Craft Day!

Marie and Ava (11 months) are friends of ours who we met in Mommy & Baby Yoga back when Gwen was only 3 months old!  Yoga was cancelled during the summer months and even though we absolultely LOVED it, many of us chose not to continue in the fall, just because the babies have become too mobile - yoga doesn't work well when you're chasing down babies the entire time.  We're happy to have kept in touch and have regular playdates with Marie and Ava.

We had the girls over yesterday for a craft day that was mostly Halloween inspired.  We decided to have the girls finger paint pumpkins.  Sounds like fun, right?

Marie with Ava & Gwen painting pumpkins

Cue the crying.  Somebody was overtired.  Either that, or Reason # 23,985 she takes after daddy and hates getting dirty!  This picture breaks my heart and cracks me up at the same time.  Marie told me that Ava has always been empathetic, she gets so upset when other babies cry, and you can really see that in her face here:

Not sure if Gwen understood that the whole point of the project was to get the paint on her pumpkin, and not her hair.

Time to regroup.  I put Gwen down for a nap while Marie, Ava and I painted letters that I picked up for the girls' rooms at Michaels.

I think they came out pretty cute!  Ava's room has a bee theme, and Gwen's accent color is purple:

I found this project online and thought it was adorable!  While we were feeding the girls in the highchair, we were able to get their footprints on black construction paper, which we turned into spooky ghosts!!!

Footprint ghost framed on our living room console

Here are the girls in their Halloween inspired outfits, admiring all of their hard work:

They are so cute together, so loveable!  Look at their little feet in this picture <3 :)

Thanks for hanging out Marie and Ava!!

Dancing Babe

As promised in the nine months post, here she is dancing away:

Crawling....sort of :)

Well she's finally mobile!!  It's less of a crawl, and more of a slither - or maybe an army crawl.  But she can get from point a to b and we're so proud of her :)

nine months

How is this possible? My daughter is 9 months old! I could've made a whole other baby by now!! :)

At her 9 month appointment, Gwen had to have her blood drawn for the first time - I was all stressed out because I've heard how bad it can be.  Justin was able to come to the appointment which I was happy about because I definitely needed some support.  So the pediatrician had Gwen sit on my lap while she looked for a vein and [of course] said that she has "hard to find" veins - she went back and forth looking on each arm a couple of times before she finally found a good one.  The Dr had me hold her arms down while she drew the blood and, to be honest, I think being restrained was worse for her than the actual needle.  The whole thing was over in a few seconds and my little trooper calmed down in no time.

Some 9 month stats:
Height - 29 inches, 94th % (seriously?)
Weight - 18lbs 3oz, 50th %

Monthly Updates:
I've already mentioned that she's pulling up and cruising (walking while holding on) around her activity table.
Although she's not crawling, she's starting to be able to get where she wants to go by bringing her knees under her hips and pushing herself forward with her feet - now she just needs to lift that belly off the ground :)
She DANCES! Whenever she hears music, she rocks her body back and forth. It's seriously the cutest thing ever.  I have a video that kind of shows it but the song was too short for her to really get into it. I'll try and get a better one.
She is now obsessed with finger foods (cheese is by far her favorite).  To the point where she's giving me a tough time with the purees that I normally give her - she purses her lips together and blows raspberries.  So I'm thinking about starting to mostly give her what I eat.  The pediatrician told me the only foods that are off limits are shellfish, nuts, and honey.  Bring on the messy meals - good thing Jackson does a good job with the cleanup ;)

Pull Ups

(not the diapers)
I swear this girl is going to walk before she crawls.  Gweny doesn't have much of an interest in crawling these days. The most she'll do is go from a seated position to tummy time and then roll if she really wants a toy.  I mentioned last month that she is starting to pull herself up to stand, but yesterday she actually did it all on her own!  She's also "cruising" (which means that she'll hold on to an object and walk herself around it).  I'll try to get a video of that too, but for now here she is doing her pull ups :)

Waving

My sister in law kept telling me "I can't wait until Gwen starts waving backwards!!".  I didn't really know what she was talking about - but now she's doing it and it's adorable!
See for yourselves: