From:	"Eric Siegel" ...
To:	"Emom" ..., "mom" ..., "dad" , ...,
Subject:	Isabelle Update
Date:	Tue, 20 Oct 1998 05:54:01 -0600

Dear family and friends:

I thought you might enjoy hearing what Isabelle has been up to. In any case, I am going to enjoy telling you. You may have heard that Isabelle began walking three days after she turned 14 months old. It is really hard to believe that that was less than one month ago, because she walks very easily now and can even carry her chair around to whereever she wants it to go.

We went to our friends' country club Saturday (as we do every Saturday), and Isabelle was not very brave in the water, but she still had fun. However, she was incredible on the little tikes plastic play area. She spent about 10 solid minutes trying to get herself up a slide. She tried walking up, crawling up, pulling herself up, and almost made it once. I was amazed at her persistence and strength and by the fact that she didn't get upset or scared, even when she was practically hanging by one arm. Then we went to another area and she climbed through a tube for the first time (she is generally nervous about small spaces), climbed up two levels higher and slid down a much longer slide.

She is wanting to do everything by herself now, including eating and drinking. She is using a regular teaspoon to eat and is getting better and better with it. At the club she fed herself soup. It got all over her swim wrap, but she did pretty well. She also ate french fries with the older girls and dipped them in the ketchup just like they did. She is mimicing everything we say or do now. We were picking up Rachel from Spanish class Friday and Rachel put her hand to her lip and said shhhh, and Isabelle did it too. It was very cute.

Her favorite book is Moo, Baa, La La La, which has many animal noises. She can do most of the animal noises. She doesn't do them yet without our doing them first, but they are really cute. She does cow, sheep, two different dog ones, duck, and horse. Speaking of animals, she suddenly became really interested in them. There are tons of dogs here as well as a fair number of cows, horses, ducks, and chickens around and she loves to watch them. She points at all the dogs we pass, when just about a month ago she seemed not to notice them at all. Just yesterday we found a house that had three rabbits in the yard and she loved watching them and threw a little fit when we had to leave. This is a new thing, this fit throwing. It seems our baby is becoming a toddler.

They had a local fair here last week that ended yesterday. You know the kind they have in small towns with rides that move from town to town. Well, we finally took Isabelle yesterday. She hadn't been enjoying the little rides they have in malls, so we didn't think she would like the rides at the fair much, but we wanted to see the fair and decided to give it a try. So we went and brought along one of her little friends who is about 7 years old, because the rides for Isabelle are generally too small for me to fit in. Well, she had a fabulous time. She went on five rides. Two different ones with little cars that go around a track, one mini-ferris wheel type ride that she was nervous about so that one I went on with her, and one that she loved and went on twice that went around in a circle in little planes and went up and down too. Of course, I think Rachel and I had even more fun watching her on the rides than she had. Isabelle's language skills seem to be really developing. She seems to understand a lot of what is said to her in either English or Spanish, and as I said she is repeating words we say with much more clarity now. She still only uses mommy, daddy, yeah, si, no, and caca (Spanish for poop) on her own. As you might have guessed, the most frequently heard word these days is 'no'.

It is 5:30 in the morning now and Isabelle is still asleep. She wakes up between 5:00 and 6:00, still usually takes two naps (but sometimes only one now), and still goes to bed by 7:00 pm (sometimes even earlier). She loves her sleep and she loves her food. She eats lunch most days at our Costa Rican friends' house, because she likes their cooking better than ours (they also give her galletas--cookies), and they love to feed her because she is so into eating. They have two little girls and the younger of the two hates to eat, so Isabelle is a pleasant contrast. We really haven't found anything that she won't eat.

Well, I could go on, but I will stop for now. Being a father has been an incredible experience for me and it keeps getting better and better as Isabelle gets more and more expressive of her affection. We are really lucky to be able to spend so much time with Isabelle this year.

Keep in touch.

Eric