Dema was watching Kali in St. Charles one day so we thought it would be a great day to visit Gigi and enjoy her company and her fun yard! The kids played baseball and rode and pulled wagons and just generally blew off some energy. Can you believe Agnes is already big enough to enjoy most of the fun?
She started out sitting up in this wagon but perhaps wasn't feeling super stable; she moved down to her tummy and rode around like that happily!
Gigi had all sorts of wagons and carts in the shed. You would think they would fight over who got to ride and who had to pull, but all the kids seem just as happy to do the work of pulling as to go for the ride. Although I think Michael probably ends up pulling the most.
One of Agnes's favorite toys right now is shoelaces.
Catherine took most of the wagon pictures up above, and she also set Agnes in the grass and took a bunch more pictures. Her goal is always to have so many good pictures that I can't pick and have to post too many. She wins again!
I still haven't gotten many pictures of the new house, but here is our new park! It's a lot shorter walk than Tower Grove was from the old house, and it has a lake with ducks and a good playground. It doesn't have a fancy splash pad with varying jets, but apparently one powerful fountain spurting water into the air is all we need! It's not really a great design for a baby to play in, but Mary held Agnes close enough to get her wet and she loved it.
Eventually they were filling up their water bottles and turning the slides into very fast water slides. Between the playground being partly shaded in the afternoon and the fountain to play in, I think we'll find ourselves here quite a bit this summer.
I think this is one of my favorite pictures of Edie at this age, taken around 7 months, in my favorite dress we have in this size.
It must be one of Edie's favorites also because she often chooses it for Agnes. And now that I am looking at these two pictures one after another, it occurs to me that Edie and Agnes look nothing alike at this point!
Agnes can use almost anything to get herself up to standing, and often stands around only holding on with one hand.
Edie asked me to take these pictures and put them on the blog, because she likes her smile.
And she wanted you to see how much Agnes looks like her. Sorry, Edie, I don't see it anymore.
One hand standing!
[Side note: I have consulted several grammar guides to try to decide if the possessive form of Agnes is " Agnes' " or "Agnes's" and in the end, it seems I can choose either. It makes sense to choose the one that best represents how we say the possessive of Agnes, with the extra "es" sound at the end or not, but alas that also seems to be a grey area grammatically and now I don't know what to do. I'm pretty sure the old school correct way is " Agnes' " and it is pronounced just like "Agnes", but that seems to confuse people a lot and it seems to be acceptable in modern English to use the " 's" and pronounce it "Agnes-es" in spite of the original rule saying the possessive of a 2-syllable name ending in "s" is written with only an apostrophe at the end and pronounced likewise. I put it to a vote in the family and they are leaning toward "Agnes's" so I'm going to try that out. And now I completely forgot what I was going to say that started with "Agnes's" that brought on this side note. Oh well.]
Agnes has been working on coordinating her crawling motions for several weeks, and is finally moving about at a pretty good crawl and mostly abandoning the dragging army crawl. Video proof!
In this video Agnes shows off her standing skills and reminds us all why I occasionally refer to her as a baby pterodactyl; that high-pitched screech is her favorite noise. If she hears someone whistling or if Gussie is making his own high-pitched screech, she is happy to mimic it back.
I have not been doing a good job uploading videos that go along with the blog posts, so here are a few random ones.
The phone has the neat trick of speeding up a 5-minute video into a few seconds, which is hilarious when filming Agnes and her non-stop activity.
I posted a picture of Agnes in her sink bath, but you want a video also, right? She loves the running water and often sticks her face and head under it as well.
A couple weeks ago, around 7.5 months, Agnes pulled herself up to standing for the first time, and she started making pretty good forward progress using the army crawl, dragging herself along the floor on her tummy while propelling with her toes. I don't seem to have any good videos of that, but here's her first pull-up:
It has been a rainy, rainy, rainy Spring but we are still getting out on the good days! And there is the bonus that most of the creeks we play in are quite high and fun right now. Agnes wanted to play in the water with the big kids, then slept the whole walk home.
Michael is honing his "coconut tree climbing" skills, climbing without any branches.
I promise, he didn't step over from the log, but climbed from the bottom. Here's video proof from a different tree.
I only had my phone with me on this day, but Catherine is quite skilled at selfies and managed to get us all in the frame!
