little MOMents from kristin: 12-month photo shoot

This weekend I drank a bottle of wine with a good friend, changed a poopy diaper without waking my baby, watched an old movie, enjoyed the peace and quiet of a 3.5 hour nap, and took some new photos of my baby girl. It was a good weekend.

It's been a while, so here's a few cute things Lizzy is into these days...

She is standing for brief moments by herself. We discovered this on Friday night (3/4) and if she's in the mood she will stand for what seems like a long time. On Friday night, she let go of the chair and took a step before she sat down. Jon and I just looked at each other. I think she was just as surprised as we were! She still amazes us ALL THE TIME. If I am near her, she will take a step or two to get to me. Oh boy, here we go. She'll be walking before we know it!

Her love for opening cabinets, taking everything out, and putting a few things back in continues to grow. I think I've mentioned she loves to get into the bottom drawer in our bathroom. Well, her favorite thing to do is take the tampon box out, then take all the tampons out of the box. She has discovered she can hold and carry at least ten or eleven at one time; my little hand-hoarder's dream :o)

Sitting on the bathroom counter brushing her teeth is a new favorite past-time. She now enjoys moving the toothbrush around in her mouth, turning the water faucet on and off, and looking at herself in the mirror. And speaking of the bathroom, she decided she does not like baths. She has loved baths since she was very little, and this is a new development that hopefully won't last long. She is still in the little ducky bath because she still fits and my engineer/saver husband likes that it takes less water. Perhaps it's time to move up to the big girl tub.

We switched to whole milk a couple days after her birthday and she took it the first time without any problems at all. What a relief! She is doing better and better all the time with her sippy, but she would still prefer to drink her milk from a bottle. She is down to just two (sometimes three) bottles a day, though, so I'm happy with the progress so far. She usually has a bottle after her nap at daycare and then one before bed. That bedtime bottle will be tough to let go of. And while we're on the subject of eating, we're still working on her table food acceptance. I talked with Jon's boss' wife, an occupational therapist, a couple nights ago and she gave us some tricks to try. She also reassured me that this is not something to worry about, and put my mind at ease about the whole thing. Slowly but surely we will get there.

Lizzy also loves pushing her dinosaur around the house. It rolls really fast and she hadn't been able to keep up with it on the wood floor, but just recently she has started LOVING pushing it around and even speeds up to keep up on the wood floor. It's really cute. You can just see in her face how much she loves the independence of walking by herself (with her dinosaur).

She is doing really good at blowing kisses and waves anytime she hears us say "hi" or "goodbye". If we say "hello" she goes to her little purple phone, puts it by her ear, cocks her head to the side, and pushes her shoulder up; very cute! "Mama" is still her favorite word, but she is chatting ALL the time now, and uses inflection, points to things, and rasies her eyebrows. I can't wait until we can have conversations.

We are a couple of weeks behind, but we finally took some 'official' 12-month photos on Sunday. I am still learning about photography all the time, but I'm happy with the photos we got. I plan to take a few more next weekend because by the time we got her in the tutu she was kindof done (as you'll see) and I'd like to have more in that outfit. Enjoy!!