Everybody's healthy again. SNG did catch a minor case of the crud and missed work Monday, but he was spared the worst of it. On the bright side, I dropped a dress size being sick. I'll ride this lose-weight-fast wave as long as I can. I still have, after all, 10 pounds of baby weight to drop. At what point do I stop thinking of it as baby weight and just call it fat? Not yet, apparently.

Speaking of babies, e-baby's newest tricks:
* Telling us when it is dinner time: when e-baby decides she's hungry, she goes into her hamper and finds a bib, carries it over to her high chair and points up to the chair. If I don't clue in right away, she tries to put the bib on herself. Am I so clueless about reading baby's signals that she practically has to spell things out to me? Yes, yes I am. Thankfully she is able to do so. She knows the sign for "eat" but for some reason doesn't use it unless she's already in her chair and eating. She prefers the more direct approach of "Hey, lady! I wanna put on this bib and eat!"

* Requesting a specific book to read: Her favorite right now is Barnyard Dance by Sandra Boynton, but she loves anything that we sing the words to. She'll choose the book she wants, give it to me, and sit on the floor like an attentive audience. I figure she picked this up from daycare, because I have always read to her in my lap.

* More housecleaning skills: Starting about 2-3 months ago, if you'd hand e-baby a tissue or paper towel, she'd immediately get to work scrubbing the floor. Now, if you hand her a square of toilet paper, she walks over and deposits it in the garbage can. She will deposit square after square. Every time she drops one in, she raises the paper WAY over her head and sort of slam-dunks it into the can, with a little exclamation, like "bop!" or "ya!" I have no idea where that came from, but it's HI-larious.