Eleven Months Old and Her First Christmas

Yesterday Julia hit the 11 month mark, just 31 days away from her first birthday!! In the last month, she's experienced a lot:

• She now sports two teeth - both bottom incisors, of course. They are sharp. Ow.
• Julia received her H1N1 shot. The significance of this was that she now knows what's about to happen when they swab her thigh with rubbing alcohol and gets right upset about it. Never the less, she gets over it pretty quickly and with no ill effects.
• She also had her second significant illness - the croup, which is a royal pain in the kiester when you have to give breathing treatments to help with the coughing at night.
• As you can see from the photo above, she is very adept at standing up, even on things that aren't the most stable, which leads to her balancing on her own two feet - the precursor to walking! She does 'cruise' a bit along the couch, coffee table, or in her crib, so we don't think it will be long before she tries to take a step on her own.
• She now is a little shadow, following us all around the house with maddening crawling speed; sometimes it's on all fours, and other times it's with her one foot in an almost walking pose.
• Eating - she has recently expressed a real interest in what we're eating, so with a few exceptions, she gets to at least try it. To date she's tried: bagels and lox, pizza (especially pepperoni and sausage), fried plantains, gryos, turkey, pulled pork, pancakes, gingerbread waffles, French toast, bacon, french fries, tandoori bread, cheese balls, Cheetos, sweet red peppers, lemon wedges, mashed sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, dried cranberries . . .there's more, but that's been in the last week or so!
  
• Julia seemed to enjoy the holidays - lights were very cool, wrapping paper was fun, and 'Jingle Bells' seems to one of her favorites. She got into opening presents pretty quickly, but mostly to play with the ribbons and paper! She scored some pretty cool gifts - learning toys, stuffed animals, books, and clothes! YAY!

Now for the final few weeks until Julia turns one . . .what will she do?

For those of you on FaceBook, friend Steven or I to see more photos of Christmas (or ask one of us to e-mail you a link, if you aren't on FB)!
See you next month!!! And have a HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!!!

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas

Ten Months Old and More Milestones

It was Julia's first Thanksgiving! You might be asking: what did she think of the food? Well, seeing as how she's a very finicky eater, still doing cereal with fruits or veggies mixed in and despises finger foods, I'd have to say her opinion was rather biased toward the negative. She did try some of her sister's home-made bread (passable), mashed potatoes (blech), stuffing (plooey), and baked squash (double blech). Other than that, it was just another visit to grandma and grandpa's . . . or was it?
Julia spent the two weeks prior to the Thanksgiving holiday sick with some kind of virus she couldn't get rid of - coincidentally, but not necessarily causitory, she had started going to her new daycare just three days before she became ill with what started as a stuffy nose, then progressed into daily fevers which lasted for a week and a half. Due to the fevers, she could not go to daycare and was out for two weeks total, with Thanksgiving at the tail of it. Being sick that long, she was in and out of the doctor's office several times, which ended with a trip to the lab the Monday before Thanksgiving for a urine and blood draw - this was Julia's first encounter with catheterization as well as having blood drawn, and not a nice little draw from the heel, either; this was a full-on, needle to the inner elbow extravaganza. Mommy and daddy were traumatized as much (if not more) than she was! The whole point, from the doctor's explanation, was to eliminate any possibilities for illness aside from garden variety virus. The very next day, her fever broke and she was on the mend - we were happy, but perplexed as to why it went for so long; the day after that, her results came back as all normal. So that's the good news. The bad news is that she had to go through all the testing and the sickness. Booooo!
The Thanksgiving trip to grandma and grandpa's (to continue the story) was a great time - since she's crawling now, she introduced herself to my parents' cat, Smokey, who learned very quickly that he was not fond of babies. Julia, on the other hand, discovered that she is very fond of kitties and chased that poor cat all over the areas of the house she was allowed to get to. Smokey figured out that she was somewhat limited and used that knowledge to tease her mercilessly by sitting juuuuuuuuuuust outside of her boundary areas and watching her while in full view.
Also at the grandparents', Julia took her first major fall, taking a dive off the bed while dragging along some pillows, placed to help fence her in, but which facilitated her fall by being covered in slippery material. It was quite a scare for her and all of us - her daddy was right there, but just couldn't get to her fast enough (that says something about her crawling speed!). In the end, after hours of observation and reading every scary thing we could find on the internet, Julia came through with hardly a bump. The lesson has been learned by the parentals, but she seems hellbent to try again.
And for the big announcement . . .drumroll, please! Julia's first tooth erupted on the 28th - her 10 month birthday!!!!!! The lower left incisor was noticed by me when we were out doing a little shopping Saturday. It's really hard to capture in pictures, so imagination will have to suffice - still, it's as cute as teeth get!