Fluent Gibberish and NO-NO!

b nm n , gh bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb  <--- that is Addelyn's contribution to the blog and also a lot like how she sounds these days :-)  Addelyn has become confident enough in her voice that she just babbles to herself now...it's so cute!  I think she sounds like an alien when she does it :-)

Addelyn's newest word is NO-NO!!  And the temper has developed along with it.  She now outright yells at me when she is upset about something - if she's not getting her way, it's NO-NO! NO-NO! NO-NO! broken up by a couple of high-pitched wines and angry-sounding yelling.  It's kind-of hard not to laugh at her at first, but after a while it gets pretty old!

The past week or so Addelyn has just been absorbing SO much!  For the first time, she really mimicks me very well, so she's speaking (a little) more clearly and, most importantly, she's learning TONS of signs!  According to my most likely incomplete list, Addelyn now regularly uses 29 signs and is inconsistently doing 6 more.  Here's a video of her showing of a few of them, as well as her knowledge of her body parts (it's a bit long...sorry):

At Addelyn's 9-month checkup the doctor said that she should be weaned from the bottle by her first birthday, so we're starting that.  We've begun replacing one bottle each day with a sippy cup of milk instead. She doesn't seem to mind too much, except that the milk doesn't flow as fast from the sippy cup as it does from her bottle, so she's drinking a little less for that feeding.  Hmmm...maybe we need to try a different type of sippy cup?  (the problem is finding a happy medium, because if it comes too fast then she just spits the excess out all over herself). 

In good news, Addelyn's clogged tear ducts finally seem to have cleared up!!! Yay!!!  She's had goobery eyes since she was born, and at her 9-month checkup the doctor said that if they didn't clear up by her 12-month checkup, then she'd have to have surgery, so we dodged that bullet - I'm so relieved!

Jake and I went on vacation to Italy this month - while we were gone Addelyn stayed at her Aunt Tara's house and got to play with cousins Kylie and Madi.  Based on the reports from my mom (who watched the girls during the day) and Tara, Addelyn had a LOT of fun!  She enjoyed watching the older girls play, but didn't like it so much that they got to eat different food than her, and Addelyn downright got upset when anybody got told no-no...(she's a sensitive one!).  We got back from Italy late at night, so Addelyn didn't see us until she woke up the following morning.  When she started crying, Tara and I both went in to get her.  She was expecting Tara, so she didn't even look at me and when I picked her up she got a little upset and wanted to go to Tara.  Well, I had missed her terribly, so I wasn't about to have that...we went and stood in front of the mirror, and as soon as she saw that it was mommy that had her she was all smiles!  She was pretty clingy that next few days, and even now she's much more cuddly than she's ever been, but I'm not complaining!  

The girls all matched!  Addelyn was mad that I made her stay that far away from
me for long enough to take the picture...she was feeling a bit clingy :-)

The weather is getting nice and with that we've been going outside a lot!  If we haven't gone outside to play at least once by late afternoon, Addelyn starts to get pretty upset and insistent...she's even learned the sign for "outside" and uses it to tell me when she wants to go out and play :-)  

Addelyn LOVES to swing - every time we go outside she makes a B-line to the swing!

Got her cool shades and her new helmet on and all ready to go for her first ever bike ride!

Attached to daddy's bike in her new ride

Stats:

Age: 11.5 months

Weight: 23 lbs

Length:  29ish inches

Drinks:  about 3-4 8oz bottles of milk per day (all of which is formula) one before her nap, one in the middle of the afternoon, and one before she goes to bed.

Eats: yogurt, and a fruit for breakfast; puffs, a veggie, and a cheese stick for lunch; and a fruit, and either a meat or noodles or something for dinner.  We just discovered that she likes peas!

Sleeps: 11-12 hours/night - 9pm-9am (most nights...sometimes she still wakes up in the middle)

Naps: 2-3 hours per day - her nap is 4 or 5 hours after she wakes up for the day 

Awake for: 2.5-5 hours at a time during the day.

Clothes size:  mostly 18 month, some 12 month

Motor skills: WALKING, dancing (in time no less), crawling well on hands and knees, standing standing alone well, pulling herself up to standing without any support, self feeding several things (as long as it's not too slippery)

other skills: putting balls into her toy (then the balls fall out and roll away and you do it all over again), clapping, waving, playing peekaboo, Does hand actions to songs like itsy bitsy spider and little bunny foo foo.
words:  mama, up, dada, nana (banana), "Aye" (light), "Bah" (ball), and "Ba (bath)" "ah duh" (all done), "buh buh" (puppy), hi, bye-bye, and NO-NO (is her newest), and I'm not even going to try to list all of the words that she tries to say, but doesn't say regularly.

signs: 29-35 that she does herself.