A Party for Great-Grandma

Last weekend we went to northern Ohio to visit with Steven's family and celebrate his Grandmother's 88th birthday. It was a big test for us to see if Julia would travel well and as it turned out, she slept the whole way there and back! Yeah for us! She behaved pretty well during the day, with the exception of when we were at dinner and she was a bit overwhelmed by all of the people and noise at the restaurant - that resulted in a rather fussy child, but later on, as you can see from the photo, she was calmer and cuddly, giving her great-grandma her own special present (a hug, not what might have been in her diaper).
In other news, Julia has been very active, exercising her legs and such, so much so that she apparently rolled over yesterday at her sitter's; we tried to recreate the experience at home, but Julia was either not in the mood or had done it by accident at Samia's (I'm going with option "b"). We are pretty sure that she'll be doing it for real before too long which means we'd better start baby-proofing soon!
Julia has also begun drooling and for a few days last week was very irritated, which she expressed by fussing and gnawing on her bottles (or me). Like it or not, we're pretty sure she's got a tooth developing - we felt something in her lower front gum. Maybe one of these days we'll have a toothy smile photo! Speaking of smile photos, you will see a new set in the sidebar; these are shots from last weekend, right before we left. She is smiling and laughing so much more - an absolute joy!
Let see, what else? Oh yeah - she's trying out a new attention getter: the "kissy" noise. At night when she wants changed and fed, many times instead of outright crying, she'll make a kissing or sucking noise (which is a much nicer way to be woken up, I'll tell you). The other night when we were eating dinner, she wanted to be picked up and when we didn't respond to her fussing right away, she resorted to making kissing noises - we have a short viseo that we may try to get on soon - it's interesting, though, because she uses her top lip instead of her bottom lip to nake the sound. It is adorable :-)