We came home from our trip to Las Vegas to find a baby who only slightly resembled the one we left.

First and foremost, this new baby—still named L, of course—has ditched the cold (and congestion) that was bugging her before we took off, and is now talking and cooing and yapping like always. She’s also got three new teeth, bringing her current total to five.

What’s more, the kid is eminently more mobile. Before our trip, the extent of her ambulation was army-crawling, during which she’d stagger across the floor like a zombie from some B-rate horror flick. Now, the kid is all-out crawling on all fours; because she still swaggers a bit when she moves, she reminds me of Smeagol from the “Lord of the Rings” films.

(As an aside, we left and the whole mobility thing was a cute little sideshow. The baby is now so fast and so agile that Powergirl and I have rearranged our Saturday to make a special trip to the mall for gates and other baby-proofing accoutrements.)

Of all this new stuff, perhaps my favorite development is her new ability to play catch. Yes, folks, you read that correctly: my eight-month-old daughter can play catch.

Granted, she doesn’t exactly “catch” the ball/stuffed triangle/squeezy-honky thing in mid-air. But once the object lands in her vicinity, she leans over, grabs it and fires it back in my general direction every time.

I’m no baseball scout, but I’d say she’s throwing with a gun like Mets shortstop Jose Reyes. Luckily, neither her hamstrings nor her intelligence resemble the lackadaisical and oft-injured Reyes in any way, shape or form (apologies there to my wife, who is a die-hard Mets fan; I like the Yankees and we have what we like to describe as an “inter-fanatical” relationship).

The bottom line: this post-Vegas L certainly is different than the pre-Vegas one.

All the baby guidebooks warned us development would accelerate rapidly after 7 months or so. I just don’t think we expected the differences to be so dramatic.