Oh, yes, Lara! how could I forget!?

What with me enjoying myself last weekend, I've not been able to update followers with Lara's latest news. She's settled back in at home; if anything she still seems a bit more clingy than when she went away, getting upset if one of us leaves the room without her. She is definitely saying more things more, her favourite words are "Misha" and "NO!". Misha, of course, refers to Mishka, and No is almost exclusively directed at Jackson, who loves to jump up at all of us, and this can bother Lara when he's persistent. We do step in to stop him, but also we're very happy to let Lara tell him, in no uncertain terms, "NO!". I think she gets it off her Mama...

Lara's sleeping has been almost as good as ever. She does take longer to go off to sleep now, and cries a little when whomever puts her bed leaves the room, but once she's asleep, that's it. She might wake for a drink of water just as we go to bed, but since I came back on Monday, we've not had to attend to her at all during the night. In fact, on Monday morning she slept until 8.20am, making us late for work, and this morning it was a more normal 7.30am.

Her speech is getting very interesting. She "babbles" an awful lot around us, although she gets shy and quiet around anyone else, but there are definite attempts from her to mimic what we say. Besides Mama and Papa, she's very good with facial features, she's been able to say (and point correctly to) nose, eye, cheek and "hooo-ahh" (I'll let Olga correct my transliteration! It's the Russian for ear, and seems to be much easier for Lara to say) for a couple of months now. I'm encouraging Olga to speak to Lara in Russian as much as possible, seeing as Lara will get all the English she needs at nursery, and yesterday in the car, we were trying to teach Lara to say "machina", the Russian for car, and we definitely got a 3-syllable word back, that was very close to machina. It might have been a coincidence, but we'll keep trying.
She understands much more than she can express in words. She knows the hand actions to the "Wheels on the Bus" song, she knows to say "shhhhh" and puts a finger to her lips when they are coming to the end of the programmes on the Bedtime Hour on Cbeebies and the characters are going to sleep.

Just to balance things, and so I'm not only ever posting the cutest photos of her on here, here are a couple that show her other character traits, or show that there are moments when she's merely normal, like the rest of us!
Here she can pout with the style of Kate Moss in her prime..

Here she is with Luke, who is the spitting image of his father, Terry; neither of them will be pleased if I keep this photo for the next 16 years or so. They were in the pub at the time in Limassol, so we'll forgive them!

And just to show that those photos are rarities, here is a more normal photo of Lara, seconds after the previous one was taken, probably when she realised Mama was taking her photo!