10 months!

Double digits! Two months from a year! Whoa!

We think she's a Southern Belle, she holds out her hand flat palm down to you, and thinks it's funny when you kiss it.
She's steadily improving on sleeping. I can put her down wide awake and at most she'll cry for a couple minutes, frequently she just goes to sleep. She takes two solid naps a day, though she's able to skip one if we need to. She's still up once at night to eat and it seems she is determined not to give that one up. Maybe once a week she's up twice at night, but I feel like an end to my disjointed sleep is in sight!
I took her nine month pics, it was hard to keep her focused, but she was happy to be there!

She didn't fall, and mom is just out of frame. No worries =)

It's amazing, she loves her family so much. =) When Josh gets home she stops whatever she's doing when she hears his voice and heads his way. He's the only one that she will willingly leave my arms for.
Luca calls her "pretty girl" and she loves pestering him. Especially when we're shopping, Tessa sits in the seat of the cart and Luca sits in the basket. She turns around and plays with his hair and his face and thinks it's hysterical.
He is so sweet to her, if we're in the car and she starts crying he says to her "We're almost there pretty girl."
Meal times are pretty easy with her, she hasn't turned up her nose at anything in a while. She did have a reaction to either strawberries or mandarin oranges, but other than that, we haven't noticed any problems or allergies.
Her bottom left tooth started poking through at the very beginning of July. A couple days ago I noticed her top right side looking swollen, and then the one to the left of the top middle. If those two do come through she'll look like a jack-o-lantern. =)

You can tell she knows which toys are Luca's and that he doesn't like her to play with, because she sneaks over to it, plays for a second, and then looks at me seemingly asking "Am I in trouble?" If it's a toy that she's okay to play with--it's just Luca doesn't like sharing it--then I let her and she just laughs and laughs while she continues playing.
She turns the pages when we're reading, and is starting to enjoy books that don't have textures, though she still prefers those.
She has very nearly outgrown the infant tub, probably the next bath will be in the big tub. I can't decide if bathing her with Luca is a brilliant idea or guaranteed to be a hot mess. Only one way to find out. =)

She is exceedingly agreeable, answering most everything with either "ya" or by nodding her head. We have whole conversations like that. "Tessa are you stinky?" "Ya" "Do you want Daddy to change you?" "Ya." Can't argue with that!
She is a super speedy crawler, and very quiet. She'll be playing with toys in one room, you blink or turn away for a second and you hear toys making noise in a different room.

We are quickly approaching our big trip to Kansas City. I'm excited to see family and friends, but I'm very anxious about how it will all go. I think by the time Luca was this old he'd been in twice, the first trip took I think 17 hours and the second one 12 (it's about an 8 hour drive normally). We'll see if we can continue to improve on our time. ;)

Playing in the rain

Last week was hot, so I got out Luca's new big pool and for a couple days he basically spent all day in a swim suit. Then it got rainy. But he wasn't willing to take off his swim suit, so this happened.

What made it especially funny is that he didn't want to get in the pool, and with the umbrella he didn't really get rained on. But still the swim suit ;)

Duet

Tessa learned today how to play the recorder. And she was so amused with herself. Last week one day when she woke up from her nap Luca put the recorder in her crib with her. When she blew into it and made noise he was so excited he screamed and scared her. It must not have been too scarring though, since she was at it again this evening. She would blow into it and then laugh, and then blow and laugh again. So I recorded that. Then, as luck would have it, I remembered that a couple days ago when I was cleaning out the storage in the basement I found the recorder I used in 4th and 5th grade music class. So, knowing I was going to regret the decision in about a minute, I gave that one to Luca. And they played a duet.

As soon as they finished the song I put my old one way up on a shelf. One recorder at a time is plenty for now. ;)

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.