March Update

So what's new with us? A veritable assortment of novelties!

We've decided to start a vegetable garden in our back yard using the square foot gardening method. Since neither of us have much gardening experience, we're starting small, with one 2 x 8 foot box and one 2 x 4 foot box - 24 square feet total, each with a different vegetable planted in it. The cool thing about square foot gardening is that you can fit a lot of veggies in a small space. We have cauliflower, broccoli, 2 kinds of cabbage, 2 kinds of carrots, radishes, 3 types of onions, spinach, several types of lettuce, sugar snap peas, and mustard greens in our 2 boxes. Hopefully we got the soil mix right and we manage to keep up with the watering so that we'll start having some yummy home-grown vegetables in a couple of months!

In the front yard, the flower beds that we put in last fall with the help of my parents are blooming nicely and looking great now that they've had a good weeding.

But enough about the yard - I'm sure what you're really wondering is "What about Eliza?" ☺ All in all she's doing great this month! She turned 18 months old a few days ago, which is a huge milestone in itself, but that's just the start. Thanks in large part to a sudden increase in her interest in moving around, and in part as well to some extra focused PT time and effort from our end, she's continued to make a ton of progress in her gross motor skills too. A month ago, she was rolling around on her own. Now she's getting really good at transitions - getting from prone to sitting and vice versa is still a little tricky for her but she's almost doing it entirely on her own with only a little prompting. When she's prone, she's figured out how to use her arms to turn herself left and right until she's oriented toward something of interest. And biggest of all, today she started to "army crawl" for the first time! She used her elbows and feet to push herself forward a couple of feet across the carpet to get to a toy. (It was actually one of Pasha's toys - funny how someone else's stuff is always more interesting...) Exciting times and no doubt a lot of babyproofing of the house are in store!