Breather

These past two weeks have flown by.  It's been nice to be in a bit of a routine - no travels, no holidays, no parties - just normal life.  It's been a  lot of fun.

We did take one special outing to go rollerskating on New Year's.  It was a first for Grady (and Clara, though she just stayed in the stroller), and Matt and I hadn't roller skated in decades.  Grady was excited to get the skates on - they just clipped over his shoes.

Not sure why his head looks so disproportionately big in the photo....

Grady made it about half a lap around before deciding it wasn't for him.  But not bad for a first outing!

The blind leading the blind

Grady doing a victory lap, sans skates

Mostly, though, we've been spending a lot of time playing at home.  Grady is, it seems somewhat suddenly, very interested in independent play.  He has intricate stories involving his favorite toys and their adventures that go on for the better part of an hour.  They are often repetitive (Mater taking numerous trips to a "jumping program" for instance), but they keep him entertained.

He's also been very busy working on his expressions.  He's got some good ones!

"Okay mommy, that's enough faces."

We've also all been enjoying (okay, mostly me and Matt at the moment) playing our new PIANO!  Thank you Grandpa and Nana!  It's been a lot of fun brushing up on our old lessons.  And I think we have a mini Mozart in Clara - look at that form!

We've all but completely cut out Grady's nap at this point.  About once a week he desperately needs one and he'll nap for hours, but then good luck getting him to fall asleep before 10 o'clock.  He's still in that in-between phase though where he's really ready for bed by 6 when he doesn't nap, so the evenings can be challenging.  

I'm going to hate myself in the morning for writing this, but Clara seems to have finally turned a corner with sleeping as well.  Pretty much every night for the past week she has woken up once in the night and then put herself back to sleep before getting up at 4 to eat, and then falling back asleep for a few more hours.  So just one trip out of bed for me.  Much better than having to get up at 12, 4, and 6.  I actually feel like my brain is starting to come back a bit - I even remembered something the other day!  It was crazy!

Clara has also begun saying some words.  She is the proud speaker of "all done" - "ah dunnn."  And she is almost definitely saying "daddy," "bye" (with wave), "cat" (more like a throat clearing, but it's consistently associated with cat), "up," and possibly "down" though that's less certain.

Her favorite things right now continue to be eating, pulling up, and Grady.  Here, she combined all three.

  She's mastered the one-handed stand and is starting to walk sideways while holding on.

She's also really interested in putting things in and out of boxes right now.  Since Clara's interested in that, of course Grady is too.

Grady dominating the putting sticks in boxes game

 

The kids also had fun rolling around on this big pillow I made over the weekend.  Moments like this are when I'm so happy we had these two so close together.

Clara had her nine month check up last week (at 10 months) and all looked great.  She is hitting all the marks for development, and came in at 30 inches (97%) and 22 pounds, 7 ounces (93%).  She's starting to look pretty grown up!