We are enjoying the great outdoors and fall weather by spending lots of time playing in our backyard.

Here's a smile!

Abby 9 Months Old

Abby is 9 months old- 3/4 of a year! Yah! This morning, I took 225 pictures of her, and there wasn't one smile. She does smile a lot, but just not for the camera! She is pretty in the pictures just the same. In the past month she has perfected her knee-foot crawling method with no indicators that she will start crawling the traditional way. She is pulling up a little bit and will stand in front of objects well. She is starting to explore the house, which makes me very happy because she is playing on her own some. I better double check all of our childproofing! Abby has started on table foods, which she loves. Just like Caleb at this age, Abby will eat and eat and eat until I stop giving her food. Lately she has tried rice, bits of beef stroganoff, chopped broccoli, and turkey lunch meat. We have been working on waving, and Abby had waved to us a few times. Then she very clearly waved to the clerk at Walmart the other day. I am such a mom, and that moment just made me so proud... gush... gush...gush! I am happy to report that Abby is making some progress as far as sleeping through the night. Just within the past several days, she has slept through the night a couple times. One thing I have learned from Abby is that all kids are different, and I can't really judge another mom for the way their kid sleeps, or eats, or whatever it may be. Abby has certainly been different than her brother about many things. At this age he pretty much weaned himself and would only be satisfied with a bottle. Abby has completely refused bottles and is very dependent on mom. I could have worked on this more early on, but my goal was to nurse for a year. I am fairly confident we will make it to that milestone. In fact I don't know how I will ever wean her! Here are her 9 month stats:
Weight- 16 pounds, 7th percentile (this has gone down a lot, but the doctor wasn't worried)
Height- 28 inches, 60th percentile (I'm not quite sure this was completely accurate, but Abby is long)
Head Circumference- I don't have the actual number, but she is in the 75th percentile.
Lastly here are some of our nicknames for Abigail at this age:
Abby
Abbaroo (Caleb adds -roo on to everything "Heidiroo" "bedaroo" "sunaroo"- it's quite comical!)
Absters
Abbs
Little Miss
Miss Priss
Little Roo (once again continuing the roo theme around here.

What a Boy!

After making it through two days of traveling from Waco to Albuquerque, I am stepping out there to call it official.... Caleb is potty trained! So maybe I am bragging on my child, but let me tell you we did this with a LOT of hard work and effort. Our carpet needs to be cleaned, and Caleb frequently asks me if he can go outside to pee. But, he is doing great. One funny story about our trip: on the plane ride from Dallas to Albuquerque, the flight crew had to secure the plane early because of a bumpy end of the flight which left us hunkered down in our seats for at least 30 minutes. It was completely cloudy, so I couldn't tell if we were close to the airport or not. That is when Caleb started yelling, "I need to PEEEEE!" over and over again. There I was with a baby on my lap and a two year old who was making it quite clear to everyone that he needed to go to the bathroom, and I couldn't do anything but tell him to wait. I don't know how I would have done it even if I was allowed to get up. A few minutes later he was yelling "I'm wet!". I was sitting there watching his pants slowly get wetter and wetter, but he managed to stop himself and none got on the seat. Not that anyone around us knew that. I am sure they thought that he had peed all over the place. Then after we landed, while we were waiting to get off of the plane, Caleb was looking on the floor and saw the large amount of Cheerios that Abby had dropped everywhere, and he started yelling "There's a mess!". I am all about not leaving my mess for someone else to clean up, but in this situation with two kids and our bag, there really was nothing I could do. I ended up telling Caleb to pick up as many as he could just to get him to quiet down about the huge mess we had made. Believe it or not the return flight was much worse! It was quite a trip, but we made it there and back safely. When it comes to potty training and to traveling with "Thing 1" and "Thing 2", I'm proud to say we did it!