Aylin - 10 months, 1st Christmas & New Year

At 10 months Aylin is ALL OVER the place. The start of crawling at 9 months opened the floodgates for all kinds of mobility. She started pulling up on furniture hardly a week after she started crawling. Now she's all over the house. She gets quite angry when she's confined to the living room with a baby gate and she has her sights on somewhere else in the house. She heads straight for the dog food, or a cord of any kind if it's in sight. She's starting to get the hang of standing on her own. Just today she pulled up on my leg and let go and stood there for about a minute before she flapped her arms, excited about something and then lost her balance and plopped down on her butt. I don't think it will be too terribly long before she's testing out walking!

She also eats table food pretty regularly now. It still isn't a huge part of her diet, but she wants to try big girl food any time Jeff & I are eating. So after she's had her afternoon bottle and baby food. She also gets to have table food while we eat dinner. I think it's more about her wanting to do what momma and daddy are doing than anything. But it's good for her to learn how to handle the new tastes and textures. She gets to eat almost everything we have for dinner, unless it's stuff that she really needs teeth for. She really loved the turkey pot pie over biscuits we had the other night. All kinds of yummy noises (lip smacking, NOM NOM, MMMs, and excited squeals)!!

Christmas Morning! We had to wake Aylin up (probably one of the only years for many to come that we will have to do that!). Once we all got breakfast (and momma finished wrapping a few toys) we piled all of Aylin's toys into the living room. At first the un-wrapping was fun, and we wanted to eat all of the paper. But we soon got bored with it so momma had to help. We also wanted to play with each toy we opened if you could see the toy from the box around it. So it was a slow un-wrapping process, but we had lots of fun. She received all sorts of fun clothes and more cloth diapers! She also got LOTS of fun toys. In no particular order she got: a Vtech sit to stand walk behind toy, A Giant soft teddy bear, a Busy Activity Center Cube, a Leap Frog Learn & Groove music activity table, A Ball Popper, Veggie Tales movies, Winnie the Pooh movie, a Shapes & Colors Farm, a Juke Box music toy, and probably other's that I am forgetting because they are all strewn about the house! :D The child is not lacking in things to keep her occupied.

For Aylin New Years Eve wasn't anything much different from a regular day. However after being down to bed for an hour she woke up wailing. Our only thought is that something scared her. It took about 10 minutes of momma and daddy both trading off trying to calm her down. She was quite histerical. Once she finally calmed back down then we were wide awake (at 10pm) and wanted to play. So she stayed up for another 30 minutes or so when she started crashing again and went back to bed.

Jeff & I stayed up until midnight-ish being nerds, watching TV and surfing the inter-webs. I enjoyed a little champagne and made a cream cheese cheese ball & taco salad. This year we actually made it to midnight, where last year my pregnant body couldn't make it. :)

I am curious to see what this year has in store. Where will God lead us? What new things will we experience? A few things we are looking forward to: Aylin's 1st birthday, Our 5th wedding anniversary, Brad & Kristi's wedding, just to name a few...