10 Months: Happy Birthday.



My Dearest Lina,

Now you have been here with us a week longer than I was pregnant with you. All of those months of being pregnant seemed to take forever – but the same amount of time spent holding you and playing together has gone by in a flash!

You’ve shown a great sense of humor ever since you were 3 months old and started humoring Mommy by laughing at my one lame bathroom joke. During this past month your sense of humor has seemed to develop even more. If I am sitting on the couch, you will often walk into the kitchen and find my shoe to carry into the living room. You laughingly offer the shoe to me (after having gnawed on it while grinning at me) and then you shriek and run away when I try and grab it. You know how shoe-gnawing is not encouraged in our household. You know exactly what behaviors are “good choices” and what behaviors are not.

Your favorite thing to do this month is to race up to someone, let out a huge shriek while your arms flail around and convince them to chase you. Daddy is particularly good at this game.

Another game you enjoy is looking at someone and then tilting your head while moving your body until the other person can’t see you. Then, after a few seconds, you pop up and laugh. You get so happy if the other person joins your game. When there is music playing and you are dancing, you have tons of fun spinning around in circles until you get too dizzy and you fall down. It’s pretty hysterical.

What isn’t hysterical is your reaction to someone talking on the phone in front of you. If you aren’t the person holding the phone, you get very frustrated and upset. We need to work on that, Sweet Child of Mine. You are still spending a lot of time walking around with your toy phone talking to Dada. Thankfully, we’re not paying your phone bill yet.

I am enjoying the fact that it is getting easier for you to communicate. If you want something on a table or high shelf, you point at it with your index finger and request it (usually politely, although not always). If your ball rolls under a piece of furniture, you squat down and look for it. Then you sit back up and I point at it, so I can retrieve. Yes, Madame.

Teaching you sign language has been a bust – you rather just point and use your few words. So far you say Mum, Dada, na-na, “at” (for cat), “ahhhh” for water, and both “gad” and “yum” (for when you are eating something good and yummy).

You started crying whenever we took away your tooth-brush. I think any dentist would say 10 minutes on 2 ½ teeth is probably sufficient. So, now we’ve started a morning ritual where you brush your teeth with Daddy. After a reasonable amount of time both of you put your toothbrushes in the cup and way “good-bye” to them. No one can deny that you are an expert at waving bye-bye.

One thing you are not an expert at is going to bed. You are still a very restless sleeper and usually stir after an hour of sleeping. You are definitely having difficulty on learning how to self-soothe. Please take pity on your poor Mommy and start sleeping through the night, okay? Know that even though I often feel like a sleep-deprived zombie, seeing your face in the morning makes it all worth it. You are very, very loved…

Hugs and Kisses,

Mommy