“What are you doing?” I asked her in slight baby-talk. Generally Alice and I didn’t do that since it had been shown to hinder speech, but when she was being this adorable I couldn’t really help it. Kallie turned her head to look at me and laughed.

“Jenna,” she said, very deliberately. Then she turned away from me and snuggled Jenny again. Shane and Alice happened to walk back in as she did this, and they thought it was as cute as Jenny and I did. She’d been babbling and saying the generic ma and ba for quite awhile, but never a word in context, so we were all pretty excited about it.

After that her early development was really a blur for the most part. I wish it wasn’t that way in my head, but the only things that really stand out in my mind from the period of her first word to the time she got sick are just fragments, and what I remember from the photographs Shane took and the endless snapshots Alice did.

She never really crawled. We thought something might be wrong with her, and decided to take her to the doctor although Helena told us that Kallie’s way of semi-walking by supporting herself on furniture was actually more advanced than crawling. She’d scoot herself backwards every now and then too, but generally if she was on the floor and wanted to move around she’d pull herself to a standing position and move around that way. She ended up being just fine when we took her, if not a little ahead of her age group in height and weight. We left feeling much better about the not-crawling thing.

Otherwise, not much happened that really stands out in my mind. That’s not to say that things weren’t good; they were wonderful. I loved reading to her with Alice every night, all snuggled up together on the bed. It was nice. Kallie loved her books and would stare at them wide-eyed and silent as Alice read. And then when the story was finished, she’d laugh for a long time. We never really figured out why, but it was cute so we guessed it didn’t really matter.

She definitely wasn’t a picky eater, either. We’d put her in her high chair and she’d go nuts. She’s laugh at Alice’s bad attempts at airplane sounds. We gave her baby food and she seemed to love all of it, and when we started to give her solids she loved those too, although she threw as much across the room and at Alice and I as she ever ate. I suppose we shouldn’t have laughed, but it was really funny. Especially when she flung a spoonful of mashed green peas all over Bette’s power suit one day when she stopped by after work. That time, Bette didn’t speak to either of us for a week, but everyone else thought it was hilarious.