Month 13

Oh man, Lily is older than 1 year. I guess we still have to do the she's "x month old" thing. So Lily is 13 months old. Well as I put this post together she's already14 months old, but this will be about month 13. 

We know that she's growing fast, but when you see someone everyday you don't notice. But every once in a while, you go in to her room to get her in the morning and you just think "she just looks bigger somehow". It's so weird when that happens. I can't imagine not seeing her for more than just a day or two in a row and feeling like she's a completely different baby. The most major change in her appearance recently is that  she's a curly girly. For a while, we would just put her hair up in a pony tail and then we noticed that as her hair grew there were more and more curlies. It was like the old straight hair was weighing down the new curly  awesome hair, so that meant that it was time for a haircut. So Danielle took out the scissors and gave her her first haircut. After that, it was like we had a different baby. She looked so different to us. There was something sad about just throwing all of that baby hair in the garbage, but we saved some of it.

Now that she's put walking and moving around a bit more, she's figuring how to get around things and really go where she wants. She also responds to things with her own movements. After months of asking "how big is Lily?", she now responds with throwing her arms in the air when we answer "soooo big." We've been afraid of her near steps for a bit because she hasn't figured out how to go down in a way that doesn't result in tumbling and landing on her face. But I think she now has the idea. For the first time, she realized that you can turn around or sit on the edge of a step to get down a level. And like everything else she's learned by herself, we were super proud of that achievement. Though, she's not consistent with that and still tries to go down face first most of the time.

I really think she likes this walking thing a lot now too. Sometimes when the TV is on and it's something that has  music, she spins around. A lot. She doesn't quite understand that spinning leads to dizziness, so she just does it till she can't stand. There's a video of it on Danielle's facebook page. I thing her next move might me the moonwalk as she figured out how to walk backwards now too.

We're still waiting for some words to come out. That's seems like the last thing before she really becomes a toddler in my mind. She makes lots of sounds, but no real words yet. Maybe next month. Well actually I know that it's not happening in the next month since I've already lived it. So in month 14, we have a bunch of other cute things to talk about I'm sure.

Lily and the Dragonfly

Guess what? Babies are disgusting. To illustrate this point, I'll tell you the story of Lily and the dragonfly.

One beautiful day in mid October, Nanny Carol decided to take Lily to Brookdale Park like she often does. They did the usual things. Lily ran around and screamed, followed some random little girls that were playing on the playground, walked up to strange dogs I'm sure. But this park visit included an extra little activity.

While Carol and Lily were taking a break and just observing the playground, Carol noticed Lily playing with something. She didn't give her any toys to plays with, so she thought that maybe it was paper or some leaves that she picked up. Lily likes to take any kind of papery, leafy object and rip them to shreds. Well this time, it wasn't paper or leaves. Instead, a dragonfly must have landed on little Lily's lap or close enough by for her to grab it. So she did. Carol must have seen the hand movements of something being torn apart and went to see what it was and what she saw was Lily tearing the dragonfly apart. She had pretty much ripped the wings off by that point and Carol got to her just before it ended up in her mouth. By this point, there was no saving this little creature as it was already squished in Lily's surprisingly strong hands. Carol was completely freaked out by this. I don't think she was expecting to come to work today to stop Lily from eating a wingless, squished dragonfly.

Month 12

I can't believe it. It's ridiculous how quickly one year can go and how much a baby learns. Even though everyone tells you this, it's still hard to believe. So now Lily's one year old. I'm not sure what she is officially. Too old to be a baby, but still too little to be a Toddler. I think. Maybe that's why our parents always call us their babies still. They deny that we're as old as we are just like I'm doing. Actually, as much as I miss Lily being a baby and feeling like it went too quickly, I really love where she's at now. She's just gotten to be so much fun and she's still as cute as she was if not cuter than the baby version of herself.

The most important development is that she can now walk. She's been practicing for a while as she'd crawl over to the couch and pull herself up and then walk alongside it. She would take a few steps sometimes and just stop. Then fall. But one day (Oct 5th), it finally clicked and she was running. We had put up a corral in the living room a month or two ago, so now she just runs from one side to the other. She's so proud of herself. Sometimes she's so happy, that she screams while she runs, like a damn lunatic. This whole walking thing convinced us to finally buy some other gates for elsewhere around the house too.

As far as looks go, it seems like her new hair might actually be curly. It's completely wild and all over the place, but we think that it's because the old hair is straight and weighing the new curly hair down. Her arms are now long enough that she can actually play with it. She also got some new teeth in, the ones next to the front ones. She hasn't started talking besides Mama, Dada, Baba and other miscellaneous "words", but she's starting to put things into context. When she drops things or falls, she goes "ooooohhhh". Probably doesn't sound as cute in writing, but it is.

This month, we had a few Daddy/daughter days. It was the first few times that I actually took her out on my own. We've been home together lots of times, but this was new. One Saturday, Danielle went out for brunch with her friends, which turned into dinner and drinks, so we went shopping and ran some errands. We went to the mall and stuff and the idea was that we'd end up at the park or something. Instead we ended up at Dunkin Donuts and shared a doughnut. People apparently thing that seeing a daddy with his little girl is the most adorable thing. Lots of people smiled at us, flirted with Lily, and struck up conversations. Lily is pretty irresistible.

When we got home, I had a little daddy/daughter diaper adventure. I went to change her poopie diaper (3rd one that day) on the floor as she's too big for the changing table and it was going fine until I turned to take the old diaper away and grab a new one. She flipped herself over, crawled to the edge of the couch and climbed to a standing position bottomless. She then just stood there and looked down and watch herself pee all over the floor in amazement, like she didn't even know that it was gonna happen. I didn't know what to do. I had to clean her up and also clean up the piss puddle. So I took her out of the corral, laid her down to clean her up. Then I put her in her pack n play, which she hates when she's not sleeping. She hated me and screamed for a good 10 minutes, while I cleaned and mopped the floor. I decided to mop the entire area while I was at it. After that, we had some dinner and she decided to mash her food into her hair, making it impossible to comb out. Babies are the ultimate pranksters.