11 months old!

So, the end of babyhood is rapidly approaching for my little Eliza.

Let the mourning begin.

Lots of big developments this month!
Eliza moved into a convertible carseat. Still can't believe she's big enough for that.

We expanded her exposure to table food, and she's doing great.
Green beans were a hit the first time. Not as much after that, but we're still hopeful.
She also eats a whole banana, before or after downing 1-2 jars of baby food.

We discovered that Eliza loves Goldfish and Tostitos. (Can you blame her?)

Unfortunately, so does Jack. And her chair was close enough to his that he pulled her tray until she was within reaching distance.

And terrorized her by taking her Tostito.

Eliza has finally gotten the hang of the sippy cup.

And she is beginning to figure out the real cup (thanks to bathtime).
Although this usually ends with water all over her front side.

Eliza began shaking her head and saying "naw" when she doesn't want something. It's pretty cute! She has also been standing independently a little bit this month, but she's still not cruising, so I think walking won't happen for a little while. It's fun to watch the process, though.

She's been doing a lot more playing with her siblings recently and laughing at all of the silliness in our family. She doesn't like to be left in a room by herself, and will crawl around looking for action if you leave her alone for too long. She's opening cupboards in the bathroom and kitchen, getting her fingers stuck places, and touching things I don't want her to touch. I'm so not ready for another toddler! Oh well. Ready or not, right?

A happy discovery.

I blogged about doing a cleaning blitz in August 2009. It has been a valuable tool for us over the last year and a half or so, but we hadn't done one in a while because things had just gotten a little too hectic. But now that things have calmed down a bit, I am determined to get back on top of everything. Including my (unclean) house. So naturally I enlisted the help of my family and we had a long overdue cleaning blitz on Saturday. Yeah!


And what was the happy discovery? That Jack is actually helpful now! His main contributions were that he dusted (with a sock over his hand) and helped wipe down mirrors and the glass doors. He was a great little worker and Cat was much more cheerful since Jack was helping too; she didn't feel that she was the only one being unjustly forced to clean.


We cleaned for a while and I am much happier about the state of my house as well as my family's ability to work together.

Sittin around

They were playing on the deck and I was surprised to see this when I looked outside.

I wasn't surprised to see this after a minute or two.

The Wonder Pets Save the Day

Thanks to the addition of instant Netflix to our household, we recently discovered Wonder Pets. Cat and Jack liked it. They watched the entire first season in a matter of about 3 weeks. (That's fast for us.) And we started to see some changes in behavior. We started to sing "the phone, the phone is ringing" when ever our phone rang. Jack started singing to each of us in turn, "What's gonna work, Mommy?" and waited for us to reply with, "Teamwork!"

He even did this during Sacrament Meeting a couple of weeks ago. Loudly.

At the end of every episode, the Wonder Pets celebrate their triumph with a happy exclamation: "This calls fo' some celewee!" So, of course, my kids now love celery. With or without ranch or peanut butter. But they definitely prefer to have long stalks instead of little celery sticks that I try to give them. Then they eat them beginning in the middle, like this:

At least they're eating vegetables, right?

Thank you, Wonder Pets! ;-)

Butterflies

I was looking at the kids' art last weekend and noticed that I had a butterfly drawing Cat made and a butterfly craft that Jack and I did during story time at the library. So I added an original work that Eliza and I worked on together. She was a good sport. :-)

About Jack

Toward the end of the year, we learned a few interesting facts about our boy.

1. He wants to be a puppy.
He loves to crawl around, panting and licking things. Location doesn't matter; he has crawled around, pretending to be a puppy, after Church when people are everywhere trying to meet up with their families to go home, and multiple people have tripped over him. He also refers to himself and others as "Puppy Dog."


2. He loves to go caroling.
There were several times during the month of December that we were getting ready to go places and he asked me if we were going caroling, and was disappointed when the answer was no. And on more than one occasion while we were playing outside, I saw him singing to our front door, like so:

(I'm working on a video. Hopefully soon...)

