Smiles at the DMV?!

I actually saw people smiling at the DMV today- not the employees, but the customers! Why were we there? Well, in NH you get a temporary license, then 6 months later you get your permanent one. I truly have no idea why, nor do I really care enough to research it. Anyway, I received my permanent one in the mail several months back, but apparently threw it away instead of my temporary one. So, there we were at the DMV to get a duplicate. Since ours is only open 3 days per week, there was, of course, a line. Dillon, of course, was only happy being held for a few minutes before she wanted down. Fortuately, there was a little room for her to roam without really getting into anything. She thought the divider ropes were pretty cool and that stepping over them was even cooler. Luckily, the posts were too heavy for her to really move, so she lost interest in those pretty quickly. Being the little social butterfly that she is, she would go to different people that caught her eye and say hi to them or point to their shoes. She was truly quite charming and most everyone smiled at her with several people speaking to her. Only once was someone clueless enough to hold the door open while doing something else so that I had to intercede before she made it out the door. Remind me not to ask that particular teenaged girl to babysit!

Yesterday we went to the house of one of our friends whose baby was born at 32 1/2 weeks. He's now 4 weeks old, at home and doing great. I took lunch and dinner over to Melanie & Andy (our friends) since they've been eating chicken nuggets and french fries for dinner. I held the baby so she could eat, then got him to sleep while she showered uninterrupted (what an absolute luxury!). Dillon loved seeing the baby & was really good with him. She was very gentle and with some direction stuck to only touching his back, arms and legs. She actually was much more enthralled with the 3 cats that they have. They were much more fun to touch- plus they just moved a lot more! She also got to see more babies at this morning's La Leche League meeting. They are fun, but all those new toys there-- now THAT's fun! There were a couple of times that we had to run interference between Dillon & another toddler, but I have to give it to her- she'll hold her own for the most part, even against kids older than her.

The new stuff over the past few days includes: trying to repeat lots of the words I say to her. I don't even think I could count all her words now. "Tiger" is pretty loud and clear as she has gotten to watch one on her Baby Einstein "World Animals" video. She has a new tooth & I think is getting another one. She is starting to really do the pretend playing. She wants her baby to get a new diaper on each time she does, she wants to use the spoon to feed the baby, she wants it to ride around in the backpack like she does. It's really fun to start seeing not only this element of her personality, but the beginnings of her imagination as well.