And with that she was a grown up...

Big news in the Clark house: Amelia has 1. said her first word and 2. is doing a "real" crawl! For a while now she has been saying bah-bah-bah-bah, puh-puh-puh-puh, & ma-ma-ma-ma indiscriminately so we knew that she was pretty close to a breakthrough. Just to give her that little extra push I have upped how much i read to her {instead of the half hour before bed i now read for a half hour in the morning, 15 minutes in the afternoon, 15 minutes in the early evening, and then the half hour before bed} and have been doing a lot of extra facetime+talking slowly. Last night near her witching hour {don't we parents know that time of night all to intimately} she was fussing and squirming in Cheyenne's arms then she turns to me throws out her arms in my direction and yells out a VERY definitive "MAMA!". Chey and I froze in shock. "Did she just say....?" "um, yeah I think so, I think she wants her Mama". So he handed her over and she climbed up me like a monkey, burrowed her head in my neck and said "Hrmpf, Mama." then smiled and cooed.
Well we were pretty sure that she said Mama and meant Mama {as opposed to making the sound because it's fun to do} but didn't want to sound the alarm prematurely. We kept trying to get her to do it again with no luck.
Then I went downstairs to make dinner, leaving Little Miss with her Daddy. Once again the fussing ensued. When I came upstairs during a lull in cooking she saw me and yelled out "MAMA!" then tried to throw herself off of her perch on Cheyenne's shoulders {she's usually calmed by being at this lofty height}. When I picked her up she once again cuddled up and said "Mama." she said it two more times while cuddling and then did it again today.
So there you have it, all babies say "Dada" first because it's easier...mine chooses the more challenging path. If that doesn't say Future Harvard Grad then I don't know what does.
As for the crawling, she's been doing an excellent job of mastering the army crawl the last couple of months. Lately however, when I set her on the floor to play i put her in the "normal crawling" all fours position and she sits there rocking and trying to figure it out. Tonight, after dinner, we were all 3 on the floor playing around {as crawling practice and because it calms her down during the aforementioned "witching hour"} and she got up onto all fours and crawled from one side of the room to the other like she'd been doing it all of her life. Her parents sat and watched with their mouths dropped to the floor and tears in their eyes.