One Year with Celia

Over the past 8 months it's become clear that Andres is the protagonist of this blog. Celia had her time in the spotlight for the first few months while I was at home with her, but even then she shared a lot of the real estate with her big brother; Andres was the one doing interesting things when we went on day trips, while Celia was content to eat, sleep, and watch her brother. Sadly that behavior does not make for a very interesting blog post. Running around an empty basement while speaking in tongues does, though, so you can understand why my posts frequently revolved around Andres.

But I woke up one day earlier this month and, all of a sudden, my newborn daughter had turned one, and I felt sad that I had not chronicled more of her milestones and achievements. This does not mean I did not notice them--I did, and I have copious mental notes filed away in my head about the first time she did this, the first time she did that, etc...but somehow stories about summer fun and fall day trips were more interesting to write about than the first time Celia crawled, or stood, or walked (a couple days ago), or did anything for the first time. I'm trying to rectify the absence of these posts at least a little bit with this entry.

So what can I say about Celia? She's one year old and change. She sleeps great, eats a ton, loves to play peekaboo, and would follow her brother over a cliff if that's where he wanted to go. (For his part, Andres doesn't quite understand this level of devotion yet; he gets annoyed by it frequently.)

My girl at 1 day

My girl at 1 year

Celia has been mobile for a few months now--first crawling, then cruising around objects, and now slowly learning to walk. At home she has a couple of wagons and cars that she pushes around. She hasn't mastered turning yet, so we frequently have to redirect her away from the street.



On October 16 I meant to write about how Natalia and I had walked into Celia's room in the morning to see her standing on her own--this was the first time we had seen this! She normally pulls herself up to a standing position when she wakes up, but on this morning she had pulled herself up and then let go of the railing. So there she was, standing in her crib...and then she realized what she was doing, got startled, laughed, and fell down. We laughed too, knowing that it would only be a little while longer until she was really taking baby steps to keep up with her brother.

She worked on her standing for a few weeks and then, on Halloween, she decided she was ready for a flight of wooden stairs. Makes sense, right? (Ignore the audio on this movie; just enjoy the sight of my daughter waddling upstairs.)



Well now that she showed herself capable of handling stairs, we really had to begin watching her all the time. (It's a good thing we only have one staircase in our house, and that one's behind a door.) Over the past few weeks we've been finding her standing pretty routinely in the bedroom, in the living room, at Betty's, in the bath, everywhere. So it wasn't much of a surprise when she started taking steps earlier this week...though it was fun to see nonetheless!



In the few days since this video she's been stepping a lot more--today she took 8 steps in a row, and she is enjoying being in the spotlight for this new achievement. More videos will be coming soon.

Though she is growing up and mastering all thee new skills, she is still very much her big brother's little sister. While they both have their moments where they annoy the **** out of each other, they also genuinely do enjoy each others' company as well. Here Andres is helping to feeding Celia:



And the next time Andres complains that his sister does not share with him (a frequent complaint) I'm going to show him this video:



I hope that evens the score a bit.