Jess has been saying "mama" on and off for a couple of weeks now. About 70% of the time, she means me. The rest of the time she means the television or her stuffed animal or the door or... well just about anything, really. So I wasn't counting it as her first word, since I wasn't really sure she knew that it was a word and that it meant something. It might have just been a sound she was repeating.

Five or six days ago, Jess was digging around in her toy-basket. (Her toy basket is this very-tall backpack like thing my mother brought down for us. Jess gets into it by climbing up on top of a floor cushion and leaning waaaaaaaaaay over into the basket. Every once in a while, she tips into the basket and I have to go rescue her. Which I almost always find very funny and Jess... does not.) Anyway, she pulled out her little board book Guess How Much I Love You and dragged it across the room with her.

She stopped near my computer desk and hit me in the leg with the book. "Mama!" she declared. "Buk!"

"Why so it is," I said. I then sat down on the floor and read it to her.

Yesteday, I was sitting on the sofa chatting with Kevin and Jess came over with two books that I'd checked out from the library for her; Spot Helps Out and Spot at the Fair. She really seems to like the Spot books (there's a whole series of them) and we're not really sure why - they're short, fat little books with scalloped edges and the stories take all of about 2 minutes to read. She handed me one of the books and I read it to her. When I was done, she handed me the other one. I read it to her. We switched back and forth between the two books several times before Kevin was ready to go out and it was time to stop.

"Bye Spot." I said, putting the book down on the coffee table.

"Bye." said Jess. And then she waved at the book.