49 weeks

Sloane's 49th week came to a close in a dramatic fashion -- with a 103 fever, two days of vomiting, and her first bladder infection.

Poor little one spent literally half the day at the doctor's office, as reflected in the only pictures I captured that day.

It was pretty rough -- and kept her and me from the first day of our multi-family camping trip, but -- with the help of antibiotics -- she was back to normal in 48 hours. Thank you, modern medicine!

Luckily, Sloane spent the early part of her week in good spirits

Her receptive language (the words she hears and understands) exploded that week. We starting talking with her as if she understands everything we're saying and often she indicates she does. She's so good at answering yes and no questions with head signals that I started calling her my little Ouija board.

She has fallen in love with two kinds of books: lift the flap books and highly rhythmic ones like Brown Bear, Brown Bear, Sandra Boynton and Dr. Seuss books. She's very opinionated, crying when you read her a book she doesn't like or if you stop reading ones she does like. It's really awesome to see her laugh and get the silly humor in books like Blue Hat, Green Hat. And it was awesome to watch her use one of her lovies, Sacha the Cat, to kiss the baby on each page of Counting Kisses after she watched me do it on the first few pages. She likes far fewer books than Riley did at this age, but she gets deeply engaged in her favorites.

She also loves to play peek-a-boo. She buries her head, usually into my chest or down to the floor, then pops up with a big smile. We've yet to get a video of her in prime peek-a-boo form, but I did get this little video of her loosely playing it one morning before she got sick: