Open, Close, Tail

First of all, the big news....  IT'S A GIRL!!! The ultrasound was Tuesday morning, and so now we know that Gail will have a little sister.

Right now, Matthias is in Vietnam, hopefully sleeping after almost 24 hours of travel, if you count from when he left the house to when he got into his hotel. Gail and I made lots of plans to stay busy while he was gone, but it looks like we're taking it easy for a couple days because she came down with something last night. She has a fever, but she's eating and sleeping okay, so no plans to go to the doctor yet. Maybe it's just teeth about to break. I can always hope!

Her vocabulary is expanding like crazy, and she is pronouncing words better and better. Her favorites right now are "opie" (open) and "tail". She likes to bring things to me and ask for them to be opened, and she also likes making a fist, then opening her hand and saying "opie". We can do that ten times easily in her high chair, and she shows no sign of tiring of her new game. She is also obsessed with tails. It probably started around Halloween, because her monkey outfit has a tail, and Matthias pointed out her tail and the monkey's tail. Then she found the tail on her stuffed puppy, and the obsession has taken over. She'll run to the puppy and say, "puppa. tail." and then look at me and say "Gail?" while putting her hand behind her back. She also wants to know where my tail is and where Matthias's tail is, so we repeat that conversation many times every day. I think she's mostly just happy that she can ask questions and get answers.

On Halloween, we went up to visit Matthias during his big conference, and took pictures by the huge tent that Microsoft had built for the week. These are phone pictures at night, so the lighting is what it is :).