Friday, November 2, 2007

Emilia's Developing Personality


I’ve been a bit delinquent about posting lately, but our camera (or, more specifically, our batteries) have been on the fritz lately. So we’ve had to survive with only a few dozen photos of Emilia over the last week or two rather than a few hundred (remember, she’s our first child, which means we’re a little overzealous with the photos).

It’s been fun to watch Emilia’s personality revealing itself more every day. She seems to experience some separation anxiety when she’s tired, but apart from that she is extremely curious and quite outgoing. We are involved in a play group, parent/baby class, and story time. At all of these, Emilia spends most of her time exploring and paying little or no attention to mom. Yesterday she helped our teacher play the guitar; maybe she’ll turn out to have more musical talent than her parents—let’s hope! When we go shopping, she sits in the cart and smiles and often laughs out loud at anyone that will pay any attention to her. As a result, we get lots of comments on how cute she is and dumb questions like, "Is she always this good?" (anyone who's a parent knows why this is a dumb question--of course no baby is always an angel). Emilia is also learning to be tender and affectionate (something I just learned is natural around 12-18 months of age), but has trouble with the concept “gentle.” But she knows how to kiss Baby (her doll), kiss doggy (a toy), and kiss mommy—although she’s selective about when she chooses to do so. She's also very good at hugging.

Emilia continues to not want us to help her stand up, but instead prefers to do it on her own by pulling up on furniture or her toy basket.


This is a photo I just had to post because I think it’s so funny. No, we do not have Emilia begging in the streets and we don't give her alcohol. Agustín burns a DVD full of photos every month or two and sends it to his parents so they can see how Emilia is growing. This was the final photo on the last DVD we sent them. Agustín took it when I wasn’t home (no worries about the rubber band around her neck; he didn’t let her out of his sight for the few minutes she was wearing it). The sign says ‘Grandma and grandpa (this part is in Catalan, a language from northern Spain where Agustín’s parents are originally from), prepare my room, I’m coming for the holidays.’ That’s right, we’re headed to Spain just after Christmas for Emilia’s second visit. This trip should be a lot more interesting (read ‘difficult’) because Emilia has developed overly-good sleep habits and is incapable of sleeping in our arms. Not to mention the fact that she wasn’t mobile the last time we made the long flight (it’s actually three flights---argh!).

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