About a week ago, Bean came down with a pretty high fever and was officially sick for the first time. When I took her to the doctor, she weighed in at 18 pounds. She was diagnosed with hand, foot, and mouth disease. I wasn't convinced she had it since there were only a few spots in her mouth and a high fever. My mom watched her while we went away, and since then, my mom has had signs of h/f/m disease, so maybe the doctor was right. Ha!
She isn't walking yet, but she's finally starting to show a little interest. She can crawl super fast, and hasn't figured out that walking will get her to things even quicker. However, she loves to reach for things, and will often stand near the coffee table and couches to get to stuff she's not able to reach (especially whatever I'm holding - food, computer, phone, etc). She's "cruised" a couple steps while holding onto furniture, but only takes a step or two that way. We haven't really been working with her on walking, but are starting to make her hold our hands and take a few steps that way.
Bean has really started to show her independent side this month. She is happy to play by herself with her toys, but doesn't necessarily like to be left alone. She will stand at the gate and cry for me if I leave the room (and not to make it sound like I leave my 10 month old daughter all alone, this is usually quick trips to the kitchen, upstairs for something, or to switch laundry. I can always hear her when I'm out of the room and know what she's up to and that she's safe). Most of her favorite toys make sounds and sing songs, but she also loves holding little toys like Weebles or rings and just shaking them around.
She's also really shown independence in eating. She will no longer happily eat pureed baby food. She will eat some things by a spoon (like yogurt or oatmeal), but she wants to feed herself everything else! Her favorite foods are cottage cheese, bananas, sweet potatoes, and mac and cheese. Although, the past couple days she has started to prefer strawberry over banana. I've learned the hard way that bananas stain AWFUL! So now, she eats her food naked. She doesn't seem to mind, and would probably prefer to go naked all day. I get annoyed with the whole taking clothes off, cleaning up food, and putting clothes back on multiple times a day, but it is better than dealing with banana stains!
She is still on a 2 nap schedule and gets 4 bottles a day along with 3 meals (and a couple snacks). I'm pretty sure she is just like me in that we don't have a "full" trigger. As long as you put something she likes in front of her, she'll eat it. When she doesn't like something, she'll clench her mouth shut, shake her head and push the food away.
Sometime in the last 2 weeks, we've had a breakthrough in the sleeping department! Sadly, it sort of corresponded to quitting breast feeding. But I don't think that is necessarily related. At her 9 month appointment, I discovered she wasn't getting enough milk in the day. So we started supplementing formula, but I still was estimating on how much breast milk she was getting. Now that she's on all formula, I know exactly how much she's getting and we hit our goal each day (technically she should get 18 oz, but we shoot for 16!). I think now that she's eating real food, and getting more bottle spread out through the day, she's staying satiated at night and no longer needs to eat.
She still has some nights where she cries out a lot, but usually she falls back asleep before we go check on her. There have been a few nights where I've had to go in and rock her (give Tylenol) and she'll go back to sleep. We had to say goodbye to the bird mobile (she decided to reach for the birds and pull it down during nap one day, and snapped the rod). Now, she has a glow worm that will cycle through songs for 10 minutes. I will still rock her for about 5-10 minutes and sing to her as she falls asleep. But most of the time, she isn't fully asleep when I put her into the crib. I'll turn the glow worm on, and she'll be out in just a few minutes. She knows how to squeeze the worm to make it go longer, but she typically falls asleep and doesn't mess with it the rest of the night.
We haven't made much progress on the talking front yet. She will say "da-da" and does seem to say it a lot around Steve; but she also says it about food, toys, and especially me. I'll say, "Say Mom-ma" and her response, without fail, is "da-da!" Even though she isn't saying words yet, she is constantly babbling away. If only it made sense to us! I haven't noticed any specific sounds to mean anything. I'm starting to work more with her about animal sounds, so maybe next month we'll have some progress ;-).
(Bean has officailly graduated to her bigger car seat and we no longer use the carrier. since we no longer have the carrier, she gets to sit in a high chair - and shopping car - when we go out. She does so good about sitting with us! We have a cover that can go in the shopping cart or in high chairs, and makes it nice to know she's secured in and comfortable!)
(Bean will sometimes stand up next to her jump toy to reach the toys and I'll put her in it for a little bit. However, one day she decided she'd much rather just lay under the toy instead of play with it.)
(Bean's toys are in the bottom two drawers of our console table in the living. However, she has just recently discovered that there are remote controls and video games in the upper drawer. So now she pulls them out and drags them all over like she did with the DVD's before I moved them. Looks like this stuff needs a new home, too.)
(Ha, one day while playing with her animal boat, she decided that cow wanted to eat puffs instead of being on the boat. What a goof!)
(Have I mentioned how funny this girl is? She has several ducks that she loves to play with during bath. She has two "baby" ducks, that just so happen to fit perfectly in her mouth. When they go all the way in, they tend to disappear for awhile, as I hate digging ducks out of her mouth and fear her choking on them. Goodness girl!)
(What's Bean's favorite food? Cottage cheese of course! She loves it so much, she decided to save some on her nose for later.)
(Trying out her baby pool. The neighbor's grandkids are all in love with Bean, and were crowding around her while she was in the pool. I should have taken a better photo of all the kids, there were 4 sitting around watching Bean play with her ducks. Ha)
(Holding her own bottle! She actually can "palm" her bottle and hold it one handed with just her palm - like how you hold a football before throwing it. It's quite impressive. Maybe I have a future Peyton Manning-ette in the works?!)
(These two right here are my life. I love how much Bean looks like her daddy. They even zone out to the television the same way. We've been trying to cut back on tv around Bean, and limit her cartoon watching. She gets to watch a few cartoons spread out through the day. Typically, she gets to watch a little show while drinking a bottle. Her current favorite shows are Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood, Curious George, and Arthur -- okay, so maybe it is more like these are the ones I like and can tolerate!)
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