Zoe didn’t see her first fireworks this month, but she has hit a bunch of other milestones:

• She says the word “no”, and she is not afraid to use it. At all.
• Got her first haircut. Well, trim, really. She had two big curls that were longer than the rest of the back of her hair, so I trimmed those off.


After her first hair trim

• She’s started waving to kids without me asking her to do so. When we walk around the lake and she sees another kid in a stroller, it’s like she’s running into an old friend, she lights up and waves with a huge smile.
• We’re way into the independence streak all of a sudden. I tried to feed her the last spoonful of applesauce this evening. “No!” as she pushes my hand away. I tried to help her get her pajamas on last night. “No!” and much wailing as I did it anyway. (It was cute to watch her try to put here pajama bottoms over her head, but it was getting late.)
• New lenses for her glasses – they make her eyes look even bigger. Hopefully they will also get her eyes back to straight again.
  

  Not sure you can really tell, but I can - her eyes are looking straighter with the new lenses

• Lots of new words. She’s repeating a lot of words that we say, but ones that she’s recently said spontaneously:
  • car, baby, rice, ice, bo-bo (to mean strawberries, raspberries, or grapes – no, I don’t understand), coffee (this makes me inordinately proud), duck, shoes, rock (both the verb when on her rocking chair, and the noun when we’re outside).
• She all of a sudden can identify lots of body parts
  • head, hair, eyes, ears, nose, cheeks, mouth, teeth, chin, neck, elbow, hands, fingers, belly button, knees, feet, toes

The great thing about coffee-colored pants is that when (for me, it’s not an if, it’s a when) you spill your coffee, it doesn’t show up at all.  I leave the question of the bad thing about white shirts as an exercise for the reader.

Zoe has a new word, “cheese.”  She usually says it as a question when we’re looking in the refrigerator.  There’s something overwhelmingly cute about the plaintive “cheese?” request.