3. He likes to sleep at attention.

Jack likes to put his hands down by his side under the covers when he goes to bed. He doesn't usually stay like this when he sleeps, but there have been times when he's woken up screaming and I'll go in to check on him and he'll just say "HANS DOWN!" and once I reposition the covers over his body and arms he'll go back to sleep right away. This picture reminded me of that...

Favorites

I've been meaning to share these YouTube videos with you. The first one is my favorite and I wish I could figure out how to download the audio so we could listen to it in the car. The second one we all love. The kids laugh out loud every time we watch it. Sesame Street has a ton of good YouTube videos, so it's a good thing to put on when the kids need to watch something at the computer for a few minutes. Enjoy. :-)

Looking Back

A friend of mine puts together a montage-style video for her son for each of his birthdays as a way of looking back over the previous year. I love this idea and thought it would be a great year-end activity. So, I tried it out, and... it definitely wasn't the quick and fun project I hoped it would be. But, I love it anyway. (BTW, any of you out there who have done this more often than I, I'd love to hear your tips! I'm talking to you, Melissa, Christina R., and Andy. Just to clarify.) :-)

2010 was a challenging year for us, but putting this video together was a wonderful reminder of the many ways we've been blessed. We watched it together on New Year's Day and it felt great.

The song is "I Am a Child of God," performed by Insideout a capppella.

And, sorry for the awkward silence at the end. I couldn't time the music and slides quite right, and the auto-fit feature wasn't working. :-(

Starting the year off right.

We decided we needed to have a little fun together as a family on New Year's Day. The promise of seeing a real movie set led us to spend a few hours at nearby Jekyll Island and we had a blast. The weather was beautiful and it wasn't very crowded.

So, the next X-Men movie is being filmed in part here in Georgia. There's one set within about 3 miles of our house (I've been meaning to take pictures but I keep forgetting my camera when I take Cat to school) and the other one is on JI. (Thanks for tipping us off, Nicole!) We drove around until we found the set. It didn't take long and it wasn't hard to spot. This is what we saw from the road:




And here is what it looks like on the other side of the fence, from the beach side (we didn't take this picture):

If you're interested, you can read more about it and see some good pictures here.

Next we rented a bike for me. (Ben and Cat brought theirs. I'll get my own one of these days.) JI has miles and miles of bike trails and we spent the next 90 minutes or so biking down to the historic district, riding around, and going back to the playground.


Eliza was a trooper and hung out in the trailer the whole time. She didn't even complain when she started slipping through the straps.

Jack got really antsy about halfway through, though, so I put him in the Ergo and carried him the rest of the time. It got a bit precarious at times when he would decide to suddenly lean to one side with all of his body weight, but we managed to get through the trip with no crashes, thankyouverymuch.


Then the kids played on the playground for a while, which is always a good time. I put Eliza in a tunnel that dips down in the middle, thinking she would quickly crawl/pull herself out, but she ended up just hanging out in there for a while. We finally fished her out, but it made for some cute pictures! We were again impressed with Jack's climbing abilities and Cat's monkey-barring abilities.

We finished our visit to JI with some Red Bug Pizza. The kids liked the pizza so much, they decided to share it with the ravens that surrounded us. So we all had a good meal.


When we got home, Ben decided to enjoy the awesome fallish winter weather (we'd been having weather in the 30s for the previous week) by setting up a hammock he picked up on his mission in El Salvador. He hung it between two oak trees in the back yard.


That night we had a little New Year's celebration where I gave the kids a little gift, we toasted with sparkling grape juice, and watched a video montage I made of 2010. (I'll post it here when I finish editing it.) And, of course, a party in our house isn't complete without Cat's decorations, so she and Ben did the house up with pink and purple crepe paper and it looked wonderful. Happy New Year!