Eleven Years

My life got infinitely more awesome eleven years ago.  Then seven years after that we legalized our conjoined awesomeness.  Here we are in 2015, still being awesome with our annual anniversary photo shoot!  

PS - this post is really heavy on the Karley photos and the reason is solely because dresses are more fun to shoot than white shirts. Please note: Joel only has a white shirt because I lost his actual wedding shirt and tie.  Don't even ask me how I did that.

xxk&j&charlee rae

Eleven Months

Eleven months is the besssssst! This whole thing just gets more and more fun and if you were to ask me if I'd go back in time to, say, three months I'd say NO WAY.  I love eleven months.

Here's what our sweet girl is up to these days:

Playing outside with grass.

She is incredibly expressive with her face and her corresponding sounds.

Livin' it up.  The moments when this girl ISN'T smiling or having a good time are very few.

She's grown three teeth in the last two weeks - two on the bottom and one on top.  A fourth top tooth is peeking through.

She loves mirrors!

It's so interesting watching Charlee play - it's so true that babies learn best whilst playing.

Holding on to her Pa's hand to get steady...

But she can stand all on her own now! She's getting stronger and steadier every day.

This girl is a peek-a-boo champion.

PEEK!

Charlee is now sleeping 11 hours through the night, usually from 8pm-7am.  She went through a phase two weeks ago where we thought she was dropping her PM nap, but turns out she was just faking.  She still naps twice a day, usually for 1-2 hours each nap. 

As I mentioned in the photo captions, our girl now has teeth!  Teeth haven't been a big deal for us yet.  I've heard complete horror stories about babies getting teeth and I was dreading this stage, but so far Charlee has been relatively untouched by the baby mayhem that teething seems to induce.  This isn't to say we haven't had a few struggles, but seriously, it hasn't been bad at all.

We're wondering if Charlee is going through a growth spurt right now because she suddenly is drinking over 35oz of formula per day AND consuming four meals of solid (ie. pureed) foods.  So. Much. Eating.

Charlee is in love with her sippy cup and drinks probably up to two cups of water per day,  She chugs water like it's going out of style and even makes a "glug" sound when she swallows.

Charlee is now standing on her own for upward of 20 seconds and she is couch surfing like a champ.  Her speed crawling has been taken to the next level and sometimes I swear she's not even touching the ground because she's SO fast.  We still love our baby jail!  In addition to crawling, Charlee has also learned to climb stairs.  I take care of my friend's son on Wednesdays and a few weeks ago I called out to Jackson to ask what he and Charlee were doing.  His reply?  "We're just on the stairs!" Turns out Charlee knows how to climb up stairs!  I'm constantly amazed at the things she just seems to either know how to do, or can easily figure out.  I'm not big on showing her how to do things, I'd rather let her figure things out on her own, or create a new way to do things.  So far, this strategy has worked very well for us.

As always, our girl melts hearts wherever we go.  Perfect strangers stop and talk to her because she is, by nature, such a friendly child.  Charlee waves at everything...the cats, cars, leaves, us, strangers - we are all welcome in her world :)  It is rare for Charlee to be angry or distressed (unless she's hungry or tired, which makes sense!) and she just seems to be such a kind soul.  I love this about her.  I think this is actually my favourite thing about her.

Eleven months has been fantastic and we are very excited for the next big milestone...a first birthday!

xxk&j&charlee rae

Ten Months

Charlee's ten month post is a week late, but I guess that is a clear indication of how busy and full our life is with a ten month old firecracker of a small child.  Nine months was fun and ten months has just been even MORE fun!

She learned how to do fish lips!

One of her current fav toys is this measuring tape.

This month Charlee added the "ga" sound to her repertoire of words.  She is constantly chattering away, but what is even more amazing is that she really seems to hear and understand us when we talk to her.  We've gotten into the habit of talking to her all the time and explaining things to her so she knows what we are doing and I really think all the talking we are doing is paying off because this is one attentive girl we have!

I've read these two books and have been making my way through Janet Lansbury's blog and I'm loving everything she has to say about raising babies and toddlers as whole people.  Janet's concepts aren't revolutionary by any means, but simple and oft forgotten in our culture (I think).  Since reading more about Janet's child-rearing philosophy we've started adopting a few of her practices with Charlee, such as...

BABY JAIL!

Oh my gosh, I LOVE our new baby jail.  I found this baby jail on Amazon and ordered it straight away.  Charlee learned to crawl, speed crawl and pull herself up on to all things in the span of 2.5 weeks and I was going a bit crazy trying to keep her safe.  I also found I was saying "no" a lot to her, but then I read a piece by Janet Lansbury about baby jails (yes, she calls them that!) and how great they are for babies.  Baby jails tend to have a negative stereotype in our culture, but Janet's research shows how great a closed in, safe space can be for babies...a space where they can move and crawl and play freely, without having to be told "no" every five seconds.  After reading that article on baby jails I ordered one up and now we use it all the time.  Freedom restored to all humans in this house.

This is what our living room looks like on a daily basis.  Mandatory fun times.

When she's not hamming it up for the camera, Charlee also likes to...

Eat her socks.

Pat her cute tummy.

Find and eat the tags on ALL things.

Continue to pat her cute tummy.

Play peek-a-boo by herself.

Speed crawl to all destinations.

And pull herself up on all things.

Charlee had a checkup appointment in mid-August and weighed in at just over 20lbs.  She also continues to be in the "greater than 95th" percentile for height.  Our ten month old girl is wearing 18 month sized clothing across the board.  In fact, 18 month sized jammies are actually too small now (I seriously just bought them a month ago...) because of the leg length and foot size - oh the joys we are in for when it comes to finding pants for our girl!  Let it be known that in 10 months of life Charlee has grown an entire foot in length.  When I actually think about that for a second I realize how drastically important development is at this age.  When will she ever grow 30 centimeters in ten months ever again?  That just boggles my mind.

Some people have asked, "Are you sure she was born 5 weeks early?"  "Are you sure your due date was correct?" According to what the doctors said, yes and yes.  All we know is, she's blowing every single measurement statistic and "milestone" out of the water and we are so stoked on that. 

Charlee is still eating purees that I make for her.  She seems to have a strong aversion to anything remotely textured...her gag reflex is top notch.  According to my mom, Charlee's eating habits seem to be following very closely in my baby eating habits, so we will see how this all pans out.   I finally broke down and bought some iron fortified organic oat cereal (originally I wanted to avoid this at all costs).  Charlee's doctor mentioned she needed to be getting more iron, even though she's consuming approximately 30-35oz of iron fortified formula every day.  The doctor suggested we try some Baby Led Weaning tactics, so we started with egg yolks.  We tried  and it didn't work very well.  Granted, we only tried for two days and I know that's not enough time, but when Charlee chokes on even the tiniest chunk of anything she projectile vomits everything everywhere.  This has happened four times now (choking on a small chunk of food when offered, projectile vomits, huge mess).  In my mind this kind of defeats of the purpose of getting food IN to her system...so for now I still puree fruits and veggies and we've added in two tablespoons of cereal per day, as well as full fat Greek yogurt.  She is clearly growing and thriving, so I don't think we have any problems there!

And with that, our girl is awake from her first nap of the day.

Here are a few more photos to close the 10 month update.  Enjoy!

xxk&j&charlee rae