8

Eight... eight... eight... Eight is one of my favorite numbers. Somehow it seems to be complete in every way.

But this post is not about the number of course. 

A couple of weeks ago our little baby girl turned 8 months. My, oh, my! She's getting so big:

One of the main themes going on in our house is baby proofing it. Hmm... Did I say 'going on'? Well, that is an exaggeration, of course. Kyle has installed the outlet covers, but that's pretty much as far as we've gotten. We are still thinking about the rest.

Meanwhile though little Sophia has discovered various ways to move around. She started with spinning on her tummy and scooting backwards, continued to trying to "swim" and "fly" (figured out it wasn't doing her much good) and started pushing herself forward sometimes using just arms or just legs and sometimes coordinating it all together and actually crawling in a more traditional way. One thing I can say for sure is that she needs a good motivation do something that takes a lot of effort at the moment. Maybe it's growing up in the house with cats, but she quickly realized that there has to be a correlation between effort and reward, meaning the reward must be worth the effort, otherwise she loses interest in it. For example, a turned on phone is a good reward worthy of crawling a couple of feet, while a toy is a semi-satisfactory reward that doesn't not deserve more than a few inches of reaching.

Update: A laptop was definitely worth the effort:

And here comes the reward (Mommy, I'll just order a couple of Kindles of Amazon.com):

Favorite words.

Of course, I cannot help mentioning that Sophia's been very talkative lately. She makes all kinds of sounds and most of them are a variety of squeaky high pitch noises, but she loves saying 'papa' (Russian for Daddy) when playing, 'mama' when she needs something and 'haaaaai' when.. well, whenever she feels like it. Oh, and we hear 'brrr' a lot too.

Favorite activities.

• Jumperoo.
• Crawling (even in sleep!).
• Trying to get to cat food (must be very yummy!):

• Chewing on labels and tags.
• Trying to get to various cords and chew on them.
• Pulling on Mommy's and Daddy's hair.
• Looking out of the window (and licking it).
• Riding in a cart in the store:

• Chasing cats:

• Rolling a ball back and forth (she's actually rolling it back to me on her own).

There are a lot of other things to say and show, but this post has enough pictures and videos, so I should be done for now. :)