An even bigger win? I took these pics a week ago. Go me! I'll have this monthly update thing down by the time she turns one...
Speaking of which... Someone hold me. In LESS THAN two months, my baby will celebrate her birthday. I can't believe we're even talking about this! Party plans are in the works! On top of that, we've been attending open houses for toddler programs for the fall (a one day a week parent/co-op thing, to replace our beloved baby class that she'll graduate from at 15mo). And in class, our instructor Wendy keeps referring to them as one. Or, "this is what one year olds do", or "because she's transitioning to toddlerhood..." Slow the heck down, little girl!!!
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| Braidy photo-bomb! |
I know I keep saying it, but this month has been a lot of fun, personality-wise. My absolute FAVE fave is the peekaboo! Ruby can be so playful, and she started initiating peekaboo games on her own. She will grab laundry, a blanket, her towel, my sleeve, and hold it over her eyes until you say, "where's Ruby?!?" Then she whips it down and cracks a huge grin when you exclaim, "PEEKABOO!!!". It is so so so so cute! I do end up re-folding a lot of laundry, but honestly? How could I care? It is too adorable, and I love that she gets a kick out of playing. She'll even do it with her stroller blanket out of the blue towards strangers. Love.
No new teeth yet, which is kind of funny because at her 9mo doctor appointment, the pediatrician said it felt like another one was going to pop through any minute. Um, yeah, no. Still just the two! However, she's using what she's got to eat us out of house and home. We often say that she eats like a teenage boy, or is part beagle because she's got no "off" switch when it comes to food. She's been eating mangoes and blueberries as fast as I can put them in front of her, but has also decided she loves meatballs and likes chicken even. Peirogies? Yep, loves them. TJ's salsa-style refried beans in a quesadilla? Can't get enough. Tofu from my soup at the Thai place? Yes. Turkey from my sandwich? Yep. She'll even eat peas frozen because she's too impatient to wait. She likes garlicky hummus, and has been known to suck all the "meat" from a red pepper off of the skin. I don't know where she puts it, but she will eat almost a whole banana and a pancake for breakfast. This kid is nuts about food, and it's so fun!
While my girl-baby is excelling in the eating department, she is not in the movement department. Still no crawling to report, and she doesn't really seem like she wants to (at least, not conventionally, from her tummy). She still lunges forward from sitting, and has an insane wingspan - the amount of things that she can reach, which I never thought she'd be able to, is astounding.
She has learned to scoot on her bottom if she is not on the carpet. We have to put her on the kitchen floor when cleaning up from dinner, because she tries to dive-bomb out of her high chair. However, we've found that she will scoot several feet to get to one of us, the dog, her chair (she likes to push it around), or the dishwasher (LOVES the dishwasher).
Ruby also kind of "climbs" all over us, and she will pull herself up on things, but not quite completely to standing. She gets one foot planted, but the other still tucked under. She likes to stand though, and if propped, will stand for long periods of time. No cruising yet either, though. She seems like she is scared?
Even though I know that some babies can skip the crawling stage all together, I think that if she makes it to 11 months without getting mobile, I'm going to have to call her doctor. That's hard for me even to write, but as of today at 10mo10days, she was the only "sitting duck"in our baby class, and that made me sad. I feel like she's behind, and of course, I somehow blame myself. I just want her to be able to do what she needs to do. Ok, moving on!
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| The name of the game for this photo shoot was, "see if I can rip this sticker off!" |
This month we overcame the fear of the big girl bath, and have said goodbye to the infant tub (yay!). Baths are now 100% in her ducky tub up in her bathroom. She was scared at first, so we let her play in it dry/clothed with her bath toys, then had a bath with no washing, just playing, and then finally worked up to full baths. She HATES having her hair washed, since she inevitably gets some water in her eyes since she's no longer laying down. She actually tries to climb out when she knows it's hair washing time. Luckily, she really likes her bath toys, so we distract distract distract. It works.
This is her "elephant face". I'm so glad I caught it on camera, because this is a little game she made up that has totally been "her" all month. She takes a deep breath, puffs her cheeks up like this, then makes an elephant sound out of the corner of her mouth with her lips. She LOVES it if you do it too, in turns, back and forth with her. It's totally hilarious. It's also hilarious when you're driving in the car and she's been totally quiet for a long time, then out of the blue comes the elephant-baby. Love her.
I guess we should talk about sleep, too, huh? Mostly, sleep is not so bad. She usually goes down between 7:30-8, might wake up in the early morning hours and may be up for the day then, or may go back to sleep for a bit. But she threw several wrenches in there this month to keep us on our toes too. Like waking up after 20min and taking another hour to get back down. Or a few nights where she wanted to be up all. night. long. Mostly though, she'd go down (but usually after Keith had to go in and bounce her - she doesn't like Mommy to put her down), and wake way earlier than we'd want to. Like 5am. Nobody wants to be up that early, Ruby!
Ok, ok, I'll get up for that face. Then, there's naps. I feel like naps have been our "problem" from the beginning. Once the newborn sleepies wore off, she's never been a good napper. I think it's because she wants to be held, but I just can't be touching someone for 100% of the day. Maybe that's selfish, and maybe that's why I feel that naps are my achilles heel/failure as a parent. But they are just all over the place. In the past month, she went a week where she'd take one, sometimes two regular naps in her crib. I know she gets tired about 2hrs after she gets up, and try to get her to bed then so she can rest. But sometimes, she just won't do it. She's an in-arms sleeper, and wakes during the transfer. Sometimes I can bounce her back to sleep, and sometimes she's just too mad about it. Sometimes, only in this past month, she has fallen asleep in her car seat and actually stayed asleep with me bringing her seat out of the car and up the 2 flights of stairs to her room! I actually wish I could just leave her in the car, because some of her best naps have been there lately. Ugh. I just don't even know, but I want to help her with this napping thing because she's so much happier rested. I am way in the anti-sleep training camp, but I did check out the "No-Cry Nap Solution" from the library recently. I don't really know that it's a "solution" per se, but I am hoping to add some tools to my toolbox to help my girl rest.
Oddly enough, right now she's napping, and has been for the past hour and a half. Go figure. But she's doing something else that was new for month 10: sleeping on her side. Very very often, we will look at the monitor and find that she's rolled over and is sleeping on her side. We often find her that way when we come in to get her when she wakes, too. She has always been a back sleeper, until now. We've been hoping that her liking of side-sleeping will actually help us in transfers to the crib. Instead of rolling her to her back to put her down, we just put her down as-is on her side, the way we were carrying her. It does seem to have helped a bit, as it's definitely less jostling.
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| "Ok, I'm done. Take this off of me." |
I can't end her 10 month post without mentioning another one of my favorite new things she is doing. For quite some time, Ruby has pointed to her high chair tray for more food, but towards the end of her tenth month, she started pointing at other things, too. And we think that she's been holding out on us, and knows a lot more than we'd been giving her credit for. The example? Her bear jammies. She has a pair of pajamas with little bears all over them, and she's kind of obsessed with the bears. She does point to them whenever we put them on her, and they totally distract her from how much she hates getting ready for bed. So the other night, we asked her, "Where are your bears?" She started pointing them out one by one on her jams! We couldn't believe it! It's so funny to watch her intently studying them, too.
But now, the little miss is awake, and wants her mommy. She's growing up SO dang fast (I can't believe she has double-digits on her stickers here), that I need to go snuggle her before she's heading off to college or something! Slow down, baby girl!
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