ten months of tess!

i know, i know, i say it every month, but HOLY COW! can you believe that my tiny baby is just two months shy of a year old?! i absolutely can't!

i started writing this blog on saturday night, which would actually have been ON TIME for her 10 months, but the internet died sunday, and we didn't get it back until yesterday, so i'm just now getting around to the post. oh well! c'est la vie when you have a kid!

i'm trying to think of what all has changed between 9 months and 10 months. since i've been working and trying to take a little time for myself here and there, i feel like i'm missing stuff (or just don't know every little minuscule detail of every single day). but there are definitely two developments tess has made, first off...

she can climb the stairs. every single one of them. talk about mommy freaking out. apparently when i went to work on saturday, tess started trying to climb up them with daddy, so he TOOK HER TO THE TOP OF THEM??? (no clue why this was a good idea) to see if she could actually climb them... and she could. then (as depicted in the video), the next day, i decided to see it for myself, and she literally climbed up each and every stair, ALL the way to the top. i nearly had a heart attack. now i'm thinking that in addition to the baby gate between the living room and the rest of the house, we need one at the top AND bottom of the stairs! it's going to be like living in an aqueduct.

oh, and it's not the second major development, but another thing she has begun doing is pulling things down on herself rather than pulling herself up... like the grate in front of the fireplace. yowza.

but the second major accomplishment is...
drumroll please...
on 1/26/2011
tess took her first step!
i doubt she's going to be full-on walking anytime soon, but it was very exciting nonetheless! she has been trying to span the gap between pieces of furniture recently, and i see her reach from one piece to another and ponder how to make the distance, but always, she either does some sort of dive to the floor, or she sits down and crawls. this time though, it was different! tess was standing, holding on to the large ottoman in the living room, like she usually does, pulling things off of it, like she usually does, and trying to hand them to me (a relatively new trick). so she grabbed an envelope, and reached to give it to me. i reached out, but had not yet grabbed it, or her hand, when she took one step towards me and then plopped down on her bottom. it all happened so fast that i had to process a moment before i realized that she had taken the step all on her own. i started squealing and clapping and telling her what a great job she'd done, though i'm sure she had no idea what was going on. it was pretty awesome, and i was so excited that i got to see it! of course, i have no picture or video, since it was a total shock, but i'm sure we'll get something soon enough.

as far as daily life goes, tess eats TONS of organic baby food along with cheese, puffs, yogurt, pasta, and some of pretty much anything i'm eating. we nurse in the morning, sometimes in the evening, and sometimes during the day, but she drinks 6oz formula bottles several times a day as well. and all that leads to TONS of pooping. i mean this kid is a poop champion. in a 24-hr period, she poops no fewer than 3 times, usually 4. people talk about their kids "getting backed up", and the other day when i told mom i was giving her cheese, she asked if that would happen - i started cracking up. we can only hope such a thing would happen! i mean i'm not complaining about having a child with an amazing digestive system, but 1-2 a day would be just fine with me!

sleeping and napping is off and on. most nights she sleeps from about 7:30pm until 7am, waking once or twice, but a week or so ago, we had several sleepless nights when she woke up practically every hour. andrew and i blamed it on teething, but so far we still have yet to see those suckers make their triumphant entry into the world. she's also been napping pretty regularly between about 10 and 11, depending on when she wakes up in the morning. unfortunately, as that nap has gotten longer, the afternoon one has begun disappearing, apparently backwards of what most kids do, but this is tess we're talking about.

she is now wearing 9-12 month clothes, which seems right on track to me, since she is between those months, and yet supposedly she is still a shrimpy. oh well, so are her parents.

as far as stats go, we're majorly estimating this month:
head - who knows. cute though! starting to grow SOME hair :-)
length - maybe half an inch longer than last month? not much taller though. :-/
weight - based on our scale/weigh, add baby and weigh again method, we're going with 18 lbs. we WILL make it to 20 lbs by birthday!

...and now the beast has awakened, so i must go keep her from climbing the stairs or pulling things on top of her head. perhaps pictures to come? we shall see!