Holy cow!

I held Alex up to the mirror this morning. She grinned and crowed, as usual. As usual, I asked her, "Who is that girl?"

And she said, clearly, "A-leh." Accent on the first syllable. Unmistakably her name.

I've thought for more than a month now that she sometimes trys to imitate her name when she hears it a lot of times in succession, which usually happens in front of the mirror. This week, my niece independently reported that Alex mimicked "A-leh" in front of the mirror. But this time I hadn't even said it. She just answered my question.

I swear I don't wanto be one of those crazy "my baby is a genius" mothers who imagines that random baby actions are signs of purposeful intelligence. ("He played peek-a-boo before we'd even left the hospital!") It took me a long time, and other people's agreement, to conclude that she really is purposefully saying "hi." I have no illusions that "Mmamamamamum" means "Mama." But I am dead certain that Alex just used her name in conversation. It didn't sound like any of the rest of the morning's babble, which has been running to things like "THAAAAH-thah-thah-thwah."

In the past couple of days, she's been saying "Mama" more often. It's still not at all clear that she means me, but she's saying it as a two-syllable word, not as part of a long string of syllables. And she's imitating speech sounds these days, too, albeit without any real signs of comprehension. For example, my mother was showing her a plastic turtle. "Can you say 'turtle?'" Alex said, "Tur-dur." Today I asked her, "Are you ready for breakfast?" She said, "Be-fuh." Obviously those don't count as talking, but talking really seems to be coming right up.

Holy cow. She's only eight months old.

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I was up way too late loading things onto the new Palm Pilot Michael gave me for Christmas.

The Epocrates pharmacopeia, because at work I often need to identify a drug or look up potential side effects. A document reader and a whole slew of e-books from places like Memoware and the UVA e-text library. Games like Blocks (a Tetris analogue), Bookworm, and Space Trader. The Texas Hold 'Em game Michael bought me. New Japanese picture puzzles for PictureLogic. AvantGo, which downloads web channels to the Palm. Photos, mostly of Alex. I am incredibly pleased to have a working Palm to replace my old, crappy, broken one.

I also spent some time looking for a case. There appear to be three kinds of cases for the z22, all of which have major drawbacks. I could get a clear plastic box, which I'd need to remove the Palm from completely if I wanted to use it. I could get a soft plastic gel wraparound, which protects every inch of the Palm but the most delicate and vital area - the screen. Or I could get an attractive leather case with holes for the screen and buttons and a cover flap to prevent screen damage between uses... which has absolutely nothing to prevent the Palm from sliding out of the open top edge and smashing to the ground if the case is tipped even slightly forward.

My first Palm had a hard plastic flip-top that protected the buttons from accidental pushes and the screen from accidental damage while the thing was closed. Why has that technology completely vanished?