Zoe Liremet at 10 Months

Our sweet girl is now a big 10-month old!  She’s at such a fun age – funny, feisty, curious, chubby, wiggly, and snuggly.  I know that I’ve said this in every single monthly update, but we cannot believe how well she is doing.  It’s hard to believe that we’ve only been a family for four months now, because it’s really difficult to recall what life without her felt like.

And since this blog is essentially ZL’s baby book, I must document a few things about her 9th month of life.

• She is *finally* sleeping through the night. Before we were parents I had no idea that there were so many philosophies and opinions out there on sleep – and so many very, very strong opinions at that.  I’m not looking to start any kind of debate about parenting styles and sleep here (or be judged for that matter) but I will tell you what worked for us.  Let me just say that we went through several weeks where not a single one of us was getting any quality sleep. And that is a miserable way to live.  We really thought we would be strict no-cry parents.  And then we found ourselves with a baby that couldn’t sleep.  So we tried a few of the no-cry approaches and nothing worked.  Some nights we were getting up every hour all. night. long.  Some nights we would be up for 2 or 3 hours in the middle of the night.  And then after doing a lot of research we decided that perhaps a little crying was in order and we tried a new approach (Dr. Ferber, to be precise) that involved letting her cry for a few minutes at a time and then going in to comforting her.  And after 1 night of this (that involved less than an hour of crying) she’s slept completely through the night ever since.  Amazing.  Maybe not for everyone, but it definitely worked for us.  And I would say there has been no damage done to sweet ZL and we’re all (including her) in a better place now that we’re sleeping.
• She has two teeth!  Perhaps a couple more on the way, but her smile is officially toothy these days.
• She’s not yet crawling or pulling up but she has still managed to find ways to be mobile.  We’ve been saying for weeks now that she’s about to start crawling because she gets in the position and rocks, but nothing yet.  She mostly gets all set to crawl and then decides that it’s not worth the effort, flops on to her back, and rolls across the room.  We’ve gotten just a glimpse of what life will be like once she’s a threat to anything in her path and let me just say that I think it’s going to rock our world.
• She loves to entertain people.  If she does something and it makes you laugh you can bet that she’s going to do it again and again and again.  Right now, her favorite thing to do is make this totally adorable face where she scrunches up her nose (I am yet to capture it in a picture) and does this fake laugh/cough thing.  It never gets old. I think it confuses people that don’t know what she’s doing because it looks like she’s in some type of pain or maybe that her nose itches, but Matt and I have realized that we scrunch our noses up at her all the time and she’s just following suit.  And because it makes us laugh every time she does it over and over and over.
• She just keeps getting louder.  She’s not yet at a point where you can reason with her to be quiet or tell her no, so it’s always a bit risky to go anywhere her screeching might bother other people. But of course, we still think it’s funny.  And when she gets really excited, she adds some bouncing up and down and arm-flapping to her screaming for effect.  Matt took her to her first basketball game this week and apparently she danced and squealed (one could argue it’s more like screaming) in his lap through the entire game. And she made the “fan can” on the jumbo-tron – because she’s so dang cute .  She’s still jabbering like crazy and we’ve really noticed some changes in her ”talking” lately.  It’s starting to sound a lot more like she’s actually trying to express herself than just blabbering.
• We’re starting to work on sign language because she is definitely imitating us these days and seems to understand when you ask her to do certain things – like peekaboo or “How big is Zoe”?  It’s hard for us to not just keep asking her to do trick after trick (clap your hands, wave bye-bye, raise the roof (shameful-I know-but so cute)) because it’s so very cool and exciting to see that she understands what we’re asking her to do.
• She’s still the happiest baby I know.  I don’t know how much you can tell about personality when kids are this age, but she’s so very laid back, easy going, and up for about anything.  And this sounds kind of cheesy when you’re talking about a baby, but she just seems to love life.  The smallest things just make her giddy.  And she doesn’t get upset about much – unless she can see her bottle and you waste time giving it to her or she has an ear infection and her parents are too dumb to realize it.
• Every day, she seems less like a baby and more like a little girl.  It’s bittersweet because I so look forward to every new thing that she’s going to do and it’s just amazing to watch her grow and develop, but at the same time it’s just going by so fast.  When I look at pictures of that tiny baby we met in Ethiopia it hardly seems like the same girl.  I guess that could be because she’s gained 8 (yes – 8!!) pounds in the last four months.  From 3rd percentile to 50th percentile (13 lbs to 21 lbs) in no time.