Babaloo.

You have me in awe. 10.5 months and you are just an explosion of movement. Every day you stand on your own, for longer and longer stretches and more and more often. You sit and spin around on your butt, using your legs to trace wide circles. You squat, unsupported, playing. Today, you bear-crawled for a few feet, with your butt in the air, AND you took your foot off the floor while standing all by yourself. You can swim for 5 seconds underwater. You stump, with an odd, stiff-legged gait, behind your walker, looking like a cowboy who’s been astride his trusty steed for too long.

Walking is in the air, along with a nip of autumn.

You’ve been in 12-18 month clothing for a while now, which is nice because you’ve blown through every other size. I’m happy to be able to put you in some of your outfits more than once before you outgrow them! At 9 months, you were above the 95th percentile for height and weight at 23 pounds 13 ounces and 29.5 inches. You’re perfect.

With your six teeth, four on the top and two on the bottom, you love beans, avocado, broccoli, BLUEBERRIES (oh god the blueberries), olives, toasted nori, and rice puffs. Sometimes you want to eat your favorite tidbits so quickly that you swallow them whole. Last weekend we went out for BBQ with your Granna and Pa and you chewed on an 8-inch beef rib, waving it around and speechifying. Sometimes you get mad at your food, smashing it into the table and yelling, and sometimes you smear it around. I feel like I spend a significant portion of my day cleaning up food.

Not only are you always in motion, you are also talky talky talky! You are always making sounds. Sometimes these are “nananananana” or “baba” or “dada” (which you actually HAVE said while looking at your father!), but your favorite noise lately is “doidle noidle doidle.” You sound like a babushka.

You’re down to two naps a day, which are sometimes 20 minutes and sometimes an hour and a half, but more often on the short side. At night, you still sleep like… a thing that doesn’t sleep well. My metaphors would be better, but that’s what lack of sleep does to a person. Those 6-hour stretches I wrote about in July didn’t stick around, unfortunately; we are back to your longest sleep period being about three hours. Now you start the night in your crib in your room, but you are still in bed with us by about 1 AM. Between you, Stinky, dada, and myself, that is one crowded queen bed.

The thing that blows me away most of all, though, is how much you have begun to understand. When Granna was here, she taught you where your eyes and nose are. You know that I am Mama and dada is Dada. You know the cat’s name, you know “diaper”, you know what a puppy dog is (and you love them with all your heart) and you most definitely know the steps in your bedtime routine (bath, massage, book, nurse) because on nights that you don’t want to go to bed, you start letting us know early in the process. And you love pointing at things.

You amaze me every day. I love getting to know you as your personality becomes more and more apparent.