11 Months Old!

I’m starting to get sentimental about Brooklyn turning 1.  I realized this month that she will no longer be a baby; she will be a toddler.  While toddler-hood brings new excitement and milestones, I can’t believe her infancy went so fast.  Just one more month.  30 days.

 Monday marked Brooklyn’s 11 months.  We have been busy this month getting ready for her party – who knew so much would go in to getting ready for a one year old’s party!!

 This month Brooklyn got very confident and strong in her cruising (walking while holding on to furniture).  She also still really liked the “trust” game where she would turn to me and take a step then fall forward – knowing I wouldn’t let her fall on her face.  But here’s the great news – I took her pictures on Sunday and posted them a day early since Monday is a work day…and Sunday NIGHT she took her first steps!!!  I figured her first steps would be to a dog instead of us…but it was to the dog that doesn’t like her! Brooklyn is determined to make Cinder like her all the time, rather than just at meal times.  I think Cinder will love Brooklyn once she can start throwing the ball for her.

This month Brooklyn had 3 more teeth pop through!  We’d been expecting the top ones to come through since our trip to Florida at the end of June…but it finally popped through while we were camping – 30 minutes away on a tight and winding road to a store for Baby Tylenol. So we suffered through a night of fussiness.  Once that came through, about 2 weeks later two more are coming now.  She has 2 on top and 3 on the bottom now – though you can’t quite see them in the pictures yet.

We’ve been working with Brooklyn on her body parts.  If you ask her where her ear, leg or foot are, she will point to them.  Sometimes she gets shy though and won’t do it.  She especially enjoys pointing at her ear.  I think this month we may try belly button!

She has started mimicking everything now.  I especially noticed it with her hairbrush and toothbrush.  She’ll follow your lead on just about anything now.  I think she’s hit the stage where she wants to act like a big girl, so she copies everything mommy and daddy do.

And of course, just this week she learned how much fun it is to feed the dogs her food.  If you’re on facebook, you’ve already seen the video.  She doesn’t feed them everything – I’ve figured out that she’s only willing to share certain foods with them, but she thinks it utterly hilarious.  The full video is about twice as long, but blogger limits the size to 100MB so I had to cut it down.  You'll get the gist of it though - Enjoy!

This month we also built her playhouse.  We bought it at Costco a few months ago (if you don’t buy it when you see it, it will be gone the next time you’re there), but we didn’t want to put it together until it was closer to when she could use it.  It was a lot more work than we anticipated, but it looks so great.  I can’t wait for it to cool down a little more so I can plant some flowers and Brooklyn can actually play in it.  We’re going to put the house in the backyard near the garden fence. Then I will make a flower garden around it and build a mailbox for her.  Make it her very own space.

Well, with just 1 month left, party preparations are in full swing.  The invitations have been ordered and will be mailed out over the weekend. I think they turned out great. We spent some time at Thunderbird park two weekends ago taking pictures for her invitations.  Here is a sneak peak.

Can’t wait to see what changes in the next month as Brooklyn transitions from baby to toddler!