I would have posted this yesterday but I left my ipad at work, and it’s really hard to write a blog post on a paperwhite. So! I missed a couple weeks. We went back to Philly for the holidays and I immediately lost track of time. It was glorious to have no idea what day it was for multiple days in a row! Lots of new firsts came up. In no particular order:

– First (and second) plane flight! She handled the entire travel experience like a champ. Nothing seemed to frighten her and none of the rigamarole bothered her at all. Her ears only hurt a little bit during one of the ascents, but a quick nurse fixed that right up. We forgot all the goody bags we’d put together to hand out to our fellow travelers, but it turns out we didn’t need them at all. J was smiling at everyone the whole way to Philly. On the way home she was not as smiley, but just as cute as she played step step in the aisle and clapped and did tahdahs (more on that in a minute).

– First Christmas! There are so many firsts about this! In her stocking she got an orange, a bright bow, a squishy airplane toy, and a bell. She enjoyed 4 of them thoroughly, and I enjoyed the orange. She also got some great books and some great toys. Her favorite thing, however, was definitely the wrapping paper. She helped unwrap a number of her presents, but once she got a good strip of paper in her hands she lost all interest in everything else and proceeded to try to eat the paper. We tried hard to let her play with it without letting her actually eat it. We mostly succeeded, although I did find a little piece of red shiny wrapping paper in her diaper the next morning.

– Clapping! She’s figured out how to clap. Not only does she do it on her own, she’ll also clap if she sees you clapping. This led to some very adorable scenes where J would clap, and then a room of 10-12 people would all clap back at her. She would get a big smile on her face and do it again. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if she was clapping to imitate us, or if she was training us to clap