What are we up to this week?

Happy April Fool's Day, everyone! I'm not feeling witty enough to come up with a silly April Fool's post, so here goes more of the usual:

Maia's walking skills have increased (seemingly) exponentially over the last few days. Her first bona fide walking adventures were on the day we posted that video with her in the blue shirt (the earlier video was more walking "by accident"); that was last Thursday. By Saturday, she was walking circles around the house for 20, 25, 30 feet at a stretch. This is how Maia seems to work in terms of her physical development: she waits until she's quite confident with something before really going out on a limb and giving it the old college try.

We've also noticed that this transition to having a walking kid around the house isn't as hard as we thought it would be in terms of keeping her out of things. Several months ago, on that first day that she really, confidently crawled forward, she confidently and deliberately pulled herself up to a stand. So, really, whenever we've had a moving baby, we've had a standing baby. We child-proofed the cupboard doors in the kitchen, and we make sure that the basement door is always closed, but, other than that, things are pretty much just as they always have been around here. That's been surprisingly non-eventful.

Today, Nana Dawn visited for the whole day, during which we went to a coffee shop on Main St. and Maia walked up to a stranger's table and begged for her to share some of her pastry.

I'm reading David McCullough's biography of John Adams. This is somewhat off the beaten path for me, but I realized (with some embarrassment) that my knowledge of the so-called "Founding Fathers" isn't as solid as it should be. So, in honor of the election year . . . let's try to address that deficit!