11 Months!

Happy 11 month birthday to James! We can now start the official count down to his first birthday. The main change for James this month has been how mobile he has gotten. He can get anywhere and everywhere around the house and he is such a climber! Right now his favorite thing to climb is up on the dishwasher when it is open, and the bar thing in our kitchen. He also loves pulling himself up on baskets, chairs, couches, stools, you name it. He hasn't started cruising yet, but I am sure it is right around the corner.

James is still having major attachment to me, which I know is a good thing, but is proving to be a little bit challenging for the time being. Despite his constant clingyness to me and his lack of stellar sleeping, we know how lucky we are with James. He is such a content baby and loves to go places. We can always take him to restaurants and with us on errands because he loves to observe different places and people. He is very easy going and laid back and is pretty flexible with his routine to a certain extent. We can always make him smile and we love to get some good belly laughs out of him at least once a day. If he does get fussy, it is nothing that being held or nursing for a little bit can't solve.

James loves to play peek-a-boo and thinks it is silly to see anything upside down. James still loves any and all balls. Beach balls, wiffle balls, playground balls, bouncy balls, Jax's tennis balls, and actually anything that is remotely shaped like a ball he immediately gravitates towards. His other favorite thing is wooden blocks. One of his favorite games is to take his blocks one at a time, lick it, offer it to me to lick and then throw it to the ground as hard as he can and repeat with every other block in the set. This activity holds his attention for a good 10 minutes at a time.

James' babbling has increased, but he is nowhere near saying an actual word yet. He will say mamamama and dadadada but not as a name for us. He will also occasionally babble babababanananana and our all time favorite that he reserves for yelling at the top of his lungs while standing in his crib at 2 in the morning is NAYNAYNAYNAY! We think this translates to, "Why the hell am I in here by myself, come and get me so we can play please!"

James is now eating more of a variety of regular food and not many purees. He eats plain, whole milk yogurt with fresh banana or peach for breakfast and then eats a few cheerios or pieces of a flaxseed whole grain waffle as finger food. Lunch is hit or miss, sometimes he is not in the mood. But a typical lunch is cottage cheese, avocado and applesauce. For dinner he will have a little of anything I have made that is appropriate for him to eat too. He had lentil soup last week, and tonight will get to try lasagna. If we are eating something I don't want him to have he will have pieces of a vegie burger, or sometimes multigrain cereal and some type of vegetable. So far we have avoided giving him juice or any overly processed or sugary foods. I figure he has the rest of his life to eat junk, so why start now? He still nurses all the time, which I think is probably for comfort about 60% of the time. He no longer takes a bottle, and has never really taken a pacifier, so nursing is the only real soothing/comfort he has. He is nowhere near ready to stop nursing, so I see us nursing well past a year. He loves to drink water out of a cup and we will introduce a little cow's milk in the next couple of months so that he can get used to drinking it and it will give me an opportunity to leave him for more than a couple hours at a time without having to pump (which is a good thing because the past few times I have pumped I have not gotten any milk).

I have been enjoying all of the activities that I signed the two of us up for, and I will speak for James and say that he seems to enjoy them as well. He seems to be a little more shy than other babies we are around, so I think that being around other people and babies is good socializing for him (and me!). He loves to shake the shakers at music and play with the scarves. He isn't clapping yet, but he will sometimes wave/flap when we sing and listen to music. We went to our first swim class this week, and it was great. Longmont Rec Center is awesome and has a whole kid's area with warm water and fountains, waterfalls, slides and a mini lazy river. We just splashed around and sang songs mainly, but we had fun as long as the water stayed far away from James' face. We do Gymboree class in Boulder, which I have mentioned before, and it has really encouraged James to try new things. He watches other babies do things and then will try it himself. It also gives him a new variety of things to climb on and crawl around each week. Not to mention they have mass quantities of a variety of different balls, so James finds a new favorite ball each week he latches onto for the whole class. It is also nice to talk to other moms with babies James' same age at all our different activities. I really miss Book Babies in Denver though :-( Storytime at Longmont library is way lame in comparison. Once Baby O'Reilly is a little older, we may have to plan some Book Baby playdates.

I am sitting here with a sleeping/nursing James laying on my lap enjoying his snuggles (and sweaty head) and have gotten a little long winded in my 11 month update, so I don't think I have left anything to add to a list for the month. So I will just end with saying I can't believe how much things have changed for our family in the past 11 months. We are very lucky to have James, and James is very lucky to have so many people who love him.