Ten Months

Charlotte hit double digits on Monday. TEN MONTHS. My baby girl is ten months old. I’m still not sure I believe it.

I have to say, I am LOVING this age. This kid is so much fun. I just adore being with her.

At the moment, she’s all about the 3 C’s… cruising, climbing, and crawling. The other day she tried to climb her dresser like a rock wall using the knobs as footholds. (Umm… no, we won’t be doing that!) All of the activity has led to more bumps, bruises, and encounters with blood than I was prepared for.

I know lots of babies her age and younger are spouting off words, but Charlotte’s not much of a talker. At least not to the point that I’m comfortable saying “Word! That was totally a word!” She says “mamamamama” a lot, but it’s pretty rare that she just says “mama,” and the occasions that it’s been directed at us are seriously questionable. Catch took a video of her on Monday where she honks the horn of her toy steering wheel and it sounds like she’s saying, “beep beep” but “be be be be” has been her favorite sound lately, so I’m not sure. We also swear she says, “dog dog” sometimes, but who knows?

She is all about peekaboo, though. And oh, how she laughs. It’s contagious. We toss a cloth diaper over her head and ask, “Where’s Charlotte?” She waits a moment and then pulls the diaper off with total flourish. She is SO proud of herself. She likes to play peekaboo with her bedroom curtains, too.

Have I mentioned the clapping? She started clapping a few weeks ago, and it’s adorable. The other morning, I picked her up out of her crib and she was still sleepy, so we snuggled together in the glider for a bit while she woke up. She was lying still with her head pressed tight against my chest, and we were all warm and quiet. Suddenly, she sat bolt upright and just started clapping. Good morning to you, too, kiddo!

It’s taken her a while to really start to understand that solid food is good for more than playing with, but man—she gets it now. She’s starting to eat so much more. Crawling seems to have sparked her appetite and now the food just disappears. (Well, except for the morsels that are tossed from the high chair into the mouths of waiting hound dogs.) She also loves to drink water out of her sippy cup. She will hold it to her mouth and throw her head back taking deep, long gulps and then in a flash, she sits forward and tosses the cup onto the floor (or onto the closest hound). We need to work on that part!

Sleep is… mediocre. The bad days are baaaaad. The good days are meh. I feel like I totally slacked on the Happy Sleeper stuff, but she’s not really crying to the point where the 5-minute sleep waves are appropriate. She just sort of starts fussing and throwing herself around in her crib. Sometimes she stands up. There’s a lot of squawking and whining, but very little actual crying. If I leave her to her own devices, she’ll sit there like that for an hour, and it’s an hour that I can’t sleep through (even if I turn the monitor off, the sound just carries straight to our room). So that’s why I just go in there. If I nurse her for 5 minutes, she’ll go right back to sleep and then I can go back to sleep. Once Catch is on summer break, I’m considering night weaning. I’m really torn though. Those night feeds are the only time I get to just hold her and cuddle her these days, and I sort of relish it. I’m fighting myself over it.

Plans for her first birthday party are underway. We’re inviting everyone under the sun, and it’s going to be huge, but honestly this party is more for us than it is for her. It may be her first birthday, but we kept her alive for that year, and I feel like we deserve a freaking PARTY. (And a million dollars…)