Fleeting Baby Days

"For thou, LORD, hast made me glad through thy work: I will triumph in the works of thy hands."
Psalm 92:4

My baby is a little girl now. 18 months old already. Sniff. A little girl who talks in sentences, tries my will to the breaking point in many areas, takes the outside stairs with ease(Dolly was just slightly older, than Emma is, when she fell off the outside stairs), vaults over crib rails and baby gates (our baby gate happens to be blocking the inside stairs), bosses and terrorizes her siblings, can do very amazing things to a computer in under 10 seconds, can get to the top bunk three different ways - using the ladder, climbing up the back, or by pulling herself over the railing after hopping from the top of the rocking chair back, she loves to dance to nearly anything and sings almost all the words to many of the children's hymns.

There is so much more too. Emma has always been my snuggly one - thankfully, she hasn't grown out of that cuddly-ness. I would miss it dreadfully. She is my second lefty - so much for the 7 to 10% chance of left handedness when it comes to our family!, she learns her memory verse right along with the other kids and thankfully, she eats just about anything. Sometimes I get so tired of dinner-time battles. But there are other things too... like how Sir or I have to check on her every three minutes or less every time we put her to bed. Or how it's the thrill of strategizing and manipulating to get a certain spot on the couch, a chair or kitchen counter space. Emma is our calculator - she's littler than everyone else, so she has to figure out how to get them to do what she wants without them realizing it. But on the other hand, she can play by herself for long periods of time which is pretty nice.

I love these pictures of her. Just three days before her scheduled pictures, she tripped over a mattress and crashed into the corner of a dresser. The result was a vertical split and a massive egg on the right side of her forehead. If I'd had butterfly stitches handy that night, I would have used them, but we had to settle with a band-aid. We were not going to wait hours in an ER just to find out that the cut had been open too long for anything other than a band-aid anyway.

So, I had to figure out how to hide the band-aid in her pictures. In the end I settled for the hat - after all, she still doesn't have much hair, so it would add a little change to her appearance than the standard bald feel. Sir said she looks like a little French Paratrooper in the pictures. Below is the extra pose. You can see the band-aid peeking out under her hat.

And I need to go make lunch before my munchkins decide that I'm never going to and start raiding the refrigerator - you can just guess who'd be the mastermind behind the crime!