Samantha continues to develop new skills and confidence at what seems to me like a remarkable pace. There's something new every day. She now stands up effortlessly (pulling herself upright on whatever happens to be handy), and usually manages to sit back down again with no trouble at all.

Her ability to pick up pieces of food and actually get them into her mouth is improving daily. She's pretty fond of most of the foods we've offered her, including such unusual items as water chestnuts and straw mushrooms from last night's pan fried noodles with vegetables.

She navigates the two steps down to the living room better every day and has been able to climb most of the way up the main staircase to the second floor (with me or Amy sitting next to her making sure she doesn't fall, of course).

The biggest change I've noticed, though, is in just the last two days. There's a real deliberateness and intent to her actions that wasn't there before. For example, three days ago she'd look around a room and her eye would fall more or less by accident on some random object, which she would crawl toward.

Today I noticed that she was actively looking for specific items -- especially her favorite pacifier -- and going to get them when she wanted them. She'd play with them or chew on them for a while before putting them down again and going on to something else. But later you could really see her decide that she wanted that pacifier again, remember where she'd left it, and go directly over to it to retrieve it and stick it back in her mouth with an expression of great self-satisfaction. It's the first time I've seen her engage in that kind of directed, intentional action, and it's really amazing to see that sort of ability just appear one day.

That's the really cool thing about being a dad ... watching the development of cognitive capabilities, of choices and opinions and attitudes. A few months ago Samantha was a mostly immobile bundle of instinct who more or less relied on us to make all decisions for her. Then almost overnight she began to develop her own opinions about things -- about what foods she liked, which parent she wanted to hold her, what toy she wanted to play with at any given time. And it wasn't long after she started crawling that you could see conscious choices on her part about where to go, and what objects to get her hands on when she got there.

Once she makes up her mind, she becomes very persistent about reaching her goal, too. She'll go over, under, and around obstacles, and while you might be able to distract her with some other object or toy for a few minutes, it's never too long until she remembers what she started out to do and returns to her original course. She must get that from her mother.

Seeing these changes you have to wonder where these things come from. How is it that one day instead of crawling around at random she decides that she wants to go over there and pull all of the videotapes out of the TV cabinet, instead of going in the other direction and pulling all the cd's out of the cd tower, or decides that the pink bear that plays music is more fun today than the purple elephant that also plays music?

It's clear that these preferences have nothing at all to do with me or with Amy or our influence on her, whatever that might be at this point in her life, so where do they come from? I know, I'm hardly the first parent to wonder about this. Piaget did it first, and before him every parent back to the first Neanderthal who watched their kid crawl across the floor of the cave. It's the most mysterious, and the most magical, part of having a child.

On other notes, we installed the convertible toddler car seat in Amy's car today (what a pain in the butt -- Saab should really find a way to retrofit their cars with LATCH anchor points), removed the bases for the infant seat from both cars, and replaced the car seat carrier with a real stroller in the back of Amy's car. I guess this means we've taken the next step toward true toddler-hood. How scary is that?