Happy 11 Months Peanut!

Papa Bear and I have discussed the way we keep time in a baby's life. For the first three months we track it by weeks, and then from about three months to a year we track it month by month. You have to track in smaller increments because they change so much month to month. When Little Man was a baby we could rattle off how old he was to the minute. I think that the fear of being new parents and the fear of messing up or the unknown made Little Man's first year exaggeratedly long in our minds. But this past 11 months of Peanut's life have blinked by. I mean, really, we blinked and our baby is 11 months.

He is crawling like a pro and spends a lot more time vertical, cruising along the furniture and moving from object to object while holding on. He loves to hold our hands and practice taking steps and sometimes I can slip my fingers from his chubby hands and he stands on his own for a few seconds. He is a getting great at steps (going up, not so much on the going down) and spends lots of time holding onto and shaking the gate at the bottom of the stairs.

Peanut loves all things cars and balls or things that act like a car or ball that he can otherwise push or throw across my kitchen floor. He can empty my kitchen cupboards in the blink of an eye and will often be found using my spatulas to play tupperware hockey across the floor. We have never been so happy for the tot locks that we installed when Little Man was a baby because Peanut gets into everything. We are a little sad to report that he has already gone fishing in the toilet a few times when we forgot to shut the door tightly.

He makes us laugh all day. Whenever we catch him heading towards an off-limits area (laundry room, bathroom or stairs) he lowers his head and speeds up in a vain attempt to make it before we catch him. If we even think about lowering the dishwasher door he bee-lines for it and tries to climb up into it. He loves to wrestle with his big brother and has really started being affectionate (mostly through head hugs) and today he showed his first separation anxiety and cried for most of the hour and a half that he spent at my neighbors house. His only words are Mama and Papa (said BaBa) and he signs "all done" when he is done eating and loves to clap his hands. He even started moving his hands along to Little Man's rendition of Itsy Bitsy Spider.

Peanut is an independent, playful, ticklish loving little 11 month old baby with the soul of an angel.