Laughing with Sarah

Eleven months - October 24, 2014 Well, I think it is my fault. I blinked. And when I did, you took advantage of the moment to get another month older, Sammy. This has been a month of rapid changes. Every day you are a different kid. You keep moving farther and farther away from being a baby, and closer and closer to being a sweet little boy. Standing up is old news for you by now. It takes very little effort to pull yourself up. You grab the couch, or a chair, or a bookshelf, or mommy's legs, and stand up tall. You have started cruising around furniture, walking very carefully while holding on. We have a wheeled toy that transforms from a sit-and-scoot bicycle to a stand-up walker, and you have mastered the art of walking around the living room while pushing it ahead of you. You aren't quite interested in trying to walk while holding onto mama or daddy's hands, but I'm sure that will happen very soon. You are a boy on the move. You scoot around the house, chasin...

Ten months - September 26, 2014 Well, little Sammy, I'm writing this post with a lukewarm cup of coffee by my side, trying to keep my eyes open after a second night in a row of bad sleeping on your part. It's a good thing that you are darn cute... Cute and kind and funny and sweet, that is. :) You are now ten months old (plus a few days), and you are a little man on the move. You're so busy that you're still hugging that skinny 10th percentile curve for weight. And it doesn't seem matter how many bites you take of scrambled eggs, quiche, muffins, grapes, chicken, shrimp, rice, Cheerios, pasta, bagels, donuts, bread, yogurt, squash, or anything else. You love playing and you love eating. Eating will get easier and easier as you get more teeth. You have two big ones on the bottom, plus a third one that is poking its way through. Someday you'll have top teeth, and then you'll figure out that chewing is the best. You've been a good sport about teeth...

Nine months - August 24, 2014 And just like that, another month has flown by. These days, it's hard to keep up with Sam as he crawls around all over the place. We are in full hands-and-knees territory. He can crawl, and sit, and change directions, and crawl while holding a toy, and bat a toy around and chase it. He laughs and grunts when he's moving at top speed toward something he wants (like when he races over from across the room when mama comes to pick him up from daycare). He shrieks - LOUDLY! - as he chases the cats around. He can pull himself to standing, though he's not quite so good at sitting back down once he's up. This is one mobile kid! Which means that we now have three baby gates and a bunch of corner protectors guarding the house. And it means that he has a few bumps and bruises from random pieces of furniture that he has decided to try to crawl through instead of going around. All this movement means that he's still burning calories like...

Eight months - July 22, 2014 Well goodness. What a big boy we have on our hands these days! For starters, we have two teeth! Both on the bottom, both of them about halfway grown at this point. Teething has been blissfully uneventful, for the most part. He drools more, sticks his tongue out a lot, and has a slightly harder time staying asleep at night, but otherwise he's not too cranky about the teeth-growing process. Just a little confused about what these weird things are in his mouth. Teeth! We've added broccoli, nectarine, apricot, and multigrain cereal to his list of foods, plus a few more sneaks of ice cream, whipped cream, and most recently, rømmegrøt (at this last weekend's Nordic Fest ). Sam has also decided that drinking out of a grown-up cup is the most hilarious thing ever. He'll watch Matt and me at dinner, and his face will light up when we take a drink...and then he'll reach out, wanting to take a sip of his own. We hold the cup up to ...

I have an eight month update (with picture!) languishing in my queue, but before I have time to finish up that post, I need to speak my peace. I was putting Sam to bed last night, and had one of those distinct "Wow, I love this sleepy little guy so so so very much" moments...followed immediately by the thought, "And you know what? I think I'm doing a pretty good job at this whole mom thing." It wasn't so much a self-congratulatory thing as it was a freeing realization that I love Sam, and Matt and I do our very best to keep him healthy and happy, and you know what? For the most part, he's a healthy, happy kid. So I think that counts as success. I say this because in these first eight months, I have said very little about the "shoulds" that pile up around the feet of new moms. For my own part, I think I did a good job of ignoring most of them, except for a brief couple of weeks when I thought that maybe I should think about getting Sam o...