~10 Months Old~

Dear Rowen,

Today you are ten months old!  Today and everyday you look less and less like a baby and more like a little boy.  This past weekend you had a cold and just wanted to cuddle, and it reminded me of the days when you were itty bitty and would just sit in our arms and stare up at us.  Now, we usually get minimal cuddling because you want to explore, you are always on the go.  I missed writing you a post last month, with the holidays and everything else, so I will sum up as much as I can for the last two months.

Going back to you being on the move, I swear if you could crawl in your sleep you would.  At daycare you aren't contained, only by the confines of your classroom, and you have free reign.  But at home we try to establish boundaries for you, and you hate it.  I love to watch the internal battle you have with yourself when we tell you 'No' when you have reached one of those boundaries, and you have to decide whether to obey or disobey.  Usually you obey but start whining at the edge since you can't figure out what to do next.  

Speaking of daycare, if there is one memory that I know will make us laugh when you are older is how in love you are with one of your misses.  You love her so much so that on a few occasions when I have come to pick you up in the afternoon you quickly crawl away and sit behind her legs, peaking out and giving me dirty looks.  While this has upset me some (and I may tell anyone who will listen) I take comfort in the fact that in two short months you will be transitioning to the pre-toddler room and will have to leave your beloved girlfriend behind.  I told you dad that I truly believe that if she and I were to stand in a hallway at opposite ends and we put you in the middle, I guarantee you would crawl to her instead of me.  Hopefully I'm wrong.  

While you are crawling everywhere, you are also standing up a lot too, but you are extremely cautious about this.  I often wonder if you will end up being a cautious child and we are just seeing hints of this trait now.  Whenever you pull up on something and what to move, we can see your little wheels turning as you weigh the options of reaching out to something else or sitting back down and crawling over there.  Usually you choose to crawl, but you are getting a little braver.  You hate falling down, so we try to practice that a little on the bed, but you still very carefully get up and down from sitting and standing.  I know that one day the risk won't will win out in your mind and you will take those steps, and hopefully that day will come soon.  

I would say this is the period where you easily and openly started expressing love.  We knew before that you loved us and enjoyed us being around, but lately you have taken your expressions of affection to the next level.  The biggest benefiters of this have been Jack and Lola.  It is clear that you love them, you squeal with delight every time you see them!  They have begun to realize that most of the time you taste like some type of food so they are constantly trying to lick you.  Over Christmas we went home to Massachusetts and you loved following your aunts around!  Sometimes you think you are a big kid, so I think it was nice for you to have big kids around for a few days to play with!  You also thought your grandpa was the funniest, which only confirmed what he already thought about himself!

Now on to the important details that will likely be lost in my memories.  At your nine month appointment you weighed 21 pounds, 8 ounces and were 29 inches long.  This put you in the 55% for weight (you are pretty lean, probably from always being on the move) and the 65% for height.  Now while I can't remember the exact measurement, I do know that you are in the 95% for head circumference, confirming what we already knew, that you have a big head!  Sometimes it can be so hard to get the shirts over your head that still fit normally on your torso, so hopefully you will start to transition into the next size here soon to fix that problem.  Right now you are wearing roughly 12months clothing, and I'm hoping to stretch those for the rest of the 'winter' so that we don't have to buy anymore cold weather clothing.  You are also wearing a size three diaper.

As far as eating, despite only having your two bottom teeth and the tips of your two top teeth, you think you can eat just about anything!  At daycare they transitioned you away from the baby food because you wanted to eat the toddler food, and you are doing really well with it.  At home we still give you some baby food, and give you our food when I think it will be a good fit.  You are still taking a few bottles a day, and we are working on the sippy cup, but you are not the biggest fan of that yet.  

In the past couple of weeks we have really mastered your schedule.  We realized that you needed to go to bed earlier which results in you being happier when we wake you up in the morning.  So most nights you go to bed between 530 and 600, and get woken up around 510 in the morning.  On Fridays and weekends we try to stretch this and give you a late afternoon nap, which sometimes to our benefit results in you sleeping in til 7am on a Saturday! 

You are such a happy little boy, sometimes dramatic, but always lovable.  I have a feeling once you start talking you will be a chatter box because you babble non stop when you aren't tired.  Just yesterday your dad and I were reflecting on the Super Bowl from last year and how quickly this past year has gone.  I remember last year trying not to get too excited (which was rather unsuccessful) because I knew that in two short months you would be with us, but it still felt like it was so far away.  Today sometimes its hard to remember what life without you was like!

Happy ten months Chicken Little, Gremlin, 'The Baby', Row-Row, and Rowen Joseph!