11 Months

Sonia’s world continues to expand in front of our eyes and she’s laying some strong groundwork for walking and talking.

Sonia’s 11th month started off with a week-long trip to Charlotte.  As part of the trip, Mommy & Daddy took a couple days to themselves, leaving Sonia with Grannie and Granddad.  Surprise surprise she did just fine!  And we enjoyed the time away.

While in Charlotte, Sonia worked on a couple key developments: such as pointing to what she was interested in, and starting to find words for things.  In fact, she learned one of her strongest word associations yet – “quack” – from spending so much time watching the ducks on the lake 🙂  By the end of the month she had added a variant, “Caw”, for birds other than ducks.  She also started to expand the use of “nana” to mean banana – I’m hungry, night night – I’m sleepy, Mama – Please hold me, and Luna.  Hopefully soon I’ll be able to tell the difference better.

The other thing Sonia was working on while in Charlotte was her top teeth – and oh my gosh the drool!  For the first time we really had to keep bibs on her at all times so she didn’t soak her shirts to the skin with drool!  By the end of the month Sonia had a “full” smile of four top and four bottom teeth, and kept showing them off to everyone. She continues to be a very happy baby.

After coming back from our nice break, we got back into our routine quickly.  One of the things I soon noticed on our morning walks was that Sonia is very interested in airplanes.  Maybe the 20 flights she has been on has something to do with it. The planes start taking off from BUR right at 7am while we’re walking, and the path they take goes right over our route.  Sonia notices the sound immediately, gets excited and “jumps” in the K’tan, and follows the plane as it passes overhead.  Sometimes she’ll even wave “bye bye” as it flies away.  Birds and planes, hmm, destined to be an aerospace engineer?? 🙂

It was also Daddy’s birthday the day we got back from Charlotte. We celebrated with our first art project!  Yogurt and food coloring, yum.

Toward the end of her 11th month Sonia became a full blown cruiser, and even started to “dance” (bounce up and down at the knees), so we introduced a walker and she immediately took off across the living room!

Sonia’s 11th month ended with a “bang.”  Specifically, the bang from the house being shook by a 4.4 earthquake only 5 miles away at 6:25am.  Sonia wasn’t disturbed by the earthquake but woke up when Luna started barking because a painting fell off the wall and a bunch of spices fell out of the cabinet.