Ten months old!

Hi everyone! Well, I'm ten months old and counting down the days till I turn ONE. I've decided that I will be walking before long, just because mom keeps telling me to get down and crawl. This here is my friend, Shilo the snake - my auntie som som gave him to me to play with. I like to wear him like a feather boa.
See?
Did you get that on film mom?
Hey - here I am again - I'm showing mom what it will be like when I'm walking. I can reach almost 6 inches onto the table now (nothing is safe from my examination anymore!)
Here I am after mom changed my diaper. I like to empty the basket under the stroller and examine it closely. Sometimes mom leaves me cool treats in there to find (like rattles, snacks, my sippy cup, or other cool toys).

See? I found a num num!

My favorite game right now is hide and seek. Mom crawls (very noisily) around a corner, or behind a chair and then giggles hysterically until I find her. Then she screams and runs really fast waving her arms like a crazy lady and hides somewhere else. It's really funny to watch her! Pretty soon, I'll start hiding and she can find ME!

my rad daughter

Check out the faux-hawk!
Rocking out!
i had to get my own rockin' hairdo:
Look, gran - I had to pull up the wall hanging you made for Kaydie - she kept pulling it down... she's getting SO tall... she can reach the knobs on the kitchen stove now... :(

Time for babyproofing the house part TWO!

MOMMY UPDATES!

This morning, after Kaydie woke me up to eat and play (and went back down for her morning nap) but before I brushed my teeth, I looked at myself in the mirror and noticed something odd. There is a fringe of new growth hair - a 1 1/2 inch long "bang" growing under my real bangs, and there's new hair pushing up on the crown of my head as well - enough that the light catches it and I look decidedly punk rocker. After contemplating this for a moment (and considering that perhaps Kaydie had pulled a chunk out and it was simply regrowing), I've decided that this is hair that is growing back after so much fell out after Kaydie was born. Apparently, when you are pregnant and you have that thick lustrous hair, it's the hormones telling your body not to shed it's hair. Then, around month 6, you lose all the hair that you wouldn't have had - it was kinda freaky - I could actually clean my brush out on a daily basis for a while there (I even asked my doctor about it!)... So, I've got a four month's growth on all those follicles now. The reason I explain all of this to you, the reason that it made me grin like a little girl, is that Kaydie's hair is the same length as my new hair. It might be a stretch, but I feel like we've got twin haircuts (in a way)...

This morning, while she was in her highchair eating veggies, chicken, and rice, I was eating my toast. She looked at me and babbled, which I interpreted as, "I want to feed Mommy" - so I gave her my toast and opened my mouth and she - being the smart sweet little thing she is - fed me my toast. She even took a nibble for herself. It was a total AWWWWW moment!

So, as far as real Mommy Updates go, lets see... You've all seen the pictures of Kaydie standing on stuff - 'cruising' from the couch to the recliner to the coffee table... Last weekend, she was sitting cross legged on the ground and - without hanging on to anything at all - rose to a complete standing position. Then she held it for a solid 10 seconds before she decided to sit back down. It wasn't like she fell or anything - she decided to sit. I was very impressed. (Okay, I'm always impressed!)

She's halfway through figuring out how to wave, but she's got clapping SO under control. She loves to clap with the beat of music, clap when she has done something she thinks is great or funny or silly... Basically, she must have heard me singing, "if you are happy and you know it, clap your hands" and she's adhering to that tenet so well! Her baby talk is getting to sound more human - with more consonants and pauses for words/sentences/heck - even paragraphs when she really gets going! I'm just grinning at her saying, Uh huh - tell me more... and she is happy to comply. Her favorite game is definitely peek a boo - she can play for hours without getting bored. Yesterday, I set up a couple boxes in the living room and we crawled around 'chasing' eachother and playing peek a boo when we ended up on far sides from eachother. I started dropping the peek a and just yelling BOO! and you'd have laughed hard to see her jump and then scream with laughter - time after time after time! We played for at least an hour like that!

She's definitely a mama's girl. She is happiest being picked up. No, not being held - she loves knowing that when she puts her arms up to me that I will pick her up. It's a control thing I think... everyone said that she's so spoiled... but I don't care. I am so glad that I could spoil her for her first nine months!

I have been scheduled to return to work part time as of September 1st (yeah, I know it's a holiday, that's TOTALLY why I picked it), and Kaydie and I are going to go through a tough transition. Luckily, she has her Auntie to spoil her while I am away...

