Month 11

Clara Panera, why do you have to grow up? Only one more month until you're a whole year old! You're breaking my heart, sweet baby girl. Please stay little.

I know you won't; you can't. And I wouldn't really want you to. I'm actually so excited to watch you grow up. I only wish I had a way to go back in time, some day when the baby days seem so far gone, and see and experience you again as you are now. But since I can't, I'm writing it all down. Here it is:

• We discovered she loves spaghetti and meatballs, just like her siblings.
• She crawls around with things in her mouth, like a dog. Nerf gun bullets are a particular favorite, but I won't let her have them because the tips come off easily and could choke her.
• When her siblings go outside, she sits by the sliding glass door and watches them play. They are her favorite form of entertainment!

• When we give her a bottle, she snatches it out of our hands and shoves it hard into her mouth in a way that just makes me laugh. She takes her food very seriously!
• On the 4th of July, she discovered she likes graham crackers! She found one that Aubrey had dropped while we were making s'mores, and she picked it up and started gnawing on it. I expected her to not like it because of her issues with texture in foods, but she ate the whole thing!

• When she really likes the food she's eating and I try to give her her water cup, she instantly throws it and looks to me for more food.
• When Aubrey tries to comfort her with stuffed animals if she's sad, Clara always throws them on the ground too.
• This month she learned how to stand up while holding on to things. She can't pull herself up on her own, but she can hold herself up after we have helped her.

• We put shoes on her for the first time a couple weeks ago, and she was not a fan. At first she just picked up her foot in one hand and stared at it. Then she spent a long time angrily trying to rip the shoe off.
• She's very particular about how we feed her finger foods. If we have a puff or chunk of carrot or something for her to eat with her hands, she refuses to either let you put it in her mouth or hand it to her. She'll whine until you put the food on her tray so she can grab it herself.
• Changing her diaper is a royal pain in the butt. She absolutely does not want to sit still, and she often makes a game out of it. If you lay her down to change her, she crawls away and laughs...

• But sometimes it's not a game, and she tries her hardest to squirm away, getting increasingly mad when she's unsuccessful.

• If the whole family goes upstairs and leaves her downstairs, she'll crawl over to the stairs and try to crawl up them. But then she gets stuck with her hands resting on the second-to-last step and her feet still on the ground. She gets very upset by this and just scream cries until I help her sit down or pick her up.
• If we leave the pantry door open, she immediately crawls over, grabs a cooking wine bottle from the bottom shelf, and tips it back. She can never understand why nothing comes out. There have been many jokes made about her growing drinking problem...

• She always points at things with her middle finger. She also sticks just that finger out and touches/taps things with it.
• The girl is unruffleable. There is a lot of screaming and yelling and loud noises in our house due to her older siblings. But she never flinches or even reacts. When we vacuum, she'll sit right on the floor, just a foot or two away from the vacuum, and be just fine.
• She has two favorite things in the house to destroy. The first is the Ziploc bag drawer...

• The second is Aubrey's paint bucket in her art desk.

• She doesn't like to be held too close, so oftentimes hugs aren't her favorite. She actually pushes her siblings away when they try to squeeze her. However, she still finds a way to show me affection. She leans her forehead against mine and just keeps it there. Sometimes she says, "Mmmm" when she does it. It melts my heart and makes me SO happy. There was the one time she ate my nose while doing it, but you know...
•  On the 4th of July, she did this weird series of hilarious facial expressions. She really is very expressive and funny... and ridiculously adorable.

• She often says, "Ah dah!" We're not yet sure if it means "all done" or "Dad" or nothing. We are sure that it's super cute though.
• One time Carter tried to move her while she was in her highchair and ended up knocking the whole thing over. Clara got a little pinch bruise on her ear and line bruises across her thighs from where the tray of her seat dug into them. For a few days after that happened, she would scream and cry if we moved her highchair while she was in it. It was sad.

Month 10

I'm sad to say I actually missed Clara's 10-month "birthday." My chiropractor asked me at an appointment how old she was, and I said, "She'll be 10 months old on the 21st... whenever that is." He responded, "So last Sunday?" That made me feel pretty dumb! In my defense, it was also Father's Day. So... yeah.

Anyway, here are some highlights about our sweet little bookend baby!

• She absolutely loves playing with my sunglasses. If I'm holding her and wearing my sunglasses, she will always take them off. When I put them back on, she immediately grabs them again. 
• She also always pulls off her bibs (if she can). She doesn't approve of them I guess!

• When we feed her, she often flaps her hands. This leads her to hit the spoon and spill food everywhere. She also likes to grab the spoon on its way to her mouth. So yeah, meal times are a messy affair. I'm learning she likes it when I make funny sounds as the spoon approaches her mouth...
• She doesn't like her food to have any chunks or texture. If it does, she spits it out. Did I mention meals are messy?

• She started crawling! She really gets around, and she's a curious one. Everything is a toy to her now, especially the contents of Aubrey's art desk. She also loves outlets, so we had to pull out our old outlet plug covers.

• She also loves opening our Ziploc bag drawer, haha.





• She hates diaper changes and getting dressed or undressed. She gets rigid and won't bend her arms to get shirts off. Then she spends her entire diaper change trying to roll over and get away. And she definitely does not take kindly to being held down to get it done.
• She had her first pool experience a couple of weeks ago. She liked it! She sat in the shallow part of the zero-depth entry pool and splashed around by kicking her feet. At some point she crawled out and just sat on the tile at the entrance, just out of the water. 

• She likes it when I put my forehead against hers. She leans into it and starts laughing. She also loves it when I lift her into the air and when I pretend to eat her neck. Her little laugh is the best sound in the whole world!
• Once at bedtime, as Aubrey and I were reading to her, she leaned in towards Aubrey and put her head on Aubrey's shoulder.  She kept it there for awhile, and it was clear it was a sign of affection. Awwwwwww.
• She does a little nose scrunching, eye squinting smile that just makes me laugh.

• If you try to take something from her, she death grips it and won't let go. If you succeed in getting it away from her, she gets maaaad. And when she gets mad, she starts scratching.
• Speaking of scratching, she loves grabbing people's faces. It's too bad her claws make it so painful, because it's actually really sweet and cute.
• She always falls asleep in the hiking backpack. I can't decide if it's more cute or more funny.

• She loves her water cup. If I give it to her during her meals, she will just drink it and refuse to eat. So I have to take it away (with no small difficulty). But whenever I do give it to her, she gets very excited. 
• She waves now! We often have to demonstrate and coax her into it, but she does it sometimes! The first time she did it was in California while we were at Maren's house, when she was saying goodnight to Maren.