Readers

Make no mistake, we grow readers in this house. Tessa is still a little more into tasting the books than she is reading them if she's on her own. (Even though Amanda's head tastes better.) But she loves to sit in my lap and read the books with texture. She pats books without them looking for textures.

 Luca of course loves to read, and he started early too.

Love our little readers! Love our growing collection of books too =)

40 weeks

Tessa is 40 weeks old today! In honor of that, I thought it would be fun to put up a couple pictures.

Forty weeks in:

And forty weeks out:

Nine Months

Man oh man, three quarters of a year old! And the months before her birthday will just fly by. Gotta enjoy the summer!

She has made huge changes this month! She's been looking like she was going to start crawling for a while now. People would tell me "She's so close!" and I would take their word for it (since Luca never crawled I didn't really know what pre-crawling looked like.) Then it got to the point that she was enjoying pulling to standing so much and didn't seem to be progressing with the whole crawling thing that I assumed she was going to go straight to walking. She found all sorts of ways to get things she couldn't reach. She would rock while she was sitting and sort of skootch forward. She would reach as far as she possibly could on her knees before sitting back up again. Combining those two motions, plus rolling around, she could reach pretty much anything. Then when she was on the hard wood and reached as far as she possibly could she would sort of pull herself along without moving her legs. Finally (finally!) this weekend, while she and I were in St Louis with some of mom's family (but while everyone was out except for she and I and Brit) she crawled! I took a video on my phone and sent it to Josh and showed the family when they got back. I think she knew her 9 month well-baby appt is tomorrow and she wanted to make sure I could say "Yes" when the doc asked if she was crawling.

Demonstrating the best way to drink from a sippy cup

 Still no teeth, though she certainly seems to be teething. The white spot and the bright white dot that I noticed last month was gone after a couple days. It's not uncommon for baby teeth to sort of rise and fall under her gums and it seems that's what hers are doing, poor little girl. While we hardly ever gave Luca tylenol, Tessa's about gone through a bottle. She will cuddle onto your shoulder so tired and just whimper, breaks your heart. During the day we give her teething toys and frozen grapes in a mesh sleeve to chew on and it helps, but at night she seems to be miserable sometimes. They say that the longer the teeth take to break through the stronger they are, so I guess it's good, but I still feel bad for her!

She's gotten to be a pretty good mimic, it's kind of funny. She and Luca take turns banging the table during dinner. He blows raspberries and then she does (again during dinner, Josh is developing a splatter shield for himself). She's good at imitating noises too.
She says "mamamama" all the time, but she's not referring to me, just likes the syllable. So far no words.
This month she's learned to clap and wave. We helped teach her to wave by waving nigh-night to her, so now when she's tired she starts waving, it's cute.

Mmm... frozen grapes

There was a week or so when she refused to eat pureed food--that was tricky. Now she's back to eating them in addition to pieces of grapes, blueberry, pears, peas, corn and carrots. Little girl needs teeth so she can eat like she wants to!
This month was also her first long car ride--5 hours or so to St Louis for my cousin Ali's bridal shower. Next month we'll go all the way into KC for another shower for Ali and that time Luca will come too--it'll be interesting.

She wouldn't keep a headband on, but she's wearing shoes!

She's loved pulling to standing for a while, but just this last week while standing she's started lifting her feet to walk forward (we were helping her shuffle before). Luca didn't start walking on his own until 18 months, we'll see what Tessa's plans are...
I can't believe how quickly she's doing so much growing! She is a little sweetheart, to be sure =)

How to be cool

Luca knows how to be cool. And today he's kind enough to share a couple tips. One option, if it's hot outside (or even if it's really a little bit chilly) is the kiddie pool on the patio. When filled with water from the hose it will literally help you be cool. So the hip kids sucker their mom's into filling buckets with hot water from the tap to warm it up a bit.

Tessa is too amused by the toys to look up

Option two is to follow Daddy's example: aviator sunglasses.

Lessons in perfecting the disinterested look will have to wait for another day.