One year state of the Willa address

And just like that we have a one year old!  What a sweet, sunny, brave-hearted wonder she is.  She is walking everywhere, has ten teeth, and is a bit of a picky eater.  Seriously, I think she is going to turn into one big cheese stick later, if she doesn't eat her weight in Apples and Chicken puree first! 

Her favorite game is "clean up," wherein she puts things away into boxes or baskets, regardless if whether they belong or not.  I think the cutest example of this is when she was playing with a refrigerator magnet in the mudroom, and when I told her to put it away, she dropped it in the nearest shoe.  Too cute!

She has a lot of words and signs now.  Her words are mama, up, ball, book, and bubble, and her signs are milk, more, cheese, cookie, want, and daddy.  We are working a lot on getting her to say "daddy" clearly, but so far she prefers to sign and point it.

She loves to see mirrors and pictures of babies, and has perfected her kissing technique by practicing on them.  She can kiss on command now, which is amazingly charming.  She can also tell you what a fishie says, how big she is, and point to her head, ears, nose, toes, and tummy.  Its incredible how brilliant she is, in my completely unbiased opinion!

I can't wait to see how her words start to pick up steam, and to start hearing simple sentences.  I know she'll have some amazing things to say once she can say them!

11 month state of the Willa address

Just one month to go in her first year!  Just looking at this picture I'm astounded by how much she has grown.  Gone are the days when I had to prop her up and shoot very quickly before she slid down in this chair.  She has even started posing a little, since she has gotten to know this routine after 11 times in the hot seat.  Excuse me while I get a little emotional!

So, her stats.  As of this picture she had taken her first steps (November 28th) while she was playing with me on the floor.  She was cruising on the chaise part of our sectional and walked over to me where I was sitting on her playmat.  It was two or three steps together, and I screamed in excitement!  She did it a couple more times that day, but silly me, I forgot to get my camera out in favor of staying present with her.  So that moment will exist in my memory :-).  She still wasn't confident enough to walk spontaneously, but every once in a while we could get her to walk while her hands were occupied or she was surrounded with people.

She hasn't cut any new teeth, but given her sleep regression, I thought that she must have by now!  For about a month and a half she started to get up every two hours again, wanting to eat.  At least once a week she would wake up and refuse to go back to sleep for the next two hours.  Those were dark weeks, y'all.  We were all SO tired, all the time.  It got difficult to follow my clients in session, and I unloaded my woes on my coworkers almost every day.  This continued until December 20th or so, but I'll fill you in on all that in her 12 month post!

She is still nursing a lot, but she has started to love saltines, cheese, and yogurt more than anything else.  Seriously, I can get a whole meal eaten while she chows down on cheese and crackers!  She has learned how to sign her own versions of "more" and "all done," and I am very excited to be clearly communicating with her.  She always smiles super big when we do, so I think she does as well!

She now has a couple of words, "up" and "mama," and Jeremy is working very hard to get her to say "dada."  Sadly, she's actually closer to "puppy" and "ball," but we'll blame that on phonetics not affinity!

Our little miss is growing like crazy, I can't wait to celebrate her first birthday very soon!

Getting ready for Christmas

There are so many things to do before Christmas, and having a little person that simultaneously needs fun things and takes my free time has only made it more challenging this year!  Because I knew there would be a lot of demands, I started my knitting projects way early this year.  The two ones I wanted to accomplish the most was a "Weasley sweater" for Willa, and a stocking that she can have for years to come.  Since I started in October I was able to get both done, woohoo!

I think I have an unhealthy fixation on the letter W

On December 5 we attended the Greensboro Lights Festival downtown since our company holiday party was at the same time in the office.  All of the activities were free and open to the public, and we had a good time walking around with her in the carrier until the crowds got to be too much.  Here are some highlights:

Willa's first time sitting with Santa, she was totally calm if a little bewildered

Remembering her affinity for bands, we made sure to stop and listen to the 

local high school's brass band play Christmas carols

Who doesn't love giant holiday wind socks?

They made fake snow for the little ones, who clearly should have been warned that 

it was made of soap suds, and therefore not the tastiest stuff ever!

I was worried about how Willa would do with a tree this year.  I always love to get a real tree, both for the smell and for the ritual of choosing just the right one.  However, our little miss loves to put anything she finds on the floor in her mouth, including (and especially) dog hair and little bits of paper.  I just knew that I would spend a decent amount of time chasing her down and prying needles out of her mouth if we got a real tree.  I briefly considered an artificial tree for this reason, but then I realized that since she is just learning to walk and steadies herself on anything within arm's reach, she would be likely to topple the thing onto herself.  Thus, I took this year to experiment with a tree alternative.  I always loved the trees made out of book arrangements, and when Jeremy suggested using our built-ins in the living room, I jumped at the chance to play with it.  Behold, the result:

I grabbed every green book in the house, a couple of baskets, a stack of Real Simple magazines, and some white bowls/bud vases to assemble a rough outline of a tree

Then we added our favorite ornaments by wedging them between stacks and pages, on top of vases, and from light clips I stuck to the front of the shelves

And here it is all lit up!

I think it was a nice compromise, although I look forward to next year when she is (hopefully) old enough to be safe with a regular tree.  If not, we can always bring this out again, it was quite easy!

The last big thing to accomplish this year was the first year I got to play with taking pictures for our first family Christmas card.  I bought her a pair of red and white striped pjs for just this occasion and scoured Pinterest for cute ideas.  I really liked pictures of babies with lights, so I took these:

No, she didn't actually eat the light.  I swooped in right after I snapped this!

