I’m not predicting that she’ll walk any time too soon, but Nora’s definitely getting closer. She pulls herself up on chairs, table legs, the couch, or people, and takes steps along the edges. She will even move from one thing to another as long as she can keep at least one hand on something. But she knows she is way faster with her crawling, and so that is the best way to keep up with Jonah for now.

Nora almost always wakes up before Jonah in the mornings, and sometimes at naptime, and then she usually goes looking for him. If I don’t pay close attention, she scoots off down the hallway to holler and bang on his door. She’s learned lots of things just by watching him, like how to draw with crayons and chalk, drive trucks around, swing a bat, strum the ukulele, stack blocks, and brush her teeth. She will also ‘dance’ if you ask her to.

Nora is becoming a more determined communicator. She still doesn’t say any specific words (other than maybe mom, dad, Jonah), but she certainly acts as if we should be understanding her emphatic sounds! She has started signing a few more things, like for changing her diaper, eating, or saying please. Every day it seems like there are more words I realize that she knows because she follows a new direction or looks for a certain thing that I’ve mentioned. It’s so fun to see her huge smile and squeals of delight when she realizes that I understand what shes trying to say.

She’s also becoming a lot more wary of strangers. It’s very helpful for Nora to have time to warm up and watch people, and if they start talking to her before she’s ready, we all get to witness a slow motion face-crumpling meltdown. This has happened a few times with kind old ladies in the grocery store checkout line… At the same time, when we go somewhere new, if I put her down on the floor, she’s instantly off to explore and is not terribly cautious with new surroundings.

Even though we’re getting into the rainy season here, that hasn’t changed Nora’s desire to be outdoors. It just means she wants to crawl through and sit in puddles, wet grass, and mud, getting herself totally messy. I’m not sure she’ll be left with any presentable 9-12 month pants when we’re through with this phase. Oh, and she wants to lick her hands clean afterwards. Nice.

In so many ways, she’s such an easy kid – she eats good meals, sleeps well (although I blame her father for the early-riser genes), entertains herself easily, and is even fun to take on errands. And she’s happy and adorable.

A month from now, she’ll be a one-year-old. Wow.

Height: 28 inches

Weight: 20 lbs

Nora’s getting to be more and more fun every day!  She has a few little games that she loves to play.  One of them is “not in the bathroom!” where she crawls down the hall, and I say, “Where are you going?”  Then she cracks up and frantically heads for the bathroom door.  I chase her down and say, “Oh no! Not in the bathroom!” and move her back down the hall while she laughs hysterically.  Jonah really loves watching this, too, and often requests that I start playing it with her.  She also enjoys playing with balls and likes to have a ball rolled to her.  She’ll grab it and squeal and then hand it back for someone to roll to her again.  Fun times.

On her own, she often crawls over to the bookshelf to pull out some of her books to look at.  With Jonah around, she certainly sees a lot of reading during the day, and seems to like books pretty well herself.  There are a couple of specific ones that she will try to find when she hears someone talk about them, like her Itsy Bitsy Spider book.  She also loves opening cabinet doors and drawers to play with the bowls and containers in the kitchen.  I’ve caught her on several occasions stashing away a bunch of refrigerator magnets in the drawer under the stove.

We notice her continuing to understand more and more words and phrases.  She knows stand up, sit down, come here, look up, put things in/take them out,  open/close doors, go outside.  (She loves going outside.  If I open a door just to let in light or air and we don’t go outside, she has a meltdown.)  As far as signing goes, she does definitely sign ‘more’ while she’s eating, and she understands at least a dozen others.

Food continues to go well.  She enjoys eating and can now feed herself chunks of food like cooked carrots or cut-up peaches and bananas (or pieces of Jonah’s lunch that he drops on the floor).  She’s tried some of those baby puffed rice snacks and likes those a lot.  Jonah always wants to put them on her tray for her and tries to get away with sneaking her three or more at a time.

Nora is super fast with her crawling now and is also going through a biting phase.  It is not unusual for me to be standing in the kitchen, making lunch, when out of nowhere her little hands and knees come slapping along the floor and she takes a bite out of my calves!  I say it’s like living with a crocodile.  She has all eight of her front teeth, too, so it actually really hurts sometimes.

Standing is a new skill, and she’ll pull herself up to stand on anything she can and she’s able to stand for longer and longer before getting all wobbly.  She likes crawling/climbing over things, too.  Sometimes it seems like she’ll go out of her way to take the toughest path to something she wants just so she can go over some object or squeeze through a tight spot.

Nora’s back to sleeping through the whole night, but she’s still an early riser.  Since she’s waking up about 15 minutes before Sean usually plans to get up for the day, he’s been giving her her morning bottle and spending time playing just with her before he gets ready for work.  They both love their special alone time in the morning.

With Jonah starting preschool this month, Nora also gets two mornings of alone time with Mom as well.  After we drop off Jonah, she takes her short morning nap, and then we have some time to play and read in a calm house.