Pine Mountain Lake Getaway

Toni's friend Al loaned us the use of his cabin on the shore of Pine Mountain Lake - and we had a fantastic time there! Thanks!! The entire cabin is themed with native american treasures and bears - we found this big friend bear (I dubbed him Barry), and had a great time playing with him. Gabe held his own when wrestling Barry:

Me: Barry got the upper hand and I had to hollar "uncle"
Here he is trying to sneak up on Kaydie (who is so excited about 'borrowing' one of Gabe's toy cars that she doesn't even notice the enormous stuffed animal bearing down on her)
She buried her face in Barry's side while hiding from dad:
Then she pops up for a: Peek-A-Boo!

Kaydie was just haming in up for the camera while we played on the beach. We would put her hat on her head, and she would model for us - grin - laugh - and then toss the hat gleefully aside. Here's a shot of her actually wearing the hat... SO CUTE! She kept practicing her clapping and waving all day on Saturday. Here she is with dad, just being silly!

We were just kicking back in the shade, waiting for dinner time to arrive (something about mountain air makes Kaydie ravenous! Okay, me too!)
All smiles! She loves the camera - because the camera loves her!
HI! (I can wave and clap now!)
Too cute for words...
And, of course, to complete the photo shoot: the serious pose

Toni, Pete and the boys took a ride out on a paddleboat. Me and Nana had taken Kaydie back to the cabin for her nap, so we missed out on the ride (which was just fine w/me, because my foot was all jacked up anyhow.)

Toni is swimming with Gabe and Kaydie
Pine Mountain Lake is very pretty.

FRIDAY EVENING/SATURDAY MORNING

Before we headed out to the Beach on Saturday, we spent the morning exploring. Tom stayed at the cabin while Kaydie took her morning nap. Alex, Gabriel and I had found a creek on Friday evening (pictures below), and we wanted to follow it down to the lake (okay, we really wanted to go pick the blackberries - and YES, we got covered with scratches! Of course the berries were worth it - they tasted GREAT!)

Check it out: Alex figured out how to walk on water!
and taught me! We crossed under a road and walked through the huge drain pipe.
It was all fun and games as we 'levitated' and walked on the sides...

" Walk Like an Egyptian" & "Tally Ho" Alex and his HUGE feet could barely pull it off....
Laughing and trying not to fall:
I was so amped up after climbing the walls (and singing in the drainpipe) that I wanted to leap about like a kid - so I did. You all know how crazy and silly I get... So I ran and jumped out of the end of the culvert - and did a really super heel click before gravity caught me and pulled me back to earth. I looked down, the ground appeared to be soft sand - Whoo Hoo! Easy Landing! Ummm... unfortunately, that soft sand turned out to be an incredibly thick slab of cement, and I landed all wrong and pulled a bunch of tiny muscles in my left foot.

Here I am putting on a good show for Gabe and Alex. It did hurt, but I was hamming it up a lot. (I guess we know where Kaydie got that trait!) I even took my shoe off and kissed it better.
On our trek, we found these rad bones. Nana says that I am morbid for taking a picture, but I don't care. We thought that they were really cool. Alex and Gabe totally figured out that these were deer bones because of the teeth (no sharp front teeth), the size and shape of the skull, and the fully furred front leg bone complete with hoof. We figured they must be the coyote's leftovers (we hoped that they weren't Barry's)
Gabe had so much fun crossing this log - I've probably got 10 pictures as he went back and forth and back and forth - - - we named it Gabe's Log Bridge
Gabe's footprint in the rock: (do you see it? it's to the right of his shoe)
What on earth did you find, Alex?
Huge sacrificial slab - I had to lay on it.
Gabe is truly hilarious!

Finally, we made it to the end of the creek: me limping along, Gabe and Alex forging ahead...

It was a beautiful sight:

Growing Up!

Heck yeah, I'm a big girl! I gots teeth, I gots jeans, and I gots style!

Mom likes to watch me dig for cool stuff in my purse. She puts all kinds of neat stuff in there for me to find. Here is my flashlight...it feels great to chew on it. This is another one of my most favorite things to chew on - the dropper top of my empty baby-tylenol bottle. It squeaks in my teeth and rubs my gums where the new teeth are poking through.
Mom can't get over how big my feet are. Won't you tell her they are perfectly normal and not to give me a complex?
This is one of mom's favorite pictures. She believes that if you double click and enlarge it, you'll see that I'm peering out from behind my fit to see if it's working. When she laughed at me, I immediately began laughing too.
I'm WAYYYY to big for this swing!

Mom had to buy a huge dry-erase board in order to maintain her sanity. She was starting to forget what we were doing each day - and said she felt better writing it down.
Nana got a sunburn on Lake Hogan. I love her haircut!
A close up: