Nine

At the end of her last update I wondered how many teeth she would have by the end of this month.  The answer is six!  It still sometimes surprises me to see all those little teeth in her smile.

Anyway, here we are at nine months--nine months in and now nine months out.  You know, I remember our pre-baby days quite vividly.  But I have a harder time remembering when we just had one baby.  It feels like she's always been here!  I'm pretty sure Mr. C. doesn't remember life without her.  

(I love her round, round head.)

She's had a pretty productive month.  She started crawling on all fours more often and is getting faster every day.  She's cruising and climbing and pulling up--she is a very determined girl and will use all her methods to get what she's after. 

Food was a bit hot and cold this month.  Crunchy things were a favorite, but she rejected a lot of softer foods she'd been eating.  Yogurt disgusted her, soup revolted her, vegetable purees repulsed her.  Her four incoming teeth might have been the culprit but she also loved sweet potatoes and applesauce.  So who knows.  She eventually came back around to liking more foods again.

As for sleep!  Well.  

Once her teeth were through she eased back into sleeping through the night, going to sleep on her own and not making a single peep until morning.  But naptime was a different story.  She used to happily lay there and fall asleep.  Then she started just sitting up.  And sitting.  And sitting.  And sitting some more.  Until she either fell asleep sitting up or eventually flopped over.  

(Yep, she's asleep.)

(Yep, also asleep.)

We're still working it out.  Naps are rough these days for multiple reasons.  But I am SO glad she sleeps at night.  

I found her like this one day after nap.  Like the view??

Anyway, she is a funny thing.  Always making faces and sticking out her tongue or snorting at me.  Her sounds are all over the place.  Often they are cute little na-na-nas or squeals.  This month she also came up with this horrible banshee shriek for her more angry moments.  She and Mr. C. make each other laugh and laugh.  She makes all of us laugh and laugh.  

I love this stage of her babyhood--still very much a baby but with a clear personality and fun interactions--but I'm so excited to see her grow.  

And how many teeth will she have next month??

Eight

Hello, eight month baby.  I know I say this every month but I'm always surprised that she's so big already.  This past month has been a bit all over the place in most ways.  Let us begin with food! 

Her interest in solids skyrocketed this month and she is very impatient to get food in her mouth.  She's gotten better at not immediately pushing it right back out and seems to like most everything she tries.  I'm a little slow to start with new foods--I google things like "Can babies eat sage?"--but she doesn't seem to resent it.  Probably because she doesn't know what she's missing...

She's still mostly army crawling, but she frequently goes for the all-fours method.  I think she'd do it more but she usually falls back on her tried and true way for the sake of speed.  She pulls up pretty well and climbs all over the place.  Seriously, the climbing.

Towards the end of the month her two top teeth started to show.  The other two top teeth are not far behind, methinks.  Yikes.  I like to blame the teeth for the other happenings this month--or not-happenings, as it were...

The sleep!  In her seventh month she started sleeping through the night.  Sleeping through the night like a dreeeeeeam and all on her own.  This month, she took steps backwards, then forwards again, then steps in the middle too.  Some nights she'll wake up twice, sometimes not at all.  Some nights she'll go to sleep by herself, sometimes she can't do it.  She'll wake up an hour after bed or not.  Just kind of all over the place.  

At least with naps she'll still happily go to sleep on her own.  A new white noise sound machine seems to help her sleep longer, in spite of SOMEone's best efforts.

(Yeah, you, SOMEone.)

But like I said, I'm hoping the teeth are to blame.  Really hoping the teeth are to blame...

  

But in spite of these hiccups, she's overall a very happy, pleasant sort of girl.  She loves to be held, loves to do whatever Mr. C is doing and loves to play.  She likes to turn the pages when we read books (current favorites are Dinosaur Roar, Blue Hat, Green Hat and Goodnight Gorilla) and she likes to try anything she finds on the floor.

The real question is, how many teeth she'll have by the end of next month...

Great Snakes!

For Halloween this year, I pulled out the idea I postponed from last year--Tintin and Snowy!  Perfect for a little boy and a littler baby.  

Originally the plan was for me and Drew to be Thomson and Thompson:

But it turned out to be surprisingly hard to find all the components!  It would have been funny, but we switched gears.

Drew decided to be a somewhat dressed down Captain Haddock and well, I was a unicorn with a secret.

(Get it??)

For Tintin, I bought the sweater online and made the socks from leftover fabric I had.  His shirt, pants and shoes all came from my beloved JBF consignment sale (can you believe those pants??).  

Really happy I didn't have to make those pants.

Snowy on the other hand, well, I made all of that.  I used a pattern that came with the sleep sack, but by the time I was done, I realized I should have made my own pattern based off an outfit she already had.  It would have been easier and fit better.  The suit was HUGE on her when I finished it.  HUGE.  So I had to cut it down to size, but it didn't fit great still in the end.  

BUT the fabric is such that all my adaptations didn't really show.

BUT the fabric is such that it was impossible to work with.  Never again!

(Please note her little tail.  Hee hee!)

I made her little headband from a 97 cent Halloween headband from Walmart.  I actually made it several times...  In the end, I assembled it with hot glue.  

As for us, I bought the shirts and made the iron-on designs myself.  Drew did the sketch of the unicorn though because, as it turns out, I do not draw a good unicorn.  No no.  But I did finish it up.  I also made some unicorn earrings to go with it.  

In the end, I don't think anyone knew who they were and probably didn't even realize we were wearing costumes.  But!  Being recognizable has never been a HUGE concern of mine at Halloween...and they looked cute all the same.  

And now it's time to brainstorm for next year...

A Room for the Bathing

When we moved in we had grand plans of redoing the kitchen this summer.  Summer arrived, along with many house guests, and the dust settled just in time for Drew to lose his job.  Even though it was pretty much as ideal as you can get in terms of job loss, it didn't seem quite prudent to go through with our plans.  

And then he got a new job!  But summer was over.  So instead of a new kitchen, we opted for giving our bathroom a 24-hour face lift before Drew started his new job.  It was a much smaller project.  Of course we wound up doing more things than we originally planned (paint the walls and get a new sink fixture and shower curtain), but that is how I roll!  And how I drag Drew along with me.  HA.  I jest, he is always very willing.

Anyway, here is how we started, with the same brown paint in the rest of the house:

(I got that shower curtain my first night in Bloomington, EIGHT YEARS AGO.)

(I got a little sad throwing it away.)

Then we taped it all off the night before:

In the morning Boo Boo went off for some grandparent time, and we got painting.  We used the leftover paint from the Beatrix Potter nursery, partly because it's a nice color and partly because, well, it meant we didn't have to buy more paint:

(And this time Drew didn't have to paint all by himself!)

(Though he was in the pictures by himself.)

One of the added projects was to paint the cabinets white.  It was extra work but I'm really glad we did it:

(Baby joined us after her nap.)

We also got a new faucet.  There was SOME drama installing it with SOME amount of flooding but we got there in the end:

(I say "we" but all I did was sit and watch and run for towels.)

Almost done...

Please note the new pulls for the upper cabinets.

All done:

JUST KIDDING.  By the next afternoon we decided to get hardware for the lower cabinets.  Drew had some help installing them:

And THEN we were done:

All in all, it was a very successful project, with only a little hiccup or two.  It was also good practice for when we actually do the kitchen!  Next summer!  I hope.