9, 10, and 11 Months!

We are now at Month 11! With winter hopefully receding (it keeps coming back!!!), we are looking forward to the next few months! This is a combination post as I realized that I will likely not catch up if I keep posting single backdated posts. So with this, I am now caught back up!

It's been incredibly busy the last couple of months with work and getting everything set up in the new place. But we are now more or less settled and are working on renovations and upgrading some of the things within the house.

Here are some of her updates from the last three months:

• Locomotion - Evelyn can now sit up or crawl around with ease. Though she has yet to walk unassisted, she loves to walk with us holding both our hands. She is able to stand by herself a little bit, but invariably sits/plops back down and starts crawling to where she wants to go. She crawls around very fast too, so we have to be super vigilant to make sure that she isn't getting into trouble. She also likes to cruise by holding on to large objects while standing up and walking around using it as support. It's funny because she needs to be sure that the object is stable and repeatedly taps on the surface to ensure that it's safe and will carry her weight. Smart cookie.
• Babbling/Talking - Over the past few months, she has been  more and more vocal. It's really funny sometimes captioning her phrasing. Helen and I would be talking, and then she would chime in at the right time as if she is making a comment on what we are talking about. We have a good laugh trying to figure out what she means to say and plugging in sentences that would match the intonation and phrasing.
• Sleeping Through the Night - We had her sleeping throughout the night at around 7 months, but since then, she has been waking up. We think it may be her teething, but no new teeth have appeared thus far. We did notice that she is getting longer/taller, so maybe it's just growing pains at night.
• Weaning/Eating - We have been trying to introduce more solid foods for a while now. She is still breastfed in the morning and night, and once in the afternoon, but she is eating mostly solids now. We are feeding her bland stuff like boiled chicken and vegetables. She eats A LOT. Lots of input and output. People at the daycare are surprised at how much she can eat! I don't want them to think that we don't feed her at home or anything because when she comes home, she eats dinner with us and eats a lot again! It's crazy.
• Daycare - As I mentioned before, we put her in daycare. The whole experience itself was pretty crazy. We had about 2 weeks to find a daycare that was accepting infants due to a change in circumstances. Originally, we had planned for her to start at another daycare closer to us in September. We tried to have them move up the start date for Evelyn, however, they were out of space. So we were left to hunt for another daycare in the interim. We were sure that we wanted to best for her, and didn't want to put her into some random/unknown/untested location who wouldn't respect our daily routine and processes. Luckily, we were able to find a reputable place that was just expanding so they had space for some new infants. So far, she is loving it! When we drop her off now, she is happy and judging from the daily report cards coming back, she is having a blast making new friends and experiencing the social environment.
• First illness - The downside of daycare is the illnesses. Basically, I have been told that I (not just Evelyn) would expect to be sick for 6 months after you join a new daycare. So far that has proven true as I just came down with bronchitis. It probably developed from the cold I got from Evelyn after the first week of daycare. Evelyn and Helen is fine, with just a few coughs here and there, but I got hit the worst (Mostly due to my own negligence with working and resting enough). Evelyn was actually pretty good through it, she had a runny nose and a fever that lasted a better part of a day, but after that, she was happy as a clam. It's amazing how quickly kids bounce back from being sick. I remember I was that way too, so it's becoming apparent that I am getting old and my body is also getting old and busted.

Looking forward to her first year, which is just around the corner! That's it for now.

E