...like scooting across the floor so that she could make music with the spring door stopper
...and then when she was a little bigger she used to crawl into the space beneath the TV in our entertainment center and 'peak' at anyone willing to pay attention to her (see blast-from-my-scrapbooking-past layout below...
(This is a rare peak at my very first scrapbook - created in 2002. Most scrappers have heard of 'sticker sneeze'. Well, this is an example of one of my early, and highly innovative, scrapbooking techniques called 'photo sneeze'...how things have changed!)
...and then when she starting talking, the first thing she said was 'mama' (which referred to both Mommy & Daddy until she was about eighteen months old - didn't make Daddy happy, by the way)
...and then her speech got much better, but had a little trouble with some words like yellow and elephant and we enjoyed endless hours of entertainment by asking her to say yellow elephant which came out 'lellow ephalent'We ended up watching some home video later that evening with snippets of us in the hospital waiting for her arrival and the first couple months of Kaitlin's life and a couple things really stood out to me:
One - I'm somewhat amazed that I even allowed him to tape me while in the hospital...I looked horrible - especially towards the end of my 27 1/2 hours of labor. It must have been the drugs...I was smiling most of the time...yes, it was most definitely the drugs.
Two - The whole time that we are in the hospital after Kaitlin's birth, she never cried once on video...she was this sweet, sleeping little bundle of perfection.
Three - Then we brought her home...and in every snippet thereafter she is, at least at some point, screaming her little lungs out.
At that point, I leaned over a said to Kaitlin (who has been quite intrigued the whole time as she has never seen this particular video before), "How come at the hospital you were so sweet and quite and when we brought you home all you did was cry?"
She then proceeded to give me 'the eye'.
For a five year old, she is quite adept at 'the eye'.
"I think we might just have brought home the wrong baby from the hospital," I said. "Maybe we should check into that."
"Mooooooom!"
Four - In every snippet that involved Justin, he was picking on her in some way...tickling her or pulling at her eyelids when she was sleeping, making fun of her smelly diapers...and in every snippet that I was involved in I was snuggling her or trying to get her to 'tell me a story' by talking to her in that high-pitched baby talk (which all mothers seem to instantly revert to upon having a child and, yes, I admit, is quite annoying...sorry).
However, Kaitlin's response to that was, "Mommy, you are such a nice mommy."
Well, maybe I won't check into that baby switch thing after all.
