Holy Cuteness!

Mira turned 11 months old today! That is insane - that means that in a month she'll be a whole year old! It can't possibly have been that long already!

Mira is starting to look less like a baby and more like a little girl. Some of her little mannerisms that she's learning - like pointing at things and waving bye-bye and doing her own little sign for "more" (she opens and closes her right hand when she wants more of something... totally not what the ASL says "more" looks like but whatever, we know what she means) - it all really looks like things a toddler would do. She's so mobile now it's easy to forget she's a baby still. She could totally walk off if she wanted to, but she doesn't (thankfully). She can stand by herself for as long as she wants, and she can "dance" without holding onto anything. She plays with toys standing unassisted and drinks a sippy cup standing by herself and she cruises all over the place as fast as anything with her hand barely holding onto the furniture, but the second she realizes she's standing by herself she quickly grabs onto something for support or squats down and crawls off. Well, like I said, I'm not going to push her to walk faster. She's on track and when she's ready to walk she'll just figure it out and when that happens it will all hit the fan!

She still loves that pink and purple car she got for Christmas. Although for some reason now she'll only push it when it's sideways. Even though it's definitely much harder that way, that's the way she wants to do it. Watch her and you'll see she's definitely ready to be walking. (Sorry it's so short.)

 She's doing well with sippy cups, although there's still nothing like a bottle at bedtime!

She's watching the cat

And since we're on the topic of bedtime... It's a constant evolution, I guess. She mostly sleeps through the night still but now that she's teething again she's started waking up in the middle of the night again. Luckily it's just once when it does happen and she's back to sleep fairly quickly, but that would probably explain why I feel so exhausted and sleep-deprived these days. I wish those teeth would just break through already! Her top left is finally through and the top right has been trying to come through for weeks but it's just having a lot of trouble. Her poor gums are all bruised and swollen and it looks so sad. I've never seen that happen before but after asking around it sounds like that's fairly normal and I should stop my PICU RN mommy freakout. Sometimes I REALLY don't like my job. Not because of the job itself but because of the things I see there. It doesn't bother me as much to take care of kids that were born with some congenital defect... There's nothing to do about that. What scares the shit out of me are the kids that are totally normal and healthy and suddenly drop dead with a dilated cardiomyopathy of unknown etiology or the kid who was run over by the parents pulling out of the driveway. You know, ignorance really is bliss.

Anyway, moving on... Mira is turning into a little dancing queen! I think that should be her theme song. Every time she hears any sort of music - a commercial on TV, one of her toys, walking through the grocery store - she starts boogieing! She's so energetic about it that she's almost jumping off the ground (and if she's in her crib holding onto the rail she has figured out how to jump). It is SO cute! And she never seems to get tired of it either! The other day I started playing some music on my phone and gave it to her. She bounced and danced and wiggled for 15 minutes - pretty impressive for a baby her age!

I'm really trying to get into reading her lots of books, since her attention span is finally long enough to last through a few pages of a book. Being the master of mimicry that she is, now she tries to read the books herself. She'll pick up a book, study it with a serious little pondering frown on her face, open the book (which is upside down most of the time but who cares), point at the pictures, and start babbling. "Ba ba ba ba... doo... dissshhh... ya ya ya ya ya.... SHRIEK!!!!!!" I've tried so many times to get a video of this but as soon as I get the camera out she crawls over to me to grab the camera.

I thought we would have to wait about 15 more years for this!

She loves playing with some wooden blocks she got for Christmas. Mostly she likes for someone to build a tower so she can knock it down. Recently she's gotten really interested in pulling toys out of the box or bucket or whatever they live in - and then she carefully puts the toys back in, and pulls them out again, one by one. I'm really afraid to make this observation because everyone thinks their own kid is the super gifted genius, but this seems a little advanced for 10-11 months. Or maybe I'm wrong, but either way she's getting a lot better about playing with toys by herself and not needing me to be in the room 5 feet away from her at all times.

The 1 year mark means it's time for more professional photographs! It's early, yes, but we have a lot of crap happening in the next couple of months. We tried out a new photographer this time, since the lady I usually use only does natural lighting, and I don't think Mira's old enough to do well with an outdoor photo shoot in the winter. We could have done a shoot in the indoor studio but it's small and Mira's getting big and harder to keep in one spot. So we tried out this studio in Draper, which is a long drive but it was so worth it! Especially since we got 70 photos (they told us Mira was the easiest baby they've ever photographed and that's one reason they were able to get so many good shots) that they gave to us the same day so we didn't have to wait for the CD to be mailed to us. Oh my cuteness!! If you'd like to see the whole album let me know, but here are a few of my favorites.

Our little princess

I love this one

This might be our favorite

A bowl full of ruffles!

Watch out, she's in-bound!

Ooh... This looks good...

Hmm... I should taste some more to make sure it all tastes good

The smash cake was so funny. At first she poked her fingers into the cupcake and looked at us like she wasn't sure what we wanted her to do with it, so I took some frosting on my finger and put it in her mouth. Then she got into it! She didn't go completely crazy with it but she definitely enjoyed it and boy was it messy! It was so funny though, she had everyone in the studio laughing. I think some of these pictures will have to be printed off and framed very prominently in our house. :)