Great Leap Forward (click on picture to enlarge)

Célia Marie is growing quickly. Below is a list of her most recent and noteworthy achievements.

1. Sucking thumb
--Brian and Carolyn are EXTREMELY excited that Célia has found her thumb. It helps her fight off those blue bedtime beasties and put herself back to sleep when she wakes in the middle of the night.

2. Sitting up
--She sticks her chunky arms out as props and looks around like she owns the world.


3. Allowing others to hold her
--This is another big achievement from her parents’ perspective. For several weeks she would vociferously pronounce her displeasure whenever anyone but her parents held her. This was a concern because we will soon be taking a trip back home and worried that she would not want any of the many adoring friends and family members cuddle her.

4. Eating solids
--After bearing the weight of days of intense scrutiny whenever she ate anything, Carolyn finally gave in and fed Célia some rice mush to supplement the gallons of milk she consumes daily. And it came as no surprise to her parents that the child-who-never-misses-a-meal attacked the spoon with relish. She now happily wears whatever she can't get in her chubby maw.

Carolyn has chosen her classes for next semester. I have no idea how she is going to be able to get it all done, but she always comes out on top.

Brian’s work and Ph.D. are going well. He flies down to Canberra on Wednesday to present his work to the governing board of his research center.
(**Just in case any of you were wondering, Brian is the Communications Manager for a large research project on governance. What this means is that he is responsible for the development of their website (http://www.griffith.edu.au/govnet/) and is the managing editor for an online scholarly journal that will launch in April 2007. On the website work, Brian has been developing a number of tools that will allow researchers from all over the world to collaborate with colleagues anywhere else on the Internet. Some of these tools will be coming out this month.)