10 Months

Aerin turned 10 months old yesterday! Look at me being all timely and stuff!

(It's only because I started writing this post three days ago.)

It's been a very eventful couple of months! In just the last four weeks or so, she:

- Learned to crawl

- Learned to wave

- Started drinking cold milk out of a sippy cup (a big change from body-temperature milk in bottles)

- Started eating chunkier things like chicken, cinnamon rolls, muffins, and cheese

- Had an ear infection that lasted from the middle of March until yesterday

- Got c. diff from taking three antibiotics in a row

- Had ear tubes put in Friday morning

- Cut her seventh and eighth teeth

The whole time I was pregnant, I kept saying that we were about to get our payback for Micah being such an easy child. I think I was right. She is so very different from Micah in so many ways.

1) She is into EVERYTHING.

Micah was such a cautious child. He got into things, sure, but not with the same gleeful, self-destructive abandon.

The first week in April, she learned to crawl, and since then has been on a non-stop quest to receive a fatal head injury. She is into everything: pulling drawers open into her face, opening the entertainment center doors into her face, pulling up on the coffee table in order to properly smash her face on the corner, pulling the caps off all the door stoppers and attempting to choke on them, shredding newspapers and magazines with unbridled delight, plucking various bits of dog hair off the I-swear-I-just-vacuumed carpet and taste-testing each one, rifling through her brother's toys to find the one choking-size object I forgot to remove, grabbing fistfuls of the sleeping cat's fur, and that tape dispenser with the serrated edge? YES PLEASE.

Yesterday, while I was down the hallway harassing her brother and cousins about scattering marbles all around ("Keep them down here and away from Aerin, I don't want her to choke!"), Aerin was getting into a bowl of plastic strawberries her cousin had left by the toy box. When I came back to the living room, she had one trapped way back in her mouth, stuck behind her teeth. She was struggling to spit it back out, but couldn't even make a sound. I think I may have lost a few years off my life, right there.

I can only imagine it will get worse as she learns to stand and more things come within grabbing distance. Even before the crawling, I often joked about her go-go-gadget reach, and our constant household refrain was "Swiper, no swiping!"

With Micah, as he got older, I thought nothing of turning on the TV and taking a quick shower while he sat and watched it in the living room. Aerin, I expect, will be the child that uses those ten unsupervised minutes to empty the flour canister, paint a mural out of nail polish, trim her hair with the kitchen shears, pour all the hand soap in the dishwasher, attach her booster seat to the dog as a saddle, and decorate the cat with a Sharpie.

2) Her approach to food

Food, to Micah, was business. He was a champion eater, but he hardly ever smeared cheese sauce in his hair, or coated his face with spaghetti so as to resemble an Oompa Loompa, or deliberately shoved macaroni noodles in his ears. Aerin, on the other hand, believes a good portion of a baby's nutrition should be obtained through osmosis and acts accordingly. She will be the child I take to the doctor to have a pea removed from her nose.

She's also a bit pickier than Micah. He loved cantaloupe, but she's not impressed. He liked mushrooms, she eats around them. Her current favorite foods are spaghetti, macaroni and cheese, lasagna, pears, peaches, Cheerios, puffs, and YOUGURT IN ALL THE FLAVORS. And boy can she pack it in.

3) Teeth. So many teeth!

Last weekend, Aerin cut her seventh tooth and yesterday she cut her eighth, both on the bottom. I'm pretty sure nine and ten are on the way on the top. This time they seemed to come easier. There was plenty of drool and still some night waking, but at least she didn't go on another nursing strike.

As far as how she looks these days, her weight has been stuck around 20 pounds the whole month, what with the ear infections and c. diff and all. Her growth has also slowed down. She's been in 9-month outfits since she was 6 months old, and she's just now starting to outgrow them.

Her hair has grown in quite a bit and has started to curl by her ears. Her eyes are looking a bit more hazel than brown these days. Her skin is still super soft and smooth, with the exception of her legs. All that crawling has left her with rough, red skin on her knees and an assortment of small bruises from various toys she's attemtped to scale. She's still all dimples in place of knuckles and elbows.

She's developed the habit of wallowing around in the crib and wedging herself against the bars in various uncomfortable positions. This (along with the teeth) has resulted in more night waking, which may just kill me dead.

I've been happily buying adorable dresses for her, and I want to dress her in three different outfits every day just to see her in them. Girl clothes are so much more satisfying than boy clothes. And some of the tunic/pants combinations are just too cute to resist.

Aerin's been more difficult these last several weeks as she's learned to really voice her displeasure with people. Her impatient shriek just grates on me, like no other sound in the world. The daycare teachers laugh at her for yelling at the boys in her class when they don't do what she wants them to. If Micah's in her face, she squawks indignantly (and loudly) at him. But over the last few days, I think I've seen her trying to use some sign language (they teach it at daycare.) She holds out her hand and makes the sign for milk when she wants a sippy cup with her meal. She's starting to make the sign for hungry, too. Maybe it's coincidence that she's making those motions, but I hope she's really trying to communicate. I much prefer adorable baby signs to being howled at repeatedly.

Not to say she's not a happy baby. She's still very smiley and cheerful, even when she's sick. She's starting to get a little more clingy, but she'll still grin and wave happily at strangers.

As fast as she's changing now, I can't wait to see what she'll be like by 11 months.