ELEVEN Months

ONE MORE MONTH till this little lady has been in our lives for ONE YEAR! Crazy!

This was the best picture of her 11-month “photo shoot”. She would not sit still and kept reaching out for me. She was a little tired, so that’s partly the reason, and another part is that she just can’t EVER sit still. She also will not keep bows in her hair. Makes me sad! Can you tell someone’s daddy is ready for football season to start??

And these two pictures pretty much sum up the photo shoot!

Madeline Mae just continues to grow and change and do new things. She finally has teeth! She got them around 10 and a half months. I was beginning to worry if they were even in there! Her aunties taught her how to blow kisses, and we are working on high fives and folding arms. She kind of understands them both. When we fold our arms and tell her to fold hers she will put her hands on her chest and kind of move her arms across. When she blows kisses, she has her mouth wide open and looks and sounds like she’s trying be an Indian. She loves to wave! Her wave is all over the place! It looks like a Queen wave, but more intense. It’s the cutest thing. Everyone loves it. Her Grandma Donna and her aunties take her with them to RS and they say she keeps everyone entertained with her waving.

She loves her daddy so much. She gets so excited when he gets home from work and when she sees him in the morning. He is so sweet and playful with her. Sometimes when she wakes up from a nap, we walk out of her room and she anxiously looks up and down the hallway for Daddy. Or she will be sitting in her high chair and keeps looking down the hallway. But he’s at work! It’s so cute. I love watching those two together.

We lowered her crib all the way down. She’s just too tall! Sleep is still a struggle. I need to transition her to 2 naps, but I just figured she would naturally want to stay up longer. But she still gets tired after being awake for 2 hours. I try to keep her up longer, but she’s just not very pleasant when I do that. Naps are sometimes amazing and sometimes terrible. They range from 30 min to 2 hours. You never know what you’re going to get! Night sleep is a disaster. I was finally getting up the courage to do some training, but then she started to get some teeth. So I didn’t want to torture her more while she was in pain. And then my sister came into town with her family and I knew the sleep would be crazy, so I might try after they leave. BUT then Joy tells me that they sleep trained Chase and it worked for a few months, but then he fell out of it. I’ve heard that a bit from other people too. And that all of her kids magically became decent sleepers at age 2. So I just have to wait it out? Agh. I don’t know. Sleep. Who needs sleep, anyway. I hate it.

She is pulling herself up on everything and doing the monkey walk all along the coffee table. I can’t wait for her to start walking. It is a real struggle being a germaphobe and having a crawling baby. Serious struggle.

She’s starting to get a little bit more of an attitude and some sass. She now likes to throw fits when she doesn’t get what she wants. Especially at nap time, when she doesn’t want to go down. I’ll be trying to lay her down in my arms and she will fight to sit up and when I finally let her sit up, she will look back at me and smile. Such a stinker.

I love how she feels the beat of everything! Music, the washer, my pump, anything with rhythm. It’s the cutest thing. I think she might end up doing something with music. She’s got an ear for the beat.

Madeline loves playing with wipes. She would be happy and content pulling wipes out all day if I let her. She also loves clinging on to them, like they’re a blanket or something. I guess that’s her comfort. She will fall asleep holding them. She recently started to pull out her pacifier and wipe it down! Haha. The first time I saw her do that, I was dying of laughter. I thought, this girl has seen me do that WAY too many times. It amazes me how she learns things just from watching. She also washes her hands. It’s the cutest thing. She has seen me put hand sanitizer on way too many times, too. That’s something that she just started to do on her own.

She is semi-signing. She’s not consistent with it. She knows ‘more’ and ‘all done’, but will rarely use them.

She is so popular at church! Everyone loves to comment on how big she’s getting and how beautiful her eyes are. All the YW just go crazy over her and get in line to hold her. I try not to bring her in there t0o often because she’s a bit of a distraction. And everyone always has to comment on how much she looks like Nathan!

I am still working Mondays and Tuesdays. During the summer, Donna and Rachel didn’t have work, so they would watch her one week, and then my Mom the next week. That was really nice so my Mom didn’t have to drive down every week. We are so lucky to have such amazing family do SOOOO much for us. They sacrifice a lot to take care of our baby girl so we can both work. We are extremely grateful!

Here are a few pictures I took of her earlier in the month. I love this beautiful and vivacious girl!