The Simple Life: Ten months

This past month was October which is the beginning of a very fun and festive season for me. Surprisingly it has actually felt like Fall this year with the temps in the 60s (don't hate me). I can remember previous years being in the 80s so I am gladly embracing the cooler temps. The leaves are changing colors and we've even gotten some rain. Yay! Poor California needs some relief from this horrible drought. Hopefully it's the beginning of more to come.

Abby is now 10 months old. She is crawling around with gusto and has given up the army crawl and replaced it with the good ole fashioned four leg crawl. She can get around really well now...and quickly! She is also really adept at pulling herself up onto just about anything. She barely needs to hold on and I feel like she's on the verge of standing on her own. A couple of times I've let her go and she's stayed standing for a few seconds. I honestly think she could do it but when she realizes that she's not being held on to, she sits down. She is in a really fun phase where she is enjoying mimicking and imitating other people. Her favorite subject is Ellie of course. Often times we'll have a dinner chorus of the two of them singing or banging something in a similar fashion. It's going to be crazy when the two of them can talk. She can clap her hands and wave good bye. She loves to blow raspberries and strum her bottom lip. She is getting VERY chatty and will hum and babble "words". Sometimes it feels like she's telling us a story which of course we don't get. She says "Mama" a lot and just the other day we heard her say "Papa" but she hasn't said it very often since. When she gets excited she says "Ah da" which sounds to me like "Ta da!". She says it a lot when she is crawling fast and excited towards something she wants. I feel like she is becoming a real human girl who has has her own needs and personality now. She starting to get really mad when she wants something and I don't get it to her fast enough or when Ellie takes a toy away from her (which happens a lot). She is definitely not a passive baby anymore.

Unfortunately she is now the age where she has dropped from three naps to two naps and doesn't sleep so well on the go anymore. And an even more unfortunate reality is that Ellie is starting to drop her nap all together (Noooooooooooooo!!!). I spend a very large portion of my day trying to get one or the other to sleep or keep one quiet while the other one sleeps. It is challenging to say the least. It would almost be easier if Ellie did stop napping because then we could spend more time outside of the house. Either way, I have completely lost any down time that I may have had. Tragic. Ellie and I have started doing more art projects while Abby is sleeping with the attempt of being quiet. She loves drawing and painting and I've started a binder with all of her artwork. I'm quickly realizing that is going to get full very quickly and I need to figure out a better way to save her projects.

Abby still seems really chubby to me but really she's not. She's just so much bigger than Ellie was at this time. I was looking back at some photos of Ellie at this age and oh my goodness!! Ellie had chicken legs, no joke. Tiny little toothpicks. Thankfully she's more normally proportioned now but that girl was so scrawny as a baby. Abby eats really well and goes gang busters for almost anything we put in front of her. It seems like she eats a lot but 95% of what we give her ends up falling under her seat. She doesn't like being fed so I mostly give her finger foods and pouches which she can mostly feed herself. Her favorites seem to be cheerios, pretzels, pineapple, beans and apple.

Her are her stats for this month:

Head circumference: 46 cm
Height: 28 inches
Weight: 19lbs 12oz

We celebrated Abby's first Halloween this month as well as our 5 year anniversary (wOOt!). I was determined to make their Halloween costumes this year and I was really pleased with how they turned out. Ellie went as a chocolate chip cookie and Abby was milk. I was a little afraid that Ellie wouldn't want to wear her costume but she did. We talked about Halloween and trick-or-treating a lot to prepare her for the big event and I think that helped. We had a blast trick-or-treating with them. We went around our neighborhood with our friends and neighbors Sabrina, Thomas and Olivia. It was fun to have another little person with us and made it feel more festive. The nice neighborhood around us was perfect for our little ones because it wasn't too crowded and crazy. Ellie had a lot of fun and was confident going up to the door and saying "Trick or Treat". She loved it until the very end when she bumped into a skeleton and it started moving and shaking. She was able to recover okay from that but at the next house a kid dressed up as a Gorilla jumped out and scared her. She was totally done after that. She still talks about the scary Gorilla and we've had to explain to her that it was pretend and Halloween is over, etc. Poor little girl! Hopefully she forgets by next year. Abby was pretty oblivious to the whole thing but she seemed like she was having an okay time strolling around the neighborhood and looking at the decorations etc.