Growth Spurt

You more experienced parents out there know that, just as these little ones have physical growth spurts - greatly increasing their consumption to support a speedy bit of growing, they also have developmental spurts, where all of a sudden there's a whole pile of new skills and behaviours in their repertoire.
Lately, Tango's been doing both. She's now over 19 pounds or 8.5 kilos, and as best as I can measure as she squirms around, she's 27.5 inches or 70 cm. I think only the boy 'round the corner is bigger than her at this point. (His mom and I were dubbed the Amazon women by one of the other moms at Baby Talk the other week.
But the fun part, of course, is all the new stuff she does. She rolls over on her own now - mostly onto her tummy. She'll spin on the floor, too. She's been doing that for awhile, finding her turned around in the morning in her crib, but she's getting much more efficient and deliberate about it. Harder to describe how she gets better at manipulating things (that's 'things' not 'moms', though the Bear might argue that :). The other day she was just looking at her hands, a toy in one, and rotating them: clockwise, counter-clockwise, clockwise, ... She'd look down at her hands intently with this look of concentration, "Hey, they move that way, too." She sits with support, but would rather use you for leverage to roll or reach to her next target. If you pull her to sitting from lying down, she'll push up to standing while you hold her hands, and she'll stand on her own with just a finger. The Bear says he had her supporting herself against the couch the other day. But my most favouritest new development is self-feeding with the bottle. The first few docking attempts were great to watch, as she bounced the nipple around nose, cheeks and chin before finally stretching her mouth wide enough to snag the tip with her lips and reel it in. She's improved with every 'round and yesterday she not only executed a perfect dock, but she continued to hold the bottle for the full feed.
She's far more interested in checking out everything around her, especially textures, she'll scratch at the material on the chair or your clothes. Even happy to meet new people and be passed around so long as mom's around when a need arises. And showing signs of recognizing words and phrases, with a few good babble sessions whenever the recorder isn't around. The first phrase recognized is repeated a lot. "Let go."
Go, girl!