Emmy Lou's Adventures: A whale of a tale

Dearest readers,
I apologize for my recent hiatus from Emmeline's blog. We have been rather busy this past month (nothing new there...we are always busy) but in addition to our normal activities, Emmeline and I took an unexpected trip to North Dakota for ten days. We had a lovely time with family and friends, despite the fact that we were there due to my grandmother's ill health. But all is well now. She is right as rain, craving sweets like always and looking forward to flying a kite this summer.
Since so much has happened recently, I thought I would just post a bunch of pictures with detailed captions below. They will have to serve as my means of storytelling for the time being. I promise to publish shorter posts more frequently in the future. I know these novellas can be rather daunting to read.
A lot has happened with Emmeline's development during the past few weeks. She is now crawling on her hands and knees, pulling herself up to stand and cruise along furniture, crawling up the stairs, claps every time we say "Yay!", and is understanding "no thank-you" when she does something that we do not want her to do (but does not usually decide to listen). She cries when things are taken away from her and has a bit of separation anxiety. When we arrived at the Grand Forks airport, I handed her to my mom and walked away to get my luggage. In just a few seconds her face had clouded over and she started to cry. By the end of our few weeks at home, though, she was fast friends with everyone.
She is actually very interested in strangers, just as long as they don't take her away from her mom! She has also cut three more teeth (five total): top front left, top left incisor and top right incisor. She is able to make the hard "c" sound for "cat" but has not paired it yet with the "-at". She is pretty good with "duh" for "duck" and, of course, "mamamamama" and "dadadadada". There are many other sounds that she had been working on; I have recently heard ga, ya, na, and wa sounds. She has a very full and vibrant babyspeak vocabulary. It is amazing to think that she will soon be asking (or demanding!) things by name.
Paul and I have grown increasingly frustrated by her nighttime sleep habits. Everything seemed to get worse when we got back from the Midwest, too. We were co-sleeping the entire time we were there so she nursed quite a bit at night. When we returned, we tried to keep her in her crib most of the night but she woke quite frequently. We finally decided to try the Ferber method, which was recommended to us by another mom at the Birth Center. This methods requires you to let your baby "cry it out" gradually. So on the first night, after your bedtime routine, you put your baby in his or her crib and leave the room. You let them cry for three minutes and after that time you may go in to the baby and try to sooth them, but you can't pick them up. Then after one minute, you must leave the room for five minutes and then return for one, then leave for seven and return for one. The first night it took over an hour and a half to get her to sleep. It was awful and I cried through most of it. The method really isn't working that well and I am sure it has a lot to do with the fact that I simply do not have the stomach for this sort of thing. Ferber's bottom line is that even if your child vomits from crying so hard, you clean her up and get back to business. That just doesn't seem right. There must be a better way.
Well, enough of that for now. I hope you enjoy our pictures: