Mara’s Blog Influencing the world one day at a time since 2005…

In the infamous words of our grocery store cake decorator

“1ST HAPPY MARA!”

Mom and Dad are so surprised to be sitting here one year later already. She has grown so much. Even though her party was this past Saturday, we still had to post today, of course. You have seen the pictures, so now the video. You see all the nail biting suspense of her cake episode. She ate cake… She didn’t eat cake… you decide! You see her open presents. Forget the clothes! I want the bath fizzies! And MORE….

Birthday 2006 Video

41.0 MB / Time 16:14

Lately Mara has shown her desire to play with books on her own, not just when we read them to her. Take a look at this video where she shows she kind of knows what she’s doing.

In the background I think you hear some parrots talking too. They almost talk as good as Mara.

Mara Reads A Book Video

2.8 MB / Time 1:10

Its hard to remember who we have told about our teaching Mara how to sign. It was a long road, Mom and Dad repeating sign time and time again with no results. Then one day she just did it and it was a real suprise. The first one we taught her was “eat.” The true-tell indication that she understood what it meant, vs. just repeating what we do or following word association alone, came one Saturday morning. As typical, we spend a lot of time caring for her in the morning such that we don’t enjoy our breakfast until it is well after she is done with her own. This day Mom was sitting on the couch minding her beeswax enjoying an bacon and egg bagel, when Mara caught wind of what was going on. Mara went right up to Mom and stood next to the couch. But, since she cannot have eggs yet, she was relatively ignored. She quickly turned to Dad and showed the eat sign clearly “saying” that she wanted some of what Mom had.

The next sign to come was “drink” which took a while for her to use. She also does “all done,” but that one she has not really done independently as much as just copy us. We have been using “cereal” to signify her cheerios for just about as long as eat, but she still doesn’t use that one yet.

This is a short video of us catching her with the “eat” sign.

Mara Signs Video

1.5 MB / Time 0:39