Huge Update - wedding, new things, and more

Wow it's been a while since my last post. No real reason...just busy, tired, not much to say, out of town, soaking up last days off with Morgan. Sigh. Here goes. Feel free to put your feet up and get out your reading glasses. It's a long one.

Let's start off with Morgan's new things (that I can remember), shall we?

1. Morgan *just* learned how to put things back IN a container instead of taking them out only. Uncle Tommy and his girlfriend Carrie put the finishing touches on teaching Morgan this Sunday morning (Aug. 8th). That's great! Now we can practice "clean up!" ("Clean up" song starts singing in my head...can you tell I work with the 0-3 y/os?)
2. Morgan would walk everywhere if she could. Let me back up. Morgan has, to my knowledge, stood on her own for 4 seconds on 2 occasions. Yesterday at the gift opening, I wasn't looking but she was with Adam and stood alone while playing with the car keys for about 10 seconds. Wow! Back to the beginning - at the wedding reception, I walked Morgan around the dance floor after they made it dark but before the dancing really got going and her cousins were running all around her. She LOVED it. When I finally thought my back was going to crack in 2, I picked her up to go find Adam. She SCREAMED and screamed and cried so we went for a few more laps before I finally called in the daddy person to take over. She. Loves. Walking. I have no way to tell how long it will be before she's independent but she sure seems to be on the right track. She also pulls up on everything and creeps quickly along furniture.
   
3. Words - Morgan now has the following words that she uses on a relatively consistent basis: mama, dada, no, bye (bah); she is sort of saying "up" (not always meaningfully but sometimes yes) and "ah dah" while signing all done, usually with her bottle in hand. She's imitating more sounds too which is always exciting. REALLY excited that she has that many words and she's only 9 months old (SLP in me swoons just a bit). :-D
4. Morgan. kisses. everyone/thing. She kisses her cow. She kisses her babies. She kissed about a million people over the wedding weekend and was completely willing to do so unless the recipient had a picky (whiskery) face, but she'd do it anyway and then make a funny face. Silly child. The sweetest thing is that sometimes she'll seek me out independently and kind of cup my face in her hands (or pull with all her might) and give me a kiss. Those make my heart melt just a little.
   
5. Morgan is really starting to understand many more things. While we were driving home to WI on Thursday, she learned "clap your feet." She grabs her ankles and starts clapping her feet. She also does hands. If I tried to list what she all understands now, I'll go crazy trying to remember it all and if I do, this post might get even longer than it already is going to be.
   
6. Morgan sleeps through storms. :) Maddie (our older of the two dogs; 3 years, 8 months) does not. Of course, it's been the two weeks of storms and we've been up lots with her. I think today, however, that we pinpointed it to being the lightning that bothers her the most. She was fine this morning after it was lighter outside and there were some pretty hard rumbles of thunder. We'll keep you posted or next summer we might have to put her on meds. :-/
7. Morgan is now a front-facing little girl in her carseat. She meets the height and weight requirements, but not the age ones. Since she can't sleep in her current carseat rear-facing, I asked Adam to turn it around while we were in WI and sure enough - the child slept almost 2 hours in a row on the way home and it was lovely. Her head wasn't falling forward and it's fun to be able to see her so well now. Yeah!
8. Adam update - he's got one day left of his current MBA class which is a semester-crammed-in-a-week class and then only TWO more that he is taking together this fall. November 15th! Last day! Yeah!!!!! We are celebrating by taking a weekend with just the two of us in Chicago. Perfect.
   
9. I start work tomorrow for 2 days, off for a 4 day weekend, and then I'm a full-time employee once again. I have a love/hate relationship with this right now. I like having another purpose (worker person) but enjoy my time with Morgan so much. Like it or not, here it comes!
10. That's all I can think of right now...more if I remember!

So this weekend...Morgan, the dogs, and I headed back to WI on Thursday morning for the wedding weekend for my brother, Ross, and his (now) wife, Kristen! Adam had class and couldn't get out of it (had his weekends mixed up) so he came up after his exam Friday evening. It was scary, interesting, and not at all as bad as I thought it might be traveling alone with 2 dogs and a baby, but we did it in 6 3/4 hours which went well. We stopped for lunch and Morgan and I usually are able to share a chicken tenders kids' meal with mashed potatoes (I get the ice cream) with no problem. She even had a ton of grapes. And I ended up having to go back in (we ate with windows open in the car b/c of the dogs) and get myself something b/c she ate so much of the kids' meal!! She doesn't get the breading on the chicken but she took care of at least 2/3 of everything there. Piggy piggy growing pants. :)

And I'll finish this up tomorrow. Suddenly it's 9:30, I have to work in the morning, and I'm tired b/c of all the things listed above. Hopefully I can stay awake for this day-long meeting...but I get to see Denise after a WHOLE summer away so I'm sure I'll be having a great time "paying attention" to whatever's going on up front. :)