With any luck, the house pictured here will soon be our new house! We're waiting for the bidding to close and the official word, but we believe that we will be moving here in the near future. Why, you ask, do we want to move seven months after getting here? Moving isn't fun, it's true, but neither is life in Baker. It looks like a town, it really does, but it doesn't feel much like one. We're not losing much by being away from town and we're gaining a lot: peace and quiet; beautiful views, pleasant places to walk; 3000 feet in elevation (and therefore, much, much lower temperatures); affordable rent; neighbors with cows as pets; greater proximity to all parts of the park; shorter commute for Michael; and the list goes on!
We'll let you all know as soon as we hear definitive word and set a moving date!
In other news, Darcy Jo is trying to learn everything all at once. Her vocabulary grows at leaps and bounds, and she now points to letters she recognizes on all sorts of things (like her cup at lunch yesterday; it took me a while to figure out why she kept saying "emm" because I couldn't see the writing). She can pick out maybe a third of the alphabet and grins like a maniac when we confirm that it really is the letter she said it was. Likewise, she is extremely proud that she has (how? I have no idea!) learned the concept of "two". It started with her saying "two" if she was holding two of the same object, but now extends to just having two things, alike or different, and fingers! If you hold up two fingers and ask how many there are, she'll tell you -- and she did it the very first time we tried it.
Her other new trick is crawling! Finally! We took her to a mall when we were visiting in Simi Valley last week and it was crawling (forgive the pun) with kids. There were a lot of tunnels, which Darcy loves, but they weren't tall enough for her to stand in, so she couldn't take advantage of them. It's a little heartbreaking to watch her in those situations because it's clear that if she had had a crawling phase, she would now have a much better grasp of climbing on, under, and over things. She has to just watch the other kids a lot. She loves that, but I want her to be able to DO, not just watch.
She's been doing what she calls crawling every once in a while for a month or two. It's sort of like swimming on the carpet, as her belly is still flat on the floor. But after spending quite a lot of time watching so many other kids crawling around and seeing that she was missing out, this week, she crawls! True, hands-and-knees, belly-off-the-floor crawling! She mostly just uses this to crawl to something that will help her stand up if she's plopped down on her tush, but we also set up the couch cushions as an obstacle course and she's almost able to crawl up and over a stack of two. It will only take another visit or two to a play area for her to get up to speed.
