Nearly 3 weeks ago, Mehdi attended a conference in New Orleans. While he was packing the night before he left, we talked about how, at 11 months, Elianne seemed so much younger than Anissa did at that age. We reminisced about a trip we took to Vancouver for another conference, when Anissa was just 11 months old: how she already had an impressive vocabulary and could make a repetoire of animal sounds, had a full mouth of teeth and had had her hair cut. Elianne, on the other other hand, says a handful of words (Mama, Papa, done, duck, ball, hi, bye), has 4 teeth and her baby hair. We laughed about how, the day after Mehdi left Vancouver and Anissa and I went camping in the Okanagan with my family, Anissa took her first steps. As Mehdi filled his suitcase, we joked how he certainly was not going to miss Elianne's first steps on this trip, as she wasn't showing any signs of walking soon.

Surprise surprise! It seems both our girls require two conditions to take those first shaky steps: Mehdi out of town, and Memere and Pepere to cheer them on. I dropped Mehdi off at the airport Wednesday morning, and when my parents arrived in Calgary that night Elianne took her first steps from Dad to me. She's been doing the Frankenstein walk around the house since then, getting more and more confident so that by her first birthday next weekend, she should be up to showing off her new skill.