12 Month Percentiles:
Height: 30 in - 50%
Weight: 22 lbs. 14 oz - 75%
Head: 18.5 in - 75%
My baby is ONE!
I feel like the cartoon characters that are being dragged off by another character so they try to dig their nails into everything they pass, leaving claw marks as they try to stop the forward motion. Why won't time slow down?! I love every single stage so much, and I feel like I don't get to soak it in quite enough before a new stage has arrived.
I haven't done an update in a few months, so I will record what's been going on since the last update at 9 months.
Chandler gets into EVERYTHING. He pulls out drawers, throws clothes out of the laundry basket and over his shoulder while I'm folding, rips books of the shelves, you name it. We officially had to get our cupboards baby proofed.
Chandler found a bunch of his old, small passies in a basket under his changing table and it may as well have been Christmas. He had one in his mouth and one each hand and would keep rotating them and trying to stick more than one in his mouth at once. This baby loves passies.
He likes to climb on his bouncer, stand up, put a hand on each side and bounce up and down like he's surfing. And on this occasion, I was using it to keep him away from a lamp but he was determined and got himself in this fix:
Over the last couple months, Chandler has learned several new words! He says bye bye (with the cutest little wave you ever did see!), uh oh, ball, balloon (sounds like bwooooo!), pa (for Grandpa), book (booooo), and baby. He is obsessed with looking at fire and calls it "hot" (sounds like haaa) and says it all day long. He can be crying and you just say "hot" and he will stop crying and say it over and over.
He also gives kisses now which I LOVE. He opens his mouth super wide and presses it against you cheek and says "owwwah"! He also does "Where's mama's baby?!" now (which is where you say "where's mama's baby?!" in a really excited voice and then he puts his hands on top of his head and you say "there he is!"). He just wants to go straight to the applause part and claps his hands.
Chandler is obsessed with playing ball. He constantly wants us to roll the ball back and forth with him. He is a little basketball goal in our room and will lift the ball up as high as he can and wait for us to bring it over to the basket so he can score. If he's playing on his own, he'll crawl over to the goal with the ball, stand up, and reach the ball as high up to the net as he can and drop it. Every once in a while Josh will take him to the gym at church to play. So now whenever we go into the gym (like the other night for a Court of Honor) Chandler will just yell "Ball! Ball! Ball!" while looking around for the basketballs. Josh is thrilled.
Chandler has been crawling everywhere and pulling up on everything for the last several months. He would walk along walls and furniture, while holding our hands, with a push walker or floor walker. The day after his birthday he took his first steps. And I wasn't even there...Josh was watching him! I was so sad to miss it. Then for the last few weeks he's slowly been walking more and more. He's getting so good at it! It's the cutest thing ever. He puts his hands out in front of him and lifts his knees super high.
He's still great at sleeping through the night and at napping. I'm so grateful! I still find him sleeping in the most uncomfortable positions, too.
I went in to check on him during his naptime and found his back-up passies all lined up and ready by his face in case of emergency...
Chandler is starting to get shy around certain strangers. If someone at the church or at the store stops to talk to him, he'll get a huge smile and then lean his head into my shoulder. It's the cutest thing ever. For the most part, he'll still go to pretty much anyone. He had one experience where my visiting teachers came and he was watching his reading show in the exersaucer. He burst into tears and didn't stop crying until he was safely in my lap.
My baby is no longer nursing! My plan was to have him done by one year. So around 6 months or so I started cutting out sessions. At the beginning of December we were down to just morning and night. In mid-January we transitioned to night only. In the weeks leading up to his birthday he was losing interest and just a few days before he didn't want to nurse at all. I gave him the option up until his birthday night, but he was over it. Now that he's not nursing, I really feel like he's starting to be a big boy! So now, his favorite foods include waffles (especially chocolate chip waffles), spaghetti, white chicken chili, vegetable soup, and cauliflower soup. He eats pretty much anything, which is fantastic. He kind of refuses eggs right now and apparently hates the textures of peaches because he will eat them pureed and not the slices. But beyond that, he just loves all food.
Chandler is beginning to "get" things more. Like with shooting the basketball. Or I'll put his Mickey Mouse hat ears on and he'll take them off and put them on his own head or my head. It's so fun to see him figure things out. He has also started shaking his head "no".
Chandler loooooves kids. As an only child you would think he would be a little apprehensive around them, but he's not at all. He chases them around and loves to get in the thick of their games and playing. There is a baby at our church who is one month older than him and is terrified of him, because whenever Chandler is around him he crawls toward him full steam to play with him and it freaks the baby out. I hope this means he will do really well to adjusting to siblings when the time comes!
He takes baths sitting on his own now (it took a while for me to get there. Freaks me out.) He really loved it at first, but now for some reason he hates it. He insists on standing and holding on to the side and gets mad and refuses to bend his legs when I try to get him to sit. So I usually just scrub him down really fast while he's standing and then shampoo him, which is the part he hates the most. Hopefully we can get him to come around. But here are a few pictures from the wonderful time when he loved them...
He is still a most excellent shopping buddy.
His eyes have stayed an intense blue. He gets comments on his gorgeous eyes all the time! I've wondered what his hair was going to do. Depending on the light, sometimes it looked blonde, sometimes brown, and other times even seemed to have a tint of red. But lately it looks like it is settling into a medium brown color. He has 8 teeth, 4 on the top and 4 on the bottom. We also discovered a few months ago that he has an attached maxillary labial frenum (the small fold of tissue that runs between your upper lip and gum). We had our friend, who is a dentist, look at it and Chandler will have to get it snipped later on.
Chandler is a happy, wonderful, easy-going baby. We are so infinitely grateful that he was sent to us!
Chandler is a happy, wonderful, easy-going baby. We are so infinitely grateful that he was sent to us!
Sadly, I dropped the ball on 10 month pictures. We were in Disney at the time, so there are tons of pictures, but we didn't do our usual photo shoot.
11 months:
(The laying down shot to try and get his length is pretty much impossible now.)
And on his 1st birthday!
Busy face:
Model pose:
This baby has the. cutest. whiny face. This picture doesn't even do it justice.
Adorable.
