10 Months

I know I've been really lazy about blogging this month, but life's been busy with me being back at work and Nate and I not seeing much of each other. It seems like any spare time we have we use to work on projects around the house. I'll have to try to do better for October.

Anyway, with as fast as September has gone by it's not surprising to realize that Bridget is yet another month older. She's growing up so fast, and it's so fun to watch her learn new things.

She's getting closer and closer to walking by herself every day. Nate actually got her to walk 6 steps before she fell today. The most I've witnessed is four. She crawls and cruises around very well and is also turning into quite the climber. It's not uncommon to see her trying to climb from the arm of the couch to the end table or anything else for that matter. She definitely keeps us on our toes.

She's also learning more sounds and currently can say "Mom, Dad, ba-ba, and hey." She still isn't calling us by name, but can at least make the sounds.

One of her favorite things to do is blow raspberries. If you blow one at her, she almost always does it back. In fact, that's one of our favorite games to play while we're in the car. We go back and forth and get plenty of laughs in while doing it.

She's mastered the pincer grip and is sometimes better at cleaning the floor than a vacuum. It's amazing how small some of the things are that she's able to pick up. And when we're outside she loves to pick leaves up off the lawn or destroy the marigolds.

It's also so fun to watch how well she seems to comprehend things we say. She definitely understands the word "no" and obeys pretty well. It always makes me laugh when I tell her "no" to something she's doing and she turