I've also been kept busy lately because Natalie is really getting around fast now! It took her a couple weeks of tentative crawling, but now she just goes! It's kind of nice that now, when she sees something she wants she goes to it herself instead of me having to guess what she wants. But nothing is safe from her grasp now; she can get to just about everything, including the kitties! One more thing I wanted to mention today: we think Natalie has been saying her first word other than "mama" (which she uses very often and loudly). It's "apple".  She has a toy that was sent to her by my step-grandma in California that makes all kinds of sounds and words, and she loves it. One of the things on it is a roller that flips to the picture and word apple, boat, or cat.  This is her favorite part of the toy. Between that, and the apples we eat for snacks sometimes, and other pictures of apples we have, she's really exposed to this word, almost as much as "kitty". :-) The other day I noticed that when she was seeing an apple, she looked right at me and said "ahh! puh" (She makes the "ahh!" sound all the time, but now she was adding a breathy "puh!" at the end, but only when she sees apples. You can tell she's really starting to focus more on how we say all kinds of words. Last night she was playing with her My Pal Al and I said "AL!" to her, very enunciated and practically sticking out my tongue to make the L sound, and she imitated me. Last week sometime she imitated her daddy when he started quacking along with some ducks on TV. She usually laughs when daddy quacks at her. As I would too. :-) Oh, and we think her favorite sounding word right now is "bubbles". She laughs every time we say that.  

December 10, 2002 - Okay, I'm not going to get to writing about our Thanksgiving trip tonight because I'm trying to make dinner, but I just wanted to get the new pictures up! You can see a few of them above, but the whole proof page is linked from my photo gallery.  One thing I did want to mention though that I forgot yesterday, related to things Natalie is doing at 10 months. I mentioned last month how she loves to point at things and have us label them. With her crawling, now she points to things and then heads in that direction to see it for herself. It's really cute. 

Oh, one more thing. We got a Christmas card in the mail today from the President and Mrs. Bush! It's on official, presidential seal-stamped card stock and everything, sent from the White House and signed by George W and Laura. Pretty cool!!!! (It makes up a little for the fact that I forgot to send away for a card for Natalie after she was born like I had been wanting to the entire time I was pregnant.)

December 9, 2002 - Natalie is ten months old today! Double digits! This is probably going to be a long entry because I haven't written since before our Thanksgiving trip to Missouri, and a lot has gone on since then! But first of all I want to make sure I get written down all the things about Natalie at ten months. I weighed her this afternoon and she is still about 23 pounds, so I guess her weight gain really is starting to slow down like I'd heard it does around one year of age. She's wearing clothes anywhere from size 12 months to 24 months, but most of the 12 month clothes are getting way too small. Mostly she's wearing 24 months clothes. Big girl! She's babbling a lot more these days, though still only saying "mama" as real words. She's definitely getting louder though; boy can she make herself heard when she wants to these days!! Phil and I have been saying she's just preparing herself to start playing a brass instrument in a few years. She's got the lungs! The biggest news we have of this month is that, yes, it really is true, it really did happen - Natalie is crawling! She did her first actual, not-just-a scoot, crawl across the floor on the afternoon of Thanksgiving. Phil and his sister were playing chess on the floor and Natalie wanted to join in. She crawled all the way across the floor and then grabbed the king. (So I guess Natalie won the game.) We happened to have our camera close by since it was Thanksgiving, so we actually got her very first crawl on film! Now she's exploring everywhere and getting into everything. One of her current favorites - the kitty food and water dishes. Every time I sit with her in the kitchen it's the first thing she goes to. She's also getting to be a real pro at pulling herself up to standing. She can do it with only just a little bit of support now and can then stand up by herself for quite a long time. It's so cute, when she stands up she then likes to shake her hands and arms around and smile as if to say, look at me, look what I can do! She started doing all these things on our trip to Missouri. When we were staying at Phil's aunt and uncle's house, they had lots of big soft furniture that she was able to pull up on really easily and also soft, PADDED (unlike ours) carpet that made her thumps to the ground not so painful. So she got a lot of practice in on the trip, enough to get her confidence up, probably. I really didn't think she would every truly crawl, because she was getting so good at scooting around and she was quickly getting good at cruising too, so I thought she's skip the crawling altogether. I still think she is very close to walking though anyway; she likes to pull up more than she likes to crawl so I think she'll figure it out pretty soon. I'm in no rush though, that's for sure. The only reason I'll be glad for her to start walking will be so that we don't have to carry her from place to place all the time. We were trying to determine what Natalie's favorite toys are at ten months and we decided she really doesn't have any (though she does like things she can bang or drum); right now her major interest is in crawling around and exploring everything. Her favorite things probably continue to be remote controls and magazines though. No magazine is safe in our house, especially ones with pictures of babies in them! 

We got pictures taken at Sears this afternoon. They turned out so good this time! I'll try to get the proof sheet scanned in tonight or tomorrow. (And I'll write about our Thanksgiving trip, Natalie's first trip ever, then too.)