Benny's 10th month was another month of milestones! Crawling like a pro, pulling up, getting his first teeth, growing more hair, babbling, clapping, waving, and eating pretty much anything and everything in sight kept Benny busy this last month.
Benny is now a serious crawler. He is SO fast and does a mixture of his army crawl and crawling on his hands and knees. His army crawl is the preferred mode of transportation when he is wearing clothes and on our wood floors. He moves so quickly, he looks like a snake slithering across the floor. He just uses the tips of his toes to propel himself forward and it is pretty impressive how quickly he can move. He crawls on his hands and knees if he is in just a diaper, on carpet or outside.
Benny will pull himself up to standing on absolutely anything he can grab ahold of. He loves to stand and has great balance, even when holding on with just one hand. He isn't walking behind anything or cruising yet, but I think it is right around the corner.
We had a particularly bad week and a half of sleep, and at the end of it Benny had 5 teeth. He showed absolutely no discomfort or unhappiness during the day, but just could not get settled at night. He wasn't even upset or crying really, just restless and wanted to be held all night long. He got 3 teeth on the bottom and 2 on top pretty much all at the same time. The 3 on the bottom look so funny, because he has not gotten on of the center ones yet, so he has a little gap that we think make him look like a baby bull dog.
Benny is using all those new teeth to eat everything we give him. He loves solid food, sucks down baby food pouches like a pro and still loves to nurse. He eats so much more than James and Mac did as babies, and based on how much those two eat now, I fear for our future grocery bills. Benny's favorites are fruit-especially bananas, raspberries and peaches and yogurt. He also likes salmon, ham and cheese. Baked goods are not his favorite, but he still eats them.
Benny loves to play with toys now and will find anything that is left on the floor and assume it is fair game to chew on. This means lots of Legos and dog toys have been removed from his mouth. He has started to have an opinion when you take things away from him or (heaven forbid) walk away from him and he will go from smiling to the fakest cry in the world in about half a second. This is always extremely short lived and he goes immediately back to smiling as soon as you pick him up or hand him something else to play with.
Benny gets so excited when Tim gets home and flaps his arms and kicks his feet and crawls as fast as he can to head butt him in the legs until he gets picked up. He will also lunge out of our arms towards whoever he wants to hold him. He babbles like crazy and repeats Dadada and Babababa. He will repeat "Dada" and "Da" for Dad and dog, and "Ba" for ball, and also does a pretty good imitation of, "Yep!" but I don't know that we are counting any of them as actual words yet. He doesn't say them on his own or consistently enough for me to think he is attaching meaning with the words yet. But he does try to repeat us and makes so many sounds compared to his brothers at this age.
Benny has started waving (mainly at himself), clapping when we say, "Yay!" and can make the funniest sounds. He uses his fingers to vibrate his lips to make a good motor boat impression and anytime we pick him up, he tries to do the same thing with his fingers on our lips.
Benny loves Jax and grabs a fistful of his fur whenever he has the chance. He gets excited to see other dogs too.
Benny takes two solid naps a day, though he has started pushing his morning nap later and later. I would really love for him to be on one nap a day by the time the boys go back to school or he is going to have an interrupted afternoon nap every single day. The woes of a third child!
Benny LOVES to be outside and will crawl through the grass, on cement and through dirt. He doesn't care the terrain, he just loves to explore and eat whatever he might find in his path.
Benny continues to delight all of us and we are just trying to soak up every second of his sweet, easy going, and happy personality.
