This is actually about what Nora saw from her vantage point.

The first of many fun-in-the-sun shots with great weather and Kevin in town.

Helping us make the most of sitting in traffic!
Have a great weekend, y’all!

I love watching her eyes as she tries to figure it all out.

When you ask Nora to “Open wide!”, this is what you get.

Looks pretty content doesn’t she?

Now I kind of know how Noah must have felt. (Saturday marked the first sunny weekend since February.)

I feel like if I don’t write all of the fun things down that Nora is doing, I’m going to forget all about them. And while I have tried several times to start an actual scrapbook for her, this blog seems to have turned into a virtual scrapbook. As long as the memories are being recorded somewhere, right? So here’s some stories and little things she’s up to.

• She loves shoes. Josh started a little daily morning routine where she hands him each sock and shoe to put on. She gets really excited and starts speed crawling towards him when she seems him coming with socks and shoes in hand.

• If she sees a shoe on the floor, she tries to find the owner and give it to him/her to put on. I was humoring her this morning in the kitchen and ended up wearing one sneaker (sans socks) for half an hour. It felt weird at first, then I forgot about it.
• If Nora finds a sock in the laundry basket, she holds it up and says, “Nanan!” which is her word for pretty much anything. In this case, it means “put this sock on.” And just in case that isn’t clear enough, she’ll hold up a foot. One time she found three socks. I put one on each foot but she still wanted to wear the third.
• Speaking of laundry- Nora’s actually pretty helpful with it. She kneels near the full basket and hands me one piece of clean laundry at a time. Only she’s really fast and I have to speed up to keep pace with her. So I do my laundry folding faster now.
• Nora’s become a watcher and a copier lately. The other day she was shaking a washcloth that she was ‘helping me fold.’ I couldn’t figure out what she was doing until I realized that I was shaking the wrinkles out of each towel before I folded it. She also copies us brushing our teeth by rubbing her fingers over her lips. My favorite was during Poppy and Panzy’s visit. She was watching Poppy eat with chopsticks. She used her own set to touch a plate, then her mouth, over and over, following along.
• We think “nanan” started from her trying to repeat after us when we ask her “Do you want a….” She just shortened “want a” to ‘nanan.’ This is our current theory.
• She L O V E S to be read to. (Which we love that she loves.) She used to be happy flipping through books herself, but now she brings them over to whoever is nearby. You hear her coming, too. She gets very serious and starts saying “nanana” as she does the three limb crawl, chosen book in hand. Her current favorites include “My Dog’s the Best” (dogda!) and “Booboo.” I think Josh and I have read Booboo about 100 times. Each. She loves that book and we both have it memorized by now. “This is Booboo. Booboo is a gosling. A small blue gosling who likes to eat. Booboo likes to eat from morning til night. Every day….”
• Anything that beeps, has buttons, and is small enough to hold up to her ear is a phone. “Hi.” Including- actual cell phones, the remote, our keyless car entries and most recently, a digital thermometer.
• She hates motorcyles and anything that has a siren. I blame the siren hating on Remy. If she hears one (which happens a lot since we live near a fire station and often have our windows open) she looks at me with terror. And right as she scampers toward me so I can pick her up, what does Remy do but start howling along? She looses it every time. Once it happened at a park while she was swinging and Remy was tied up nearby. I was so embarrassed to be the one with the wailing child and howling dog.
• If I give her some kind of food she doesn’t want, she promptly picks it off her tray and hands it right back to me.
• Like all 15 month olds, she knows the word no and what it means. But she likes to pretend that she wasn’t going to do whatever she’s being warned not to do. She reaches to touch the stereo and when we say, “No, Nora” her hand veers away at the last second to land on a DVD that clearly she was going for the whole time. Or last week, I saw her reaching for what seemed to be the humidifier. “No, Nora” I may have imagined this, but she went for a book behind the humidifier and I believe actually held it up for me to see. As if to say, “It’s cool, Mom, I wasn’t going to touch the humidifier. I was just getting this book. No worries.”
• Still obsessed with doggies. Now she sees one and says “dogda!” (newest pronunciation, up from ‘doggeegee’) and then opens her mouth and says “Ahhhh.” Which is how she asks for a kiss. Not from us, no. She only asks for kisses from dogs. And yes, she’s received a few before we could prevent it happening.
• She also likes to kiss illustrations of dogs in books. It’s amazing how she spots every illustration of a dog. The other day we were in the check out line and she said, “Dogda!” I could not figure out what dog she was seeing until I realized it was on a balloon two aisles over. She also loves to look at the DVD for You’ve Got Mail because there’s a 1 cm illustration of Barkley on the bottom corner of the cover.
• Nora’s going through a very affectionate phase. Sometimes we’re the blessed recipients (“She hugged me! Sob.”) but mostly it’s inanimate objects, such as stuffed dogs. She holds them close and rocks them like they’re babies.
• She likes to stare and say “Hi!” to other kids. She notices other kids almost as much as she notices dogs. In both cases, she completely zones in until she either gets a reaction or the child/dog moves out of sight.
• She loves watching home movies. Anything animated doesn’t interest her (Sorry, Veggie Tales. Your day will come.) But she watched the video Aunt Annie made from our beach trip over and over while she was sick. And on mute during plane trips.
• Nora likes to explore and find new things to figure out. Just when I think she’s explored all she can in our apartment, she comes across something new and exciting. Like the guest room clock radio…

Back in Atlanta, headed to the neighborhood pool in a Radio Flyer. Serious business.

(Nora enjoyed her bun)