*sigh* I haven’t been very good about posting recently, have I? No excuses. Just haven’t been thinking about posting much recently.Kaija is growing by leaps and bounds. She understands quite a bit of what we say to her, though her vocabulary is still limited. Some of the things she can say now are: beans, peas, cheese, yes (“yesh”), no, ice (“eyesh”), hot (cold is “brrrrr”), mama, dada and beep. That last one we taught her while pulling her in her wagon… whenever we would back up, we would say “beep beep beep beep…” and she started saying it, too. Much to our chagrin, about a week before Memorial Day she decided she liked the word “no”, knew exactly what it meant, and used it with authority. It was very trying for about two weeks. She has gotten a bit better since then.We weened her from nursing about two months ago. We quickly found that she’s allergic to cow’s milk (though cheese and yogurt seem to be okay) so until that goes away we’ve been giving her fortified rice milk. That was a pretty difficult transition for both Jennifer and Kaija but it didn’t take more than a few days. Jennifer had been in the habit of nursing Kaija after Kaija woke up in the morning so now she brings her a sippy cup full of rice milk.Kaija has become quite adept at climbing and decending the stairs. We still make sure that we’re around when she’s going up and down and we gate-off the stairwell most of the time. But she can go up and down without crawling or sliding if she holds onto the hand rail.We’ve been taking her to Gymboree music class once a week for the past few months. She really enjoys playing with the instruments. She also enjoys being the instructor’s little helper by helping to put the instruments away and straightening out any floor mats that may have gotten out of alignment.