Hallie's bath pictures: 13 months

This is the 500th post on Will & Hallie's Page! Appropriately, it's a bath picture update. It also is the debut of our new camera. We haven't quite figured it all out yet, but I think the functions on the camera will make it fun and useful. I have mixed feelings about the picture quality (the pictures seem to be less sharp than those taken with our old camera), but hopefully once we have it all figured out they'll look good enough.

Anyway, here's Hallie!

Erin likes to quote a statistic about how women use so many more words than men per day - I don't remember the exact numbers and a quick websearch gives a number of different answers (here's one that says women: 20,000; men: 7,000). Well, this sounds about right, because Hallie is a CHATTERBOX. Just comparing her to Will at this age, she easily babbles/speaks baby language for twice as long as he did. In fact, she probably says more than I do in a given day. The cutest thing is that she will look you right in the eyes and blabber on nonsensically for half a minute like she's trying to relate every detail of her thoughts. She usually does this when we go and get her after a nap/in the morning, and she excitedly tells me all about her day in this way when I get home from work. Seriously if I could capture a moment in time to replay whenever I need cheering up it might be getting home from work and having Hallie crawl excitedly over, yelling "dada", and then telling me all about her day in baby jibberish when I pick her up. We ought to get that on video, it's incredibly sweet.

Big news: Hallie has recently converted to bipedalism. As I recently discussed, we've been trying hard to get her to walk for months, apparently the trick was to stop trying and ignore her. Yesterday we were out with friends at Guy Hollerin's - a favorite casual happy hour gathering. We had an entire section of the restaurant to ourselves so Hallie was crawling around and exploring. She pulled herself up on a booth near Erin and I, did a basketball pivot, and before I knew what was going on, she took 3 consecutive stuttering steps toward me. I was not expecting it so it was a very fun surprise. I got Erin's attention and she saw the steps as well. Then everyone there made a big fuss over her, it was very fun. We've gotten her to do a few more steps since then too, so more fun is on the way.

Walking was one of the last requirements Hallie needed to pass before she could switch from the infant room to the toddler room at school, and the toddler room teachers (who were Will's teachers when he started) are very excited that she'll soon be joining them (beginning next month). I'm not sure they know what they're in for. Hallie rules the infant room - she's very bossy and has experience from being rowdy with her brother that she may use take over the toddler room. And she's not afraid to pop you if you get in her space. Look how serious she is.

I'm kidding of course - I think she'll fit in very nicely with the kids in the toddler room. It helps that she's such a good sharer: always willing to share her food and other things she gets into. She's at least getting better at sharing her toys with Will. Below you can see how she decided to share her facewash with me when she was done chewing on it. Thanks sweetheart.

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