Keeping up with Claire

Little Miss Claire is growing up so fast. Just in the past month she has completely changed. I need to write some things down before I forget.  A few notes and stories:

Helping Mom do dishes

She thinks she's a toddler already.  She crawled at 7 months.  It's a really funny crawl, though.  She goes a couple of normal gaits and then she picks up her right leg and tries to push off with her foot.  It's like she gets frustrated with crawling and wants to get up and walk.  (She also sleeps on her right side and only rolls to her right.  She's not an ambi-turner.)  Now at 7 and a half months she is pulling herself up on furniture.  She gets in to all kinds of trouble trying to figure everything out.

She still doesn't have a tooth but I'm in no hurry for that.

After some sleep training she now only wakes up twice in the middle of the night. I can't seem to wean her of night nursing.

The day she got the food bowl

She eats anywhere from one to five tablespoons of food during her three meals a day. She likes bananas, apples, pears, squash, and sweet potatoes. She tolerates peas, green beans, avocados, carrots, and parsnips. Mum mums make her day.

 Claire's favorite food, though, is paper. Its so weird, but we can't seem to keep it away from her. She pulls receipts out of my purse, finds sacrament programs on the benches at church, pulls herself up on various surfaces to find any spare page I may have left too low. She sticks the paper in her mouth, gets it nice and wet and then yanks on it with her gums until she gets a mouthful sized piece that she can swallow. Lots of my agendas from young women meetings have bite marks on them these days. A few days ago she got a hold of a pack of gum. The plastic,foil, and gum remained intact but the cardboardy paper wrapper around the pack of gum went missing except for a small scrap of paper I found in her mouth. Well I found the rest of the wrapper yesterday in her poopy diaper. Big colorful chunks. I could still make out some of the letters...

Yum... fiber

We tried to avoid "exposing" her to TV, but who were we kidding, right?  We love it too much ourselves to keep it from her for very long.  She likes Baby Einstein, Blue's Clues during the songs, and the closing credits to ANY television show, as long as there's music and words going down the screen.

Not the best view of the screen, but a great view of her cupcake bum

I babysit a little one year old named June three days a week. Claire LOVES her. I'm pretty sure June is the reason that Claire started crawling so soon. She was so anxious to follow June around and get into trouble with her. She laughs and laughs at the most normal things that June does. We can never get her to laugh like that for us.

She does make Jason and I feel special though. When she sees us, her face erupts into a ridiculously huge smile. Her eyes light up and her tongue curls up in her mouth to form the cutest expression ever. In addition, her arms and legs start bouncing up and down furiously as she tries to make her way towards us. She is just that excited to see us!

Helping Mom organize her accessories

I like to put headbands on her bald little head at church. The other day, she grabbed the bow and pulled it away from her head to get a better look at it.  Then she let go, accidentally whacking herself in the head.  She screamed in Sacrament meeting like she has never done before.  I took her out in the lobby, and luckily, June was there, so she immediately felt better. 

She doesn't babble too much, but she does make sharp quick bark yells, and she LOVES it if you make them back to her.  We have whole conversations just yelping at each other at various tones.  There are certain places where she's more vocal.  Usually these are places with good acoustics- like the parking garage or our apartment lobby.  She's figured out that she sounds louder in these places- and she likes it.

What a funny little girl- I can't wait to see what she does next.