Every time she flashes this smile, people just start to laugh and it eggs her on. She started it soon after we left for Baltimore and has been keeping it up since. It is even funnier now that she has two top teeth pushing their way through and you can see them. This was taken on Christmas morning with my 100 year old great-grandfather. He was quite taken with Julia.2. Julia's little pink tongue....
Nowadays the tongue still makes frequent appearances. But now she has taken to playing with it with her hand. This is especially funny in the car when she is dressed in her bunting and can only touch her tongue with her mitten. Why she thinks this is so exciting I will never figure out, but it does keep her entertained.3. Her love of paper.....
Seriously, the paper at Christmas alone would have kept her occupied for months. All she wanted was paper: tissue paper, wrapping paper, foil paper, paper from the chocolate covered apricots, the credit card bills in January. She just loves paper. This weekend we caught her in the living room with a catalog in her hands. She had maneuvered across the room on her belly, then sat back up at the coffee table to grab said catalog. She was in heaven until Dan took it away from her.4. Her love of music...
This was one of the few ways that Gramma and Grandpa got to spend time with Julia. They would just take her to the piano so that she could bang away at it. It occupied her so that she forgot that Mom was around the corner taking her picture.We had a really nice vacation (3 weeks!) for Christmas. We got to see lots of family members, open lots of nice gifts, and eat way too many spritz cookies. Gramma and Grandpa babysat for a night so that Dan and I could have a dinner out (our first since Julia was born!) and Nannie took Julia one morning while Dan and I ran errands. Seeing how enchanted (even my brothers Tom and Andrew) was with Julia was worth all of the sleep lost during and after the trip.
Julia's latest tricks include lots of rolling over, more backward scooting and some forward creeping (belly-flop style). The funniest thing now is her night waking is because she rolls from her side (her now preferred sleeping position) onto her belly. I've come in several times to find her crawling around the crib. Backwards of course. But she has also recently figured out how to sit back up from her belly, how to cruise to the end of the coffee table to find the remote control, and how to stand up using the nearest parent. She had a nine month check and weighed in at 17lbs 10 0z, which drops her down to the 25th percentile. The doc seemed a little worried and told me to start giving her yogurt, cheese, butter, anything to fatten the little girl up. She still doesn't show a tremendous amount of interest in solids on any kind of consistent basis. But with all of her moving around I don't think that she is starving. My dad said that she just needs a good German cook....I guess we should have let her eat some of those spritz cookies. Anyway, we hope everyone had a nice holiday (whichever one you decided to celebrate) and got to spend it with family.
