Twas the Night Before Christmas

Despite the title of the post, this blog is not about Christmas. It's about the night before Christmas, December 24th. Because on that night, Charly turned 10 months old!

It's hard to believe that this little girl is almost one year old. She learns new things everyday:

1. She's slowly learning how to walk. She no longer clutches to things with both hands and side steps her way around objects. She holds on with one hand and walks along side things. Any day now, she's going to let go and take off!

2. She's learning how to eat real food. She finally began eating Puffs! Kelli and I were worried that Charly would be the only 7 toothed 10 month old not eating food. We would put 1/4 of a puff in her mouth and she would get this panicked look on her face, as if she didn't know what to do. It was driving us crazy but we didn't want to force it upon her. Finally, about a week ago or so, she began picking up puffs and eating them with ease! She's slowly coming around to potatoes, ice cream, and bread. We were pretty excited.

3. She's learning how to talk. She has a vocabulary of three recognizable words and about 20 unrecognizable words. The three recognizable words are "mommy", "daddy", and "kitty". Pretty fitting if you ask me. We have no clue if these words actually mean what we hope they do, but she speaks them clearly and often. She even waves "bye-bye" now!

4. She's learning how to get her way! Charly loves our laptop and our remotes. We bought her her own toy laptop but of course, it's not as cool as ours. We've shut our laptop off and let her press the buttons, and she becomes bored. She knows the buttons control things and she wants to see what pressing them does. Same with the television remotes. She presses buttons and immediately looks to the TV to see what she's done. I took batteries out of one of the remotes and gave it to her and immediately, she discovered it did nothing. She tossed it aside and quickly found the remote that worked. Whenever we take these things away, she fusses.

She loves seeing her family (especially Great-Grandma Hoodjer and Grandpa Denny!). She played in the snow. She celebrated Christmas (Eve). She's attended her fair share of UNI basketball games, mastered the art of Peek-a-Boo, and is finally getting used to her cousin Cruz being around. Lately she's even returned to sleeping through the night!

She's busy busy busy and it's exciting watching her grow.