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Yesterday, Kaylee’s daycare teacher told me that Kaylee had a Great Day.  (With capital letters and everything.)  She said they’d done “butterfly art,” which involved sticking Fruit Loops to pieces of paper, on which the teachers had put little dabs of glue.  Her teacher said that Kaylee was the only kid who understood right away that she was supposed to put a Fruit Loop on each little glue blob.

So clearly, my child is a genius.

(Just, you know, ignore all those times she’s tried to eat sand and rocks.)

Although I’ve done plenty of bragging to friends and family, I’ve neglected to mention on this blog that Kaylee recently learned to crawl. Her little scoots around the living room have evolved into the ability to head on over to the kitchen to see what Mommy’s doing.

She only figured this out about two weeks ago, so I thought she’d be content with crawling for a while. Now that she can get from this side of the room to that side where her toys are, why not enjoy it for a while? Why rush on to the next milestone?

Kaylee does not see it this way. Almost immediately, she used her newfound ability to crawl over to the coffee table and try to pull herself to her feet. It’s like she has this Action Item list that must be completed as soon as possible:

1. Learn to sit. Check.
2. Learn to crawl. Check.
3. Learn to stand. 50% complete.
4. Learn to walk. 10% complete.
5. Go off to college, leaving my mom to cry into her pillow at night about how her baby grew up way too fast. .01% complete. Will address next week.

For the first few days, she could only pull herself up to her knees. This didn’t help her progress toward walking, but it did put her at just the right height for chewing on the coffee table. In the past couple of days, she has progressed to pulling herself to her feet and knocking stuff off the table for sport. And last night, she actually walked a couple of steps along the table to reach something fascinating (most likely a remote control).

Now, anything and everything is considered a tool for getting to her feet. Nothing is safe – not her toys, her parents or the dogs. If you try to give her a small toy to keep her occupied, you’re inviting her wrath, because if it doesn’t help her stand, it’s not worth her time.

This is all very cool in that I get to see her mastering something new almost every day. But it’s also a little weird because, come on, the kid’s only two feet tall. The mental image of a two-foot-tall bald person running around my house is kind of ridiculous.

Probably the biggest problem with all this activity is that we get accident reports almost every day now from daycare. Yesterday there were two. Most of them are results of Kaylee pulling herself to her feet in her crib, losing her balance and smacking her head on the rails. She has two visible bruises on her face right now. If we want her to get into a good college one day, we should probably buy her a helmet.

When I picked Kaylee up from daycare yesterday, one of her teachers told me that a classmate’s brother had asked about her. The 9-year-old boy has a little sister, and wanted to know whether Kaylee is younger than her. She is, by a week or two.

At this, the boy said, “Well, she is really smart. She stands up really well and is always smiling. She’s just really, really smart.”

I know that a 9-year-old’s stamp of approval isn’t that big of a deal, but it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. A stranger’s son thinks my daughter is smart. Yay!

Up until last night, my baby has been more or less a potato in cute clothes. She can’t sit up, crawl or walk yet, so mostly she’s just lying around watching ceiling fans spin or grinning so broadly that you just want to melt onto the floor into a puddle of happiness because she’s just the cutest little potato baby you’ve ever seen in your life.

But somebody flipped a switch in her sometime in the last few days, and she’s suddenly realized that she’s tired of being a potato and she can actually do stuff. So she decided to make it her mission in life to roll over from her back to her stomach.

We were over at Rob’s mom’s house last night, and Kaylee was in a crib in the living room, straining and struggling to achieve her little milestone. All the adults gathered around and watched, cheering her on and giving her tips:

“Come on, you can do it, Kaylee!”
“You’re almost there … almost there … awwww, so close.”
“Just pull that left arm out from under you and you’ll have it.”

After a while, she gave up and fell asleep, and we gave up and ate dinner. But after some refreshing shut-eye, she was up and at it again. After a few tries, she finally got it and found herself face-down, possibly trying to figure out why her parents, grandmother and uncle were suddenly jumping around and cheering like she’d just won an Olympic gold medal.

Of course, as soon as Kaylee managed to roll onto her stomach, she remembered that she doesn’t like being on her stomach and whined until I picked her up.

It would have taken some sort of catastrophic natural disaster to get the smiles off of Rob’s and my faces for the rest of the night. Because has anything so amazing ever happened before in the history of the world? Has any other baby ever been such a wonderful genius?

Surely not.

When I picked Kaylee up at daycare the other day, one of her teachers told me, “She’s the youngest one we have, but she’s the loudest. She’s like the ringleader of the little ones — she leads the charge.”

Aww, my baby is the loudest yeller in the class. I’m so proud.

I was flipping through a photo album today and came across the picture to the right, which I’d saved from a trip to Denver that Rob and I took about a week after we got married. We’d been lured by a photo booth that promised to show us what our future child would look like.

Apparently, we could expect an orange girl with a huge forehead and an ‘80s hairdo. Our poor child would never be able to find a hat that fits.

Instead, we got this:

Whew. We really dodged a bullet there.