Having Said That...

Anna wearing a beautiful dress my mother made for her baptism

Anna is wearing a dress that belonged to my Grandmother

Anna was a little rascal and did not want to cooperate until the photographer gave her a shaker to hold. Then she sat there making "music" happily.

I posted over here today

Anna just discovered her walker yesterday... She loves it so much that she gets mad if we try to pick her up when she wanted to walk with it. Here are a couple of cute videos of her with it for the Grandparents:)

Anna turned 10 months about a month ago, but I am just now getting around to writing about it. Time is flying so fast. If I forget to post about it then I know I will quickly forget it.

Anna love to "smile" for pictures! If she sees the camera then she scrunches up her face and lifts her head up. Often times this meas I get a silly picture of her or I miss her face all together like here (but it is so cute I don't want to forget it):

This is the first month when it has become crystal clear to us that she knows exactly what Mommy and Daddy are saying. She understands "stop", and come back. Though we have caught her choosing not to listen sometimes. The other day she was begining to crawl into the kitchen and I wanted her to stay and play in the living room so I told her to stop and not go into the kitchen. As soon as I said that she started crawling as fast as she could to get to the kitchen before I could reach her! She is a little rascal sometimes.

I realized that I have not kept track of her first words. She understands what we are saying and often tries to mimic us but her speech is not very clear so I haven't known whether to record them as words or not. She says "Mama" expeccailly if she is hungry. She will also say "stuck" when she is in her high chair or in her carseat and is tired of being there! I will add more of her words when I can think of them.

Anna loves to pull herself off on things, and can even climb stairs (Mommy found this out the hard way when we were at someones house who had a second floor and found Anna halfway up the stairs within minutes of crawling out of sight.)

She likes most foods that she has tried though we have stuck to fruits, veggies, and oatmeal, wheat, and meat. She seems to be allergic to eggs but we are hoping with time she with outgrow that.

She has struggled with eczema for 8 months and we are finally seeing relief. She has seen a new doctor and the medicine he put her on is working. For the first time she is not scratching herself when I change her shirt. I can even put her in shorts and she does not spend all of her time trying to scratch! I am so thankful for this.

She is still waking up once to eat at night but other then that she is a good sleeper. She take two naps a day (morning around 10-11:30 and afternoon (2:00-4:00) and then goes to be around 6:30-7:00) She will then sleep until around 8:00 (other then eating) and wakes up happy and content to play in her crib until we come and get her.

She also loves to read board books. We can often find her looking at one and turning the pages. Her favorites are "I wrote to the Zoo" and Osbourne's touchy-feel books.

These are just some things that I want to remember about Anna.

Well our little daughter made a rather large step today (even though it wasn't really a step). Anna was crawling over to see Daddy on the couch and climbed up to say 'hello'. Jake got my attention and when I looked over there was Anna completely standing not touching anything. She had toys in both her hands and it looked like she forgot to hold on. She was grinning and smiling and seemed to have really good balance. After a few seconds, which probably felt alot longer than they actually were, she touched the couch again and couldn't understand why Mommy and Daddy were so happy!
Additionally while feeling her gums we noticed today that she now has 2 toophies... The poor little girl was really having a hard time going to sleep last night and now we know why. So far she has two little teeth on the bottom.

Anna's tooth started peaking out today! She doesn't like it when I put my finger in to check on the progress, but I felt it! She hadn't been fussy but then after her afternoon nap while I was holding her, she started to try to "head bang" me with her mouth. I thought it must mean something was up so I felt inside and sure enough I felt it. I gave her two teething tablets and she seemed fine the rest of the day. She even slept from 11:00 to6:30 last night! (Which has only happened a few times lately!)

We also haven been spending lots of time outside since it has been so beautiful. I set up the playground outside and it was fun to see all the kids explore it today. Here are a few pictures of our time.

I feel like Anna has changed SO much in the last two weeks. It is amazing how big of a milestone crawling is. In the last two weeks since Anna has started crawling she also has started pulling herself to a standing position, siting up on her knees, going everywhere around the house, crawling into closets, crawling and getting stuck under chairs. She will now sit up in bed when she wakes up at night- this makes it a lot harder for her to fall back to sleep on her own. She also loves to wake up at and play and sing in bed:) It is lots of fun to hear her after her nap- not so much fun at 5:30 in the morning! She loves to laugh, and will often laugh if she hears us or someone else laughing or crying! She like her way and is starting to fight us if she wants something we won't let her have. (We are firm with her and don't give it to her but she is starting to show a more stubborn personality. She is still learning what the word "no" means. I don't think she is really trying to push the limits when she hears "no" it just does not yet mean much to her yet. We have been experimenting with blanket time (a time where she can play but must stay on the blanket.) She seems to get the idea - if I tell her no, to stay on the blanket she won't try to crawl off... we will see how well this will continue over the next several months. She still loves her blankie and sleeps with it over her face still. She also LOVES her pacifier and won't sleep easily without it. She enjoys playing and will even play happily in the playpen for a long time. Being put in a high chair, her carseat, or the playpen does not seem to bother her at all, she just watches or plays contentedly from whereever she is.

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This morning Anna started crawling, then I saw that she had sat up by herself. Then this evening she pulled herself to a standing position all by herself! Lots of firsts for a little one today.

You said before you left for work that you would take me with you if I did one little thing... I wasn't sure then if I wanted to leave Mommy for the day. But know I know that I am a big girl and I want to come with you to work. Will you come back and get me. Please????

