This is Julia’s second Christmas coming up and she is not a baby any more. Her milestones right now are that she has finally gotten her second tooth and she is quickly improving at standing and walking. Her teething hasn’t passed yet so maybe another tooth soon, but the second tooth that came in was a top tooth directly opposite the first tooth. I guess she wanted to be able to crush a cheerio between some teeth and hurried that one out.

Julia has a lot of control in her standing. She can stand up without holding onto furniture if there is something small to push off from. She likes to stand and swing her shoulders back and forth and giggle. She can squat down and stand back up too without much support. I still love to watch her plop down onto her bottom from a standing position, but that trick’s days are numbered. She can take 3-4 steps in a row to get some place, but if she is walking to me as she gets close she just falls toward me knowing that I will catch her. She knows that crawling is more efficient, so if she can’t get someplace by walking along the furniture, she is more likely just to get down on her knees and crawl.

Every one plays silly games with themselves and others, but when the games are one year-old games, they are so much fun. Julia has a few of them she plays with us:

• Pickup – The old traditional game of dumping things on the floor so that someone else will pick it up. We don’t play this long, but I’m enjoying the fact that she understands dimensions and distances. It is almost like playing peek-a-boo with your toys.
• Peek-a-boo– Julia doesn’t initiate this game much with us, but when we play it with her she just gives a huge smile and giggles the longer we play.
• Puzzles– Julia loves to take puzzles apart. She bangs the pieces together, she looks at them, and she chews on them. In our number puzzle she always pulls out the 1 and 7 and chews on them. Maybe they will be her lucky numbers. Emily and I put together a lot of puzzles from Julia’s playing with them.
• Clear the Table or Tray – When Julia is finished eating, she picks up her food and throws it off of her tray. It is like she is cleaning up. She also clears off toys from table tops, couches, ottoman, and end tables. If she can reach it, it is likely to hit the floor. We will have to wait and see if she dislikes clutter later.
• Stack – Julia likes to try to stack things into towers. She isn’t very good at making the stack big, but enjoys it a lot. I should say the corollary to this is that she likes to knock down the towers too. This is a fact that drives Emily crazy and gets Emily to tell Julia ‘NO Baby’.
• Fill up – If she can find a container or hollow block she enjoys putting smaller things into them.
• Pull the books down – She is tall enough when standing to reach our kid books. She enjoys pulling the ones she can reach to the floor. Then she sits down and goes through the pile looking at the books and the things on the different pages
• Bring you books to read– Lately she has added bringing us books to read to her. She has her favorites – a counting to 10 ladybug book (favorite because of the holes on the pages you can stick your fingers into to turn the pages), a Dora magic wand book, and a Dora Halloween book. Most likely the book she will bring you will be one of these books.
• Runs when she gets freedom – She doesn’t have much freedom to move around the house so when she gets it she goes for it. I was picking up some things and taking them back to their appropriate rooms. Julia kept crawling around the house at first following me, but it ended up being a game of crawling around the circle in our house over and over again.
• Play with whatever sister is playing with – Julia’s favorite toy is Emily. Later, she will figure out that she is her playmate, but right now she is just someone to follow around and mimic. She loves to try to play with whatever Emily is playing with. Too cute.
• Blanket – Julia loves her blankets. This is completely my fault and I love it. Now when I go to get her in the morning she stands at the crib side holding her blanket like she is saying ‘I’m ready Mommy!’. When it is bedtime I just wrap her in her blanket and she physically relaxes. It is like her friend. Blankets make good friends.
• Naptime dash from the room – Julia likes to go down for a nap or bed awake and go on to sleep by herself. This makes putting her down fast. Some days she doesn’t think she is ready for a nap she will stand up in her bed and look for me, I always try to get out of the room before she can see me. She just seems to settle down faster, if she doesn’t see me. But she is moving faster these days, so I have to move fast to get out of the room, too.

We had some fun swimming today. The photos aren’t the best, but they were taken with a camera phone at an indoor pool. There is only so much that can be done to help that. The water was so warm it was like bath water. Everyone had a blast and enjoyed the water at their own pace. I dunked Julia once and gave her the opportunity to bob her face into the water which she only did twice. She enjoyed the pool/Mommy time a lot! Emily was a fish in the water. She is confident in her floaties and would kick and swim herself around the pool. We need to work on jumping into the pool and getting her face into the water more, but I couldn’t be more pleased with how well she did today. If we could go back tomorrow, I would – maybe soon!

God was good to give our girls friends who are almost identical in age that they can spend a lot of time with. Elena and Maeve will not always live close to us so we thought it would be fun to get their photos taken together. Everything was pretty distracting so it was a little hard to get them interested in looking at the camera. That’s kids for you! Emily and Elena spent a lot of time dancing together. Thankfully they paused and looked at the camera for this amazing photo.

Julia had been playing in her pack-n-play with her toys and gave out. I found her asleep among her toys. I have to believe that is a pretty good way to fall asleep. I quietly stole the toys from the playpen and left her to take a good nap. These are sweet days!

We woke up to a white world of snow. How exciting! We looked out all of the windows so that we could see as much snow as we could. After breakfast Emily, went out to explore in the quickly melting snow. She couldn’t decided if she wanted to wear her gloves or not. First she touched the snow on the ground and tried to eat it and then discovered that it could be eaten right off the bushes. Julia went out a little later for her snow-time. There wasn’t much snow left. I couldn’t get her to be parted from me so the best I could do was to have her touch the snow from my lap. The experts were calling for snow last night, but they are usually wrong so we were surprised to find it this morning. It is definitely early for us to have a dusting and gave us all a bit of excitement that Christmas is approaching.