Too good not to share

We think the Hatchling may, finally, be hitting her verbal stage. For the longest time she's had the same few words (kitty, hi, no, dada, ok, yeah) and relied on her (surprisingly effective) baby babble for everthing else. But then on Sunday she spontaneously came out with two very clear new words, each with an attendant gesture. The first one is "Bye" which she says while waving. Only she says it more like "BY-eeee," all long and drawn out and hilarious. All Sunday morning she was telling us "bye" and walking out of the room, only to come back in with a grin and do it all over again.

The second word she added to her vocab was "tickle," which she does, not surprisingly, while tickling you. She started this out of the blue while we were out with her best friend Fi, and at first we thought it was just an anomaly, but no - first she tickled Fi and then she tickled the rest of us. She goes "ticka-ticka-ticka" while she scrunches her fingers on you and looks mischievous. It's pretty awesome, I tell you what.

So anyway, on Sunday night, Mr. Squab is putting the Hatchling to bed, as per usual, and over the monitor I hear the usual sounds, followed by a second of baby-wailing, followed by a good two minutes of mega-giggles. The giggles subsided and Mr. Squab came downstairs. "Man," he said, "I just had a total Daddy meltdown up there."

"What happened?" I asked.

Turns out, after Mr. Squab had finished rocking the Hatchling and was going to put her in her crib, she started pitching a fit, and locked her arms around his neck like her crib was a bed of red hot coals or something. This is unusual, so Mr. Squab pulled her back out and asked her if she wanted to rock some more. She said yeah and he sat back down with her, her arms still around his neck and her head nestled in in his shoulder. For a few moments they just rocked in silence, enjoying the snuggle time. Then Mr. Squab felt the Hatchling's hand move up towards his neck. "Ticka-ticka-ticka," she whispered, and then giggled. Mr. Squab happens to actually be ticklish on his neck, so he started giggling, too, which of course made her "ticka" him some more. After a minute or two, Mr. Squab asked the Hatchling if she was ready to go to bed now. "OK," she said, so he laid her in her crib and she went down without a peep.

"Wow. That's the good stuff," I told him.

"Yeah," he said. "It doesn't get any better than that."