Love your little girl.
PS... See- I did it

Playing the drums is one of Anna's favorite activites. She will bang on anything she can, wipe containers, boxes, the slide at the park, or even the wall. If music is playing, or we start singing she will sway back and forth to the music. (I have yet to catch that on video.) We have also noticed that she will "sing" with us at church, this is really just talking or jabbering for a minute or too during a song. The only problem is sometimes she doesn't realize the song has ended! We will have to work on that.

Here is a video of her "playing". She is also "buzzing" her lips at the end- her new accomplishment.

A few weeks ago we thought we were on the right track with Anna's sleep routine. She seemed to be sleeping through the night (except for needed feedings.), then she got roseola which has a high fever. So for a couple of nights she was spoiled with being held and cuddled a little more then normal during the night. Then her eczema became the worst it as been with two or three episodes of hives...

Needless to say we have had a little girls who has had a hard time sleeping. She would try to scratch when she was ichy and then hurt herself and cry and be misrable. This has been going on for a few weeks now. We have tried several things to address the ichiness (which is helping) and the scratching. For the scratching, we finally found some long socks that she could not pull off of her hands very easily. That helped with the scratching but it made it hard for her to put her pacifier back in her mouth when it fell out and to pull up her blankie when she woke up. After a few night she has seemed to get the hang of that but she was still waking up and crying at night.

Over the last couple of weeks I have read lots of books, but all of them seem to deal of how to get your baby to self-sooth herself to sleep when they don't know how. Well Anna knows how... she goes to sleep just fine at nap times and even bedtime. She just wakes up and has been crying at night. (And yes we have tried just letting her cry... she doesn't fall back to sleep and she starts scratching and ends up hurting herself.)

This past week it has gotten worse. Anna has started waking up more and more frequently, almost every hour or two for the last couple of nights. Two nights ago was the worst:

I went to bed at 10:30.

I woke up when Jake came to bed at 12:15.

Anna woke me up at 1:00. (This has been her night feeding time since daylight savings.) I nursed her and then put her in bed and she went back to sleep.

Anna woke me up again at 2:45. I knew she didn't need to eat so I let her fuss until it became real crying. I calmed her down and laid her next to me.... imedeatlly she is quiet. Not asleep but completely content. She falls asleep and I put her in bed. She wakes up and cries. We start the cycle again. This goes on until 4:30 when she finally falls asleep and stays asleep in her bed. Every time she would wake up and cry when I put her in her own bed, and be absolutly fine when she was next to me.

Then she wakes again at 6:00 to eat.

Finally at 7:30 we wake for the day.

Needless to say I was pretty tired yesturday. In the morning, my husband said he had been cold during the night and wondered if Anna had been too. I started to think.... We had stopped using the heater at night because it seemed warm enough, but I had been a little cold lately too. Anna would stop crying and fussing as soon as she was in bed with us. She didn't need to eat, but maybe she was just trying to get warm. So...

Last night we warmed up the room with the heater and then left in on the lowest setting all night. And Anna slept all night from 7:00 t0 1:00 (ate) and then 1:15-6:00. At 6:00 she woke up and played for a while happily, in the dark, until she needed to eat (that is her normal morning eating time.) Then she went back to sleep and slept until 7:30. Wow! What a difference a little heat makes! So I think we will be using the heater for a few more weeks!

Hopefully I can work on weaning her night feeding, now that we know why she was waking up so much.

The End of an Era

Anna will wake up playing if it it light out, and wake up crying if it is dark in the room. The sun has started to come up early enough now that Anna woke up this morning at 6am playing happily in her portacrib that is beside our bed. Since she was playing happily and it was an hour and a half before she normally awakes, I let her play, hoping that she would go back to sleep, because I didn't want to get her up lest she begin to think that this is a good time to wake up!

For the first 15 minutes she played and screeched happily. Not very indecisive to sleep but still better then getting her up. Soon those happy sounds made way to "Eah, Eah, Eah, Eah," sounds. This has been her sound for hungry since she was a few weeks old. She seemed to be saying. "OK Mom, where are you? I'm hungry!" "I'm hungry!" These hungry sounds soon made way to the "Eah, Eah, Eah," and then short fusses. She seemed to be saying now: "I'm hungry!' Did you hear me?" Then there would be long silences, in which I would really hope she had fallen back to sleep. Just when I would think she had she would do it again.

Finally she must have gotten tired of waiting for Mommy to come to her, and she rolled over on her side and sat up on her elbow. Then she proceeded to pull herself so that her whole head was looking over the bar of the portacrib and she was almost completely sitting up. It was as if she was thinking "Mom if you don't find me, I'm going to find you. Look! There you are!" She looked so triumphant! (Even though she has been rolling over for months, she wouldn't do it in bed. At first we prevented it by sloping her mattress, but after she was strong enough to do it anyway she still wouldn't roll to her tummy in bed. This made me happy because we have been able to safely keep her in the bassinet part of the portacrib, a two months long then recommended.)

I guess she will be taking her naps in her real crib today!

I have several posts that I have been working on, including Anna's 6month and 7month updates... but I have been having trouble adding pictures. So in the meantime I am going to try to publish this post with pictures of my two "twins" playing. I put them in a laundry basket and pushed them around. They had a lot of fun.

This year was our first Christmas on our own. We had a wonderful day. We both loved starting our own traditions with Anna.

traditions:
-Advent Calendar (Thanks for the calendar Grammy!)
-Christmas eve service at Memorial
-Christmas morning service (I don't know if this will happen every year but Jake had to lead it at Friendship Village so we all went.)
-Opening a gift on Christmas eve
-Reading the Christmas story on Christmas and cutting the ribbon

We also had a white Chistmas! My first! I have always wanted snow on Christmas, but when you live in the south it isn't real likely:) We also had two couples over for Christmas dinner. It was such a blessing to be able to share the day with friends.

Here are some pictures: