Tonight Anna wished to sleep on the floor in her room as though she were on a sleepover. Fine, says I, we’ll just arrange your bedding on the floor. In the process of doing so, the following items were carefully accounted for and arranged in their requisite places:

• A Scooby-Doo blanket, Winnie-the-Pooh sheet and comforter, on which she would lay.

• Bear

• Two stuffed lambs, one small and one large.

• Two stuffed bunnies, one musical and one not.

• A stuffed dog.

• Bananacrackers the stuffed cat.

• One t-shirt each from Mommy and Daddy.

• Two boxes of Kleenex.

• A sippy cup of water.

• Two pillows, small one on top of the large one.

• Six other blankets of varying sizes.

• A stuffed giraffe.

I am not making this up. All this had to be carefully laid out so that she could lay down to sleep; some under the blankets by her feet, some in the crook of her arm, others on top of her, others in a row by her head. I wonder if this is just a phase, or if we are in fact enabling the development of OCD or something.

In other news, Tara took a step on her own today… She was standing next to me, holding on to the bottom of my shorts for support (or because she was going to pants me) with one hand, then she let go and took a step, and would have done a header into a pile of books had I not caught her first.

She does occasionally steady herself long enough to stand for a second or two at a time, but mostly she looks about as stable as Stephen Hawking on ice skates.