My sweet little Anna girl is 11 months old today? Really??
Tonight, Daddy took Adele to Monkey Joe's while I had some quality time with Anna. It was bath night, and Anna desperately needed a bath, but she usually only likes her bath when Adele is with her. However, she has pretty much just plain hated her baths lately.
I decided to go ahead and give a "solo" bath for Anna a try anyhow, figuring that the worst that could happen would be that she would scream and stay dirty until Adele got home.
As it turned out, she actually did BETTER in her solo bath than she's been doing with Adele. She had fun splashing and putting toys into and taking toys out of the water. She even started following some two step commands as we played! (Sit down and splash; stand up and put the fish in the bucket, etc). It was pretty neat!
One of her favorite "games" lately is to put things "into" a container. This has been a HUGE help around the house, because it actually tricks Adele into cleaning, since the girls are becoming very...competitve(?) with each other...whatever one is playing, the other needs to be playing as well. (and on my end, except for the cleaning bit, it's getting old quick!)
Her favorite book is Moo, Baa, La La La, and she will make each of those animal sounds as we read the corresponding pages. She says "woof" for most other animals, especially cats and dogs. While at the zoo a few weeks ago (which you don't yet know about since I haven't blogged in forever!) she said "woof" to ALL of the animals she saw. It was SO cute watching that development! Some people looked at me like I was crazy for agreeing that a gorilla (or whatever animal we were looking at) was a "woof", but to me, it meant that Anna is relating "woof" with animals, and that's a huge step!
Anna cruises around the house, but prefers crawling to walking with our hands over long distances. Today she took 4 steps while holding onto my pants with just one hand, but honestly, I'm not expecting her to walk anytime soon...she's much too good of a crawler.
She has several cupboards that she has "claimed" as her own in the kitchen, and their contents are usually spewed all over the kitchen. Also, the dog food and water has to be kept up except when Cookie is actually eating, or Anna has it everywhere!
She desperately wants to be tall enough to play with Adele's dollhouse, and is actually starting to play with toys and not just put everything in her mouth!
I mentioned that Daddy and Adele went out on a little "Date" tonight, well, Anna wasn't exactly thrilled to be left at home. In fact, I believe that she had what I might call her first.....temper tantrum...when they left. (Followed less than two hours later with her second tantrum when I ate the last of her go-gurt...)
She still won't take formula out of a bottle, but I got the okay to give her a little cow's milk (which is a lot cheaper than formula!) and she has actually been drinking it out of a sippy cup or a bottle. Granted, she doesn't drink much, but she's also not spitting it out and screaming if I hold it anywhere near her, which is what she was doing with the formula. I kind of attribute this to Adele, because Anna often will pick up Adele's cup and try to drink out of it, and Adele is usually drinking milk, and since Anna is very much about copying her big sister right now, she's willing to give cow's milk a try since Adele thinks its okay!
Baby food is another thing of the past (mostly) around here. Anna prefers her food in bite sized pieces, and has even been known to take bites off of a piece of pizza! (That's better than Adele will do half the time!) She loves bite sized frozen veggies, but will eat most meats and fruits as well. She will still let me spoon feed her yogurt, and will eat mashed potatoes off of a fork, but she really thinks that she is all done being a baby (well...until its time for one of her middle of the night nursing sessions..which are still happening about every other night...then she thinks she's a newborn and can't sleep without her mommy!)
I recently took both girls to Wisconsin (sans Daddy), and Anna really started to recognize her Wisconsinite relatives! She will now look at pictures of Bapa and say "Bapa" (Which sounds almost identical to how she first said "bye bye", but it is clear that she recognizes him!) She has been looking at LOTS of pictures of family members lately, and seems to recognize people, but Bapa is the only one she will name! (Well, she says Dada when she looks at the family picture above our couch, and has for some time now, but she doesn't name Daddy in other pictures yet).
While in Wisconsin, Anna got two more teeth (technically I think one came in the day before we left...on the 22nd) but I thought she had gotten 4 or 5, her poor gums were so swollen! She currently has a very crooked smile because the top two teeth that popped through are both on the right side (the left front tooth hasn't cut through yet). Her smile is pretty silly looking, but I think it's adorable!
Daddy and I were talking the other night...he says that Anna is still too much of a "baby" for his liking, he's looking forward to 18 months or so, but I really love this stage! She is so cute about being into everything, but will actually pause when we tell her "no", which is a nice change from her older sister!
Happy birthday, sweet Anna girl, we love you!
