FORTitude

We now own a walker toy. It's a grocery cart that Ruth Anne loves. It has a handle that can be positioned long or short and folds flat. Take out the batteries and it would be perfect, though on the positive side, it plays three different classic songs.

When Ruth Anne was Neil's age, crawling and pulling up, she pushed laundry baskets. Neil pushes laundry baskets too. The other day when he was pushing one, it tipped and fell. He cried and I picked him up. But he refused to be comforted until I put him back down with the righted laundry basket and let him go again.

Similarly, Ruth Anne tumbled a couple of feet from a climbing coil on a jungle gym at the playground. She cried got a hug and climbed up again. At the pool she hangs out at the top of the entry stairs. She's slipped in over her head twice. I've brought her to the surface as calmly as possible. She gets out of the pool, dries her face on the towel and hops back in.

She's been doing a lot more climbing (like on to bar stools) and balancing (like straddling the bathtub). It terrifies me but she's clearly in a developmental spurt with this stuff.

On Father's Day, I tried out the sheet fort for a little indoor activity. Ruth Anne wasn't as enthralled as I'd hoped but it worked okay. She liked when one person sat on a chair that had a sheet draped over it and got tickled by another person sitting behind the chair and under the sheet. Neil investigated.