Horizontal is history ...

Colleen and I have our 5th wedding anniversary coming up this Saturday and I have been spending some time thinking about all of the changes that we have experienced in the past 7 years as we have grown together as a couple - changes of careers, changes of coasts and certainly changes in perspectives. It has always seemed like a pretty fluid and expanding landscape that we lived in.

Well now that the biggest change of all has taken control of our world, all of those previous experiences seem almost like a single memory of how we prepared ourselves to welcome this little dynamo into our lives. Change has taken on a new dimension of scope and time as everything has been condensed into enormous advancements measured in micro-meters. Every day this little girl discovers some new and amazing ability. It is absolutely impossible to keep up with her developing world although we try desperately to identify and appreciate things from her vantage point every day.

Things that have been amazing me lately have been a combination of both physical acuity and spatial awareness. She has mastered rolling over in both directions - onto her belly and then again to her back. She is thrilled by this and entertains herself for hours. She is making a valiant effort at crawling, although the belly and the earth refuse to separate. She insists on having us help her stand and has balanced upright for as long as 5 seconds unassisted.

Just tonight she was introduced to her new (used) stand and swivel entertainment center. It allows her to stand and hold herself up and rotate a full 360 degrees around. I think the pictures speak for themselves...she was pretty happy with the new freedom. When Colleen pulled her out she stood Sequoia next to the saucer so that her hands rested on the edge and Sequoia stood there unassisted, holding herself up for about 45 seconds ... she is only 3 months old. That astounds me...and makes me glad that we've had the luxury of writing this blog so that in a few years I will be able to catch my breath and remember these precious weeks.

Another groovy development has been that Sequoia has learned to turn the pages of whatever book or magazine that you are reading to her. She started this while I was reading a Martha Stewart magazine to her up at Aunt Sherri and Uncle Steven's house a week ago. I'm not certain why I was reading a Martha Stewart Home magazine, but now it will be a part of my personal family folklore forever. The page turning thing fascinates me because it represents so much - that Sequoia realizes that there is something on the next page, that she can manipulate things to get to what she wants, that the story has something to do with the pages turning. It also represents a pretty big step in coordination.

Another thing that startled me when I first learned it, but now I would not want it any other way, is that babies need to learn to laugh and smile. Well anyone who has followed this blog knows that Sequoia was born with a smile, but over the past weeks and months she has developed the most disarming and wonderful belly laugh. It absolutely breaks us up when she gets going. Added to that her wonderful array of vocalizations, we can and often do, spend hours on end just talking with her. I sing songs and very often on cue she fills in her little parts. I can't describe how that connection makes us feel, but it certainly makes me realize that the journey Colleen and I started 7 years ago was really just a warm up for this part of the adventure. It is hard for us to picture ourselves as just a couple at this point and we are anxious to share our good fortune and passion for the world around us with our daughter. So although this is our seventh year together and our fifth anniversary, in many ways it feels like our very first.