A Day in the Life: 10 months!

Emma was raggedy ann for Halloween, so I decided to get her a raggedy ann doll. She loves this doll. Here's proof. She holds her close and pulls at her hair, enough that she's pulled Raggedy Ann's hair out :-) She still does this to both me and Steve, although I've really tried hard to make her stop doing it to me for fear that I will become completely bald. She doesn't always pull it out. She actually plays with my hair too. It's actually kind of cute when she does this. It's clearly hard wired in her DNA since she even does this when she's half asleep.

Emma is still crawling to get around. She's very quick! She still likes to do her monkey crawl, where she's using her feet instead of her knees to crawl. She doesn't always crawl like this, but she definitely does it more when she is crawling on hard surfaces, like our tile kitchen.

She has been standing on her own more and more this week without holding on to anything for balance. I still think she's at least a month off from walking though. I'm completely fine with this. She's growing up fast enough as it is. Now that she can stand, that means she can dance :-)
I put on her favorite CD earlier this week and she started bouncing up and down immediately. It actually looks like she's dancing now that she's standing. It is excessively cute. She also bounces when she's sitting when she gets excited. She usually bounces when we put on Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood, her favorite TV show. I'm still trying to limit her TV to 1-2 shows per day, if any at all.

She's still doing well when I drop her off at MDO. They keep telling me what a great baby she is. I think it's just relative to how she was when we started there. She was fussier back then. Luckily we've never had a hard time with drop offs. Last week they said they finally got her to laugh. They said she's a tough cookie. Ha! They tickled her to get her to laugh. She's very ticklish. I was surprised that she doesn't laugh more there since we get lots of laughs from her at home.

She's doing better with diaper changes. Instead of having trouble with 100% of them, it's more like 50% of the time she tries to escape. I'll take it! We're going in the right direction. She's also gotten much better when we change her clothes. She's never been a fan of that. Typically, she gets upset and squirms, making it very difficult to change her. It's actually tricky to avoid hurting her fingers- she tries to get her arm through quickly and gets her fingers stuck on part of the shirt. It looks painful :-( So perhaps she's learned if she slows down (which is what we try to get her to do), she won't get injured.

Most recently, she's been fighting being put in the car seat. She's fine once she's strapped in but she'd rather not be strapped in at all. What kid wouldn't? Too bad for Emma! It's tricky though because she's strong enough that if she really doesn't want to go in the seat, it's next to impossible to get her buckled in. She usually tries standing to make it more difficult for us to get her in. When she's standing, I've noticed she gets this grin on her face. She's so happy or at least feels like she's outsmarted us, for a minute anyways :-) This has been going on for over a week. I think it's actually getting a littler easier. Maybe she's learning that she's never going to win this battle!

Around the apartment. She still loves watching us brush our teeth. She will bounce up and down and smile really big. She also loves following the vacuum around when we clean.

I know I can't complain when it comes to her sleep. She usually sleeps at least 10 hours at night. I know that some parents have to wait much longer for their children to sleep that long. I can't even begin to express how much I appreciate this. How we get her to sleep is the tricky part. I always have her fall asleep in the bed, then move her to her crib once she's asleep. She can't fall asleep by herself and I don't have the heart to do cry it out. I did earlier on when I really though it was the only thing I could do. For the last 6 weeks or so, I haven't been able to do cry it out. It's way too hard for me. Steve has done it a couple of times. But one of the times, it lasted over an hour. I almost had to leave the apartment because I couldn't take listening to her be so hysterical. Eventually we'll have to change our methods. Not sure how we'll do it or when we'll do it, but until then, I don't mind spending lots of time putting her to sleep. It sure would make nap time a lot easier though, if I could put her in her crib when she's sleepy and have her fall asleep!

Her favorite foods are still the same. Extra sharp cheddar cheese and grapefruit. I keep saying what an amazing eater she is. She will eat just about anything. The past several days have changed though. She's been spitting out a lot of foods. She's had a stomach virus, so I'm hoping once it's gone, her picky eating will go away too. She vomited for the first time on Thursday night and has had diarrhea since Thursday as well. She seems happy otherwise. As soon as she was done throwing up, she was ready to go play again. Ha! The stomach bug hit me significantly harder but luckily didn't last as long. I don't know what people do without having family around to help. Thank God that Steve was home on Friday because I could literally not walk due to severe dehydration, or that's my guess anyways. Glad that's over with.

Although we didn't have a 10 month check-up, Emma went in for part 2 of her flu shot this week. She cried but was fine after a minute. Definitely not as traumatic as her 2 month vaccinations. I will never forget that!

Emma is babbling a lot. She frequently babbles in a way that sounds like she's trying to say her name. I'll try to upload a video of it :-) I know we're reading too much into it, but it really sounds like "Emma!"

Photo bomb!

Totally out of focus, but I still love this pic!