Elisa - 11 months

Elisa is now 11 months old. We're only a month away from the big day - her first birthday. My mom asked me the other day if Elisa was crawling.... I was like, "Mom, she's been doing that for months!" I realized that I haven't really been keeping everyone up to date on all the things Elisa can do and likes to do. So here goes.

She has taken a couple of steps on her own - but never more than one at a time. She loves walking around the house with someone holding onto her hands. She can climb stairs (we don't have any stairs in our house, but the other day I put her down in front of some stairs and she climbed up no problem as if she'd been doing it for months). We haven't worked on climbing down stairs yet. She can stand without holding onto anything for limited amounts of time. She just started waving bye bye sometimes (finally!) She signs "more" while eating. She can feed herself with her fingers and sometimes insists on feeding herself with the spoon. She is actually pretty good at getting the spoon to her mouth, but not very good at getting food onto the spoon unless I help. We are convinced that she says Daddy and Momma and sometimes we think she says duck. But it really is so hard to know. She has just discovered the joy of dropping things. Before her bath we line her bath toys up along the edge of the bathtub and she loves dropping them in one at a time and then peering over the edge at them.

Side story: This morning I had her in the bathroom with me while I was taking a shower and she kept on dropping Itty Bit (her favorite stuffed bunny) into the tub. He was soaking wet by the end... which was okay since he really needed a wash. I threw him in the wash... but he didn't fare too well... a little hole opened up at his neck/shoulder. I sewed him up ... hopefully good as new. But he definitely wasn't made to be washed.

Anyway... Elisa is also starting to get into everything and leave huge messes in her wake. She opens all the cabinets and drawers and pulls everything out of them. She takes a book off the shelf and then looks at it contemplatively before pulling the next one off. She likes reading books now... mostly she wants to try to turn the pages. When she isn't able to turn them sometimes she gets so frustrated that she starts crying. She loves eating toilet paper and if the toilet seat is up she'll splash in the water. Needless to say, we try to keep the bathroom doors closed. She loves music - she dances whenever we sing or turn on a song she likes. And this is BIG NEWS!!! She finally got her first tooth! At 10 1/2 months it finally came through. She is now working on a second. Most of all she is just a joy to us. At the end of the day Greg and I tell each other all our Leesi stories, and then laugh and go into her room and watch her sleep. I still don't understand it - but there is just such a joy that comes from parenting.