gate up at the top of the stairs. All I could envision with a gate was Kenz climbing over it and flying down the stairs. Or me forgetting it was there in the middle of the night and flipping over the darned thing. Thankfully this worked with CiCi as well. She has been climbing up and down the stairs for months now...yet the little stinker won't walk (she is getting close now..finally)
A while back I created a post about CiCi signing. I mentioned that she, deliberately and for a reason only known to her, sticks her finger in her nose and that I knew it meant something. Well we have noticed a pattern. Whenever my DH or Arby (and sometimes me)say something to her that she doesn't like she sticks her finger in her nose. Talk about thumbing your nose at someone. It takes a lot of will power not to burst out laughing whenever she does it. My DH gets such a kick out of it, he now says things just to see how she will respond.
She is also very good at letting us know what she wants. When she eats she grunts for stuff. We take our best guess at what it is. If we are right, we are rewarded by her eating it. If we are wrong she pushes our hand away - with force. She might want that next, but right now she wants that.
She is also very quick. A while back my DH took her out to eat and a waitress stopped by their table to give them a drink. She was on her way to another table with an appetizer for that table. Apparently CiCi thought it looked tasty. In the two seconds that the waitress stooped to handout drinks to my DH, CiCi swiped a handful of food.
Speaking of food..is it at all normal for her to really enjoy butter? Not butter that is cooked in with food. But butter - in packets. Because she really does. And she can be very persistent in the way that she tells you how much she wants that butter. So we let her have it. And she eats it. And it is so gross. So I taught her to dip her food into the butter. Tonight she ate carrots dipped in butter. It is the first time we have ever been able to get her to eat carrots. That's a good thing, right???
I could go on and on, so I'll save it for another post. Enjoy the pics. Christmas ones are coming...next???