Ten Months!

My boy is ten months old today.  It's already been ten months since my little love entered my life in a very real way.  It's been incredible.  It's been hard.  It's been exhausting.  It's been worth it.

The past couple of months he's really exploded with new skills and abilities--his personality is blossoming and filling out more every day.  I love getting to know him again each morning, and putting him to bed wondering what the next day will bring in his little life.

(The rest of this post will probably be very boring if you're not related to us, but I wanted to record and share it somewhere.)

Charles can wave bye-bye (in a very beauty-queen type manner), rock back and forth to music (which is always fun while nursing, apparently), likes playing peek-a-boo (though not spontaneous with it yet), and rolls over on his belly to sleep.  He's not a fan of getting his diaper changed, and always rubs his fuzzy little head while he nurses, especially when he's tired.  Speaking of hair, he loves pulling other people's, and also enjoys biting (we're working on that).  Favorite games are rolling the ball, knocking over stacked blocks, and "reading" touch-and-feel books.  He doesn't like it when I leave the room--very much a mama's boy lately--and gets giggly and goofy as bedtime approaches.

He started crawling at seven months, began pulling-up shortly after, and it wasn't long before he started "creeping" along furniture and adult's legs.  Just this week Charles began "walking" with us while we hold his hands.  Soon after he turned nine months, he started pointing in the direction he wanted to be carried and at objects he wanted to reach.  He's still learning how to be gentle with the kitties (and gentle in general).  He loves being tossed on our big bed and rolling all over the place--all our floors are hard, so I think he likes being able to flip around without fear of getting bruised.

A fun little quirk (or maybe all babies are like this?) is that he likes to have a graspable object in each hand, like straws, spoons, pens, or popsicle sticks.  This is great for keeping him entertained at restaurants, though lately he's been joining us in eating at meal times.  He eats egg yolks, avocados, bananas, and a few other veggies and fruits.  He has four teeth now (two on top and two on bottom--that second top one finally came in a couple weeks ago), so we recently introduced some kale puffs for his first finger food.  About a month ago he learned how to suck food out of those fun pouches--perfect for tossing in the diaper-bag and feeding on-the-go.  He's now an expert at drinking from his sippy-cup, so we managed to avoid bottles almost completely.

Most exciting for language-nerd me is that he's starting to learn that sounds can have meaning, and he's expanding his phoneme "vocabulary" almost daily.  About nine months he started saying "ma ma" when he wanted me, which of course makes my heart melt every time.  He's also consistently said "AH-ma" when fussy, so I'm not sure if it's just a variation, or if that's his nursing word.  He'll grunt and "hmm" to get our attention and often when he's reaching towards something.  Not really linguistic, but he's also learned this little fake laugh that is the most adorable sound ever, and he does it all the time.  I'll laugh back, and he'll laugh again, and we just go back and forth like that for a while.  Fun times in the Clark house.

I think that's the end of the updates... If you've made it this far, you're either a grandparent or child development specialist.  ;)  I'll try to blog more this month and not wait for another skillz update!