scooter

it's been an eventful few weeks for the bunchens... bryn started eating her first solid food - rice cereal. she doesn't seem to have strong feelings about it either way and will tolerate about two tablespoons, leaving another two tablespoons or so on herself or her highchair. you can watch the video here (but probably only her grandparents will actually make it through the whole thing). her second new trick is raising both arms up above her head when she wants to be picked up. she'll only do this in the jumperoo (something kind of like a walker, except it bounces instead of rolling) and highchair, so i don't know if it's an issue with balance or an issue with generalization. in any case, i can't resist it, even if she does it in the middle of dinner. finally, and most exciting, bryn has started "scooting" (also known as belly-crawling)!

this started around the end of june, and now bryn can get across a room in about 10 seconds - if properly motivated. putting this together with the pushing up on straight arms means that bryn's perception has really gone 3-D. she now goes for toys up on shelves and tried to crawl off our bed yesterday for something on the floor. her sitting is also much improved now, so she really likes to play independently and go from toy to toy on her own. it's pretty neat to watch - two months ago we never could have imagined her doing any of these things, and now she practically feels like a teenager.

a few other little things: we also felt bryn's first tooth this week, although it is not actually visible to the naked eye as of yet. her yelling has slowed down so that she usually only does it when unhappy about something. she still chatters a lot, and now makes b, d, g, c/k and m sounds. the other day it sounded like she said "o-ba-ma"... we'll see if she can get that perfected before november.