11 months!

Today is Lila's 11-month birthday! She spent the day at Grandma Bonnie and Papa Jeff's house in North Dakota with her brother and Mommy (Daddy has to go to the field this week).

It feels like this past month has gone by the fastest of all of Lila's months. She's been one busy little girl lately -- so busy, in fact, that I've started calling her my "Squirmy Worm" because she's just too busy to sit still. Diaper changes are completely ridiculous now. Even when she's on all fours and getting ready to crawl, for example, it's not enough for her to just get from point A to point B. She also has to stick her butt up in the air and move it up and down a half dozen times. Sometimes she leans so far forward that I get worried she's going to do a somersault!

Here she is in action at Grandma and Grandpa's house.....

Lila still sometimes crawls on all fours using one knee and one foot, but the past week or so she has started using both knees. She can definitely go faster when she uses both knees. I am interested to see if she continues to go back and forth between these crawling styles or if she'll drop the knee/foot combo altogether.

During the past month, we started walking with her around the house a little. She'll take a few steps at a time, but then she'll try to pull out of our hands so she can get down and crawl. She clearly knows how she can get around most efficiently! Since we've been at Grandma and Grandpa's house, we've been trying to get her to do some "cruising" along the furniture in the living room, especially the leather ottoman. The super-plush carpet here is much more forgiving of a potential misstep than our rugs and wood floors at home. (We had extremely unforgiving ceramic tile in the house we rented in Texas during John's first year, so John didn't really start cruising furniture until we visited Grandma and Grandpa's house in December 2009.)

What else is going on with Lila now? She is.....

.....sleeping much, much better at night after a little experiment we tried earlier in the month to try to get her to stop waking up at night and to finally get her weaned off of a nighttime feeding. We started putting her to bed in the Pack n Play in the office, thinking that if we needed to let her "cry it out," she wouldn't wake her brother up (their bedrooms are adjacent, but the office is at the opposite end of the house from John's bedroom). It worked even better than we anticipated! The first night, she didn't have to "cry it out" at all, since she slept through the night completely! It was the first time she'd done that in a REALLY long time. We've moved her back to her own bedroom now, and she'll sleep through the night most nights.

.....still working on her 6th tooth (the right tooth on the side of her middle two top teeth). It is visible through the gums, but it hasn't broken through yet. It's taking forever! I think I can also see a little redness on the gums on the right side of her middle two bottom teeth. She's had some of the classic teething symptoms the past week (tugging at her ear, having a runny nose, etc.), so I think I'll be reporting on some new "break-throughs" very soon.

.....going through a huge growth spurt. Just in the last week, she has started eating like crazy and has woken up at night a couple of times acting like she's starving. She is also much less content to eat (pureed) baby food. She wants to feed herself! Her mealtime independence is great for Mommy and Daddy because it means we can eat our food while it's still hot. The finger foods she's had so far include mango, blueberries, apples, bananas, avocado, butternut squash, sweet potatoes, carrots, corn, peas, cheese and bread. She has added a few items to her finger food repertoire since we got to North Dakota on Saturday (grilled pork tenderloin, for example).

.....vocalizing a LOT more, as of the past two days. It is so much fun to hear her voice again! She hadn't been doing much talking since the post I wrote a couple months ago when she started saying "mama." Now she says "mama," "dada," "gaga," and a few other things that I can't even transcribe (but they're adorable). Today she talked for 10-15 minutes at a time! I'll try to get a video of this in the next few days.

Happy 11 months, darling Lila-pie! We love you so much. Just look at how sweet you are in this video of you eating Daddy's apple (and doing your princess wave at the very end).