Why do I have to do this, Mom?

We ended up choosing two different styles of Christmas card because I just couldn't decide between the two,  Hopefully if you are reading this you got to see at least one of them!

So that's my super long post on Christmas preparations.  Get ready for the even longer one on actual Christmas celebrations!

Willa's First Thanksgiving

Willa's first Thanksgiving was spent here at home.  My mom came to visit the week before while Jeremy was overseas on a business trip, and then my dad and brother came the day before Thanksgiving to spend the rest of the holiday week with me.  Jeremy was unexpectedly called away for a family emergency for the week of Thanksgiving, so I am grateful that my family was already planning to come so that Willa and I didn't have to be alone.  We definitely missed him, but we were able to have a good time.

I was in charge of the meal for the first time, so I had to make sure I planned closely to cover all the bases.  I made the pies the day before, and even decided to get a little fancy:

It says "thanks." It was delicious.

My dad and I decided to try to tackle smoking the turkey, which Jeremy usually does very well.  While it cooked for six hours, I enjoyed sharing the Macy's parade with Willa.

She was transfixed by the marching bands!

I shot a little bit of video of her watching it too.  She went BANANAS for the Sesame Street float, and got the closest to clapping that she ever had!

After all day in the smoker and lots of care and attention from my dad, the turkey was hot and ready and pretty fantastic looking:

Yum!

We loved it, but I think Willa was thrown off by the new texture of it.  Either way she looked pretty cute eating it!

Maybe next year she'll have a taste for it!

Unfortunately the timing of dinner was right during her naptime, so she (and I) missed the rest of the meal.  Oh well, leftovers are just as tasty!  We missed Daddy, but we appreciated our time with family, and were glad that he could be there for his parents. 

Next stop, Christmas!

10 month state of the Willa address

You talkin' to me?

She looks very Deniro in this picture to me, too funny!

As of today, our big 10 month old girl has 8 teeth, five signs, one word, and a personal best of five seconds of independent standing.  She also has conquered crawling on all fours, although she still prefers to pull herself up and cruise/assisted walk.  She has discovered Gerber cheese puffs, a Chipotle quesadilla, and that the wonders of Cheerios never cease.  She can power down multiple servings of pureed baby food in a single sitting and is down to four or five feedings a day.

One area where she seems to be regressing a little is overnight.  She has been waking up at least once a night, usually two or three times, for the past few weeks.  Not sure what that's about, but I'm hoping its just the "sleep regression" thing instead of a super fun new habit.

She is still loving her baby classes and all the kids in them.  She should move up to the next level classes in the coming month, so I'm excited to see all the new skills she can learn!  Her favorite element is still the parallel bars, and she is starting to cruise along them very smoothly.  I'm so proud!

Her newest skill is holding her arms up when we ask, "how big is Willa?" as if to say "soooo biiig!!!" It's ridiculously cute.

Next up is Thanksgiving, and trying all the tasty new foods along with it.  Hopefully she will like her Daddy's smoked turkey as much as the rest of us!

Belated 9 month state of the Willa address

My baby is 9 months old! 

On the 11th she had seven teeth, slept from 8-8, ate like a champ, and was dabbling with walking and crawling.  She has gotten very good at it in the past three weeks, so here are some videos to show you just how far she has come!

She goes to Kindermusik once a week and Little Gym twice.  She really lights up when she sees the other kids, and is impressing everyone with her tallness and her toothiness.  At her doctor's appointment she weighed 17 pounds, 1 ounce and measured 29.5 inches long.  This puts her in the 40th percentile for weight and 96th for height.  Wow! We're not surprised, but I'm definitely excited that she moved up from the 24th weight percentile.  And no wonder, she is eating so many things!

This month she started loving Cheerios and regularly eats them on her own.  We also started her on other Gerber snacks, as well as little bits of bread and cheese.  She eats mostly purees and still nurses for most of her nutrients, but it is sure a lot of fun to watch her try new things!

Her sign vocabulary now includes "milk," "want," "Daddy," and "up."  She is thiiiiis close to "all done," and babbles a lot, so I'm sure she will add more in no time!

The cutest thing she started doing is giving air kisses by pursing her lips and sucking in her cheeks.  It truly is the best thing ever, and hopefully it means we will skip the soggy open mouthed baby kisses, although they are delightful :-).

At this milestone month I have to stop and reflect that being her mom has only gotten better.  It makes me so excited for the future, and so thankful for the present moment.  We love you, Little Miss!!

Happy Halloween!

Our little miss Willa was a shark for her first Halloween, owing to her many teeth and propensity to chew everything to bits!

Chomp chomp

We dressed like Sheriff Brody and Quint to match her!

To celebrate, last Saturday we went to the Little Gym for their Halloween party with a bunch of other kids.  The activities there skewed a little old for her, but she had fun walking around the padded space and seeing some of her friends.

Baby friends!

That night we hosted a Costumed Pumpkin Carving for my work friends.  Only a handful of people came, but luckily for Willa one of them was her friend, Petra.

There was some mutual hugging/chomping action

We dabbled in some pumpkin painting, but because she was not allowed to eat it, it wasn't a fun experience for her.  So, I kept it quick and this was the result.  Hopefully she will like it more next year!

Thanks for the idea, Pinterest!

I also had fun with a little video of her in her costume today.  I was hoping that she would go after Roxy, but as always, I was her preferred chomping target!

I am definitely learning that having a kid makes Halloween lots more fun!  I can't wait for next year, and it's a lot of fun to reflect on how far we have come in a year :-).