On Friday I went out for drinks with a couple old friends and wasn't home in time to see Sydney before she went to bed. While I was sitting at the bar, I got an alarming text message from Meghan at roughly 5pm. She was letting me know that Sydney had only had one and a half bottles at day care (typically 3) and had been up since 1 with some crappy napping before that. That had us fairly worried because Sydney has a hard enough time making it to bed time if she naps until 3. Anyway, we went into the weekend not really knowing what to expect.
Saturday morning was messed up, presumably from the night before. We had a massive unexplained crying fit in the morning followed by a 180 degree turn around for the rest of the day. At one point we were all sitting on the floor, Sydney was facing us, and I was eating Cheerios out of the box. I had given Sydney Honey Nut Cheerios awhile back and she really didn't like them. This time I had the multi-grain ones and for some reason decided to give her one. I put it in the palm of my hand and held it out to her. Sydney reached over with her right hand, took the Cheerio from my palm in her little fist, opened her hand palm up, and looked at the cheerio. She then reached with her left hand, picked it up with her thumb and forefinger, and put it in her mouth.
Meghan and I were shocked. Normally Sydney has a lot of trouble with small finger foods because they get lost in her palm and she can't get them from her closed fist into her mouth. She also generally doesn't have the control to coordinate 2 hands in that way. We then repeated the procedure at least 10 times. Each time she grabbed with her right and fed herself with her left. I think at the end she did it 3 more times with the opposite hands. THIS STORY GETS BETTER THOUGH 
After the first time she did it, we clapped and cheered for her. Guess what she did? She got a big smile on her face and started clapping. We've been trying to get her to clap for a long long time and this was the first time she had ever done it. So we ate a cheerio, clapped, ate another cheerio, clapped, etc. We started to get concerned that she thought clapping meant "give me another Cheerio".
I'll also add that the cheerios got chewed up and swallowed as opposed to hanging out in her mouth for 30 minutes before causing her to gag until we pick them out of her mouth. (common problem recently)
I'll admit that one of the attempts failed that morning. She got one of the cheerios stuck to her palm and couldn't figure out how to shake it off. Meghan took it out of her hand and tried to hand it back to her. Sydney just leaned forward and took it with her mouth.
In other news, today we went to Sydney's cousin Kendall's 2-yr birthday party. Kendall and another little girl (roughly the same size as Kendall) were running around and Sydney wanted to jump into the mix. She stood up and with Meghan holding her hands tried to run out to play in the center of the room with the other girls. She also jumped up and down a few times and yelled at them. It was very cute. Our 9 month old is ready to run out and play with the 2 year olds. ...I was waiting for her to get away from Meghan, take off running, and then realize she couldn't do that and fall on her face. She really wanted to play with them though. Watching her interactions makes us think it might be good for her to play with some older kids "like Kendall" more often. It might accelerate her learning process.