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. :-)