Oh, and just last week I went into her room to get her out of her crib, and she was sitting up!!  That means she can actually roll over now.  I have yet to see it, but if she’s getting from lying on her back to sitting, there has to be some rolling happening somehow.  I was beginning to think she’d walk before she rolled over.  :)

She’s growing and changing (and moving) so fast these days! Nora’s crawling has really taken off, and she’s always following family members all over the place. It’s kind of funny because when I just watch her crawl, it doesn’t necessarily seem like she’s going that fast, but if I turn my back for a few seconds, I’m always amazed at how much ground she covers in a short time. Her fine motor skills are coming right along, too, and she can pick up the tiniest scrap or crumb of something off the floor, which means I’m sweeping the kitchen many times a day so she’s not munching on Jonah’s leftovers. Luckily, she has a very specific squeal she does when she spots something to go after, and I can usually beat her to it. She also loves peeling up the edges of our rugs to get at the stuff that gets trapped under the edges. Nice.

Nora doesn’t care about surfaces either – concrete, grass, dirt, playground mulch, sand – she’ll just take off and crawl. When we’re in the yard, she’ll find tiny patches of dirt and just dig and dig and dig with her little fingers. She likes crawling over my legs when I’m sitting on the floor and has started to pull herself up to kneeling.

Nora also had two new teeth (top middle) break through over the past two weeks, which means her days as a fanged baby are numbered. She’ll be happy to have more for eating, though, as she loves her food. We’ve been going slow with introducing things to her – one new thing every five days – but she’s finally getting enough to have a good variety of choices. She’s had carrots, peas, broccoli, squash, sweet potatoes, bananas, pears, applesauce, rice cereal, and oatmeal. Some of the veggies take a few bites to get used to, but then she cleans her bowl every time (except for squash – not a fan). Once I say and sign ‘all done’, her little face crumples and she cries, poor girl. She eats breakfast and dinner every day with the family, and sometimes eats lunch depending on the timing of her afternoon nap.

When I’ve taken the kids grocery shopping, Nora’s always been in the carrier while Jonah rides in the cart, but the past few trips, we’ve had Nora graduate to cart-riding status, and she loves it! She just squeals and kicks her way through the whole store and particularly loves the produce section. Jonah is equally happy to be on foot.

Nora is by far the happiest person in our house at 5:45 am (her preferred wakeup time). For a few months, it was rare for her to wake up in the middle of the night – lucky us! – but lately she’s been giving us one or two wakings and then still wants to start the day before 6 am. Ugh.

She’s definitely a bit of a sensitive kid who’s easily startled to tears by sudden loud noises, and will cry as if I’ve hurt her feelings when I need to take away things that she shouldn’t play with. She’s solidly in her stranger anxiety phase as well, and sometimes even the friendliest, gentle approaches make her cry or bury her face in my shoulder. She will usually warm up before too long, though.  A majority of her day, though, she’s in a very happy and cheerful mood!

We’ve noticed lately that Nora is definitely recognizing certain words. She loves the balloons at the grocery store checkouts, and when I asked her about balloons when we were home, she looked up to the ceiling, like she was trying to find them. She recognizes lots of words associated with eating, and knows things like car, truck, ball, etc. – she’ll grab at pictures of them in books or crawl over to them. And it could have been a fluke, but I swear she signed ‘more’ today while she was eating. (Jonah saw it, too!)

I don’t think she’s saying any real words yet (maybe ‘dad’?), but she loves experimenting with her voice in really loud ways and then laughing at herself. She does lots of silly bubbly, growly, squealy sounds that amuse her quite a bit.

Weight: 17 lb 10 oz
Height: 27 in

Nora turned eight months old in the middle of her terrible stomach virus, so this post is very late. I took the pictures right around that time (once she was strong enough to sit again without crying), but just hadn’t gotten around to writing anything up.

Her big highlights of the month included starting to crawl and eating more real foods. She reminds me a lot of Jonah when eating – as long as the spoon keeps coming, she’s very happy. As soon as it’s gone, it’s instant tears. She started crawling several feet at a time around the middle of July and can easily get herself back to a sitting position, but still cannot/will not roll over. Haha.

And here’s her sad little ‘sick girl’ face. Awww….

Weight: 16 lb 6 oz

Nora is sooo ready to be on the move now! Over the past week or so, it’s like she realized that if something is out of her reach while she’s sitting, she can actually do something about it, and gets herself in position to crawl and reaches out for it. Once she figures out what to do with her legs, it’s going to get a whole lot crazier around here. :)

We’ve started doing sign language with Nora, because we loved how it worked with Jonah, and she’s already got a few signs she definitely recognizes and gets excited about – bottle, up, change diapers. She loves going outside, and if she hears me say something about taking a walk or going on the swings, her eyes light right up. Vocally, she’s started making a lot of ‘dadadadada’ noises, which Sean is pleased about.

This month, it’s become obvious that Nora really likes animals. When she sees cats, dogs, or birds, her eyes get huge, arms and legs start waving all around, and she lets out all sorts of intense excited squeals. Other items that get a similar response are flags, fans, and leaves blowing in trees.

Her food challenge at the end of June went well, so now she can have soy formula and start slowly trying vegetables. So far she’s been really enjoying carrots. She also has two new teeth for munching on things, but they’re not where we expected. Instead of getting the two in the middle of the top, she’s getting the ones on the sides up there, so she looks like a vampire baby which is pretty hilarious.

She’s been able to try the backyard pool a few times, and seems to like splashing around in there, which is not surprising because she’s always loved the bathtub. She will even splash on command most of the time.

She’s still sleeping and napping really well, which helps her to be a very happy girl for her waking hours (which have been starting around 5:30 am most days). Jonah often says to me “Nora’s having a reeeeally happy day today, isn’t she?!”

Weight: 17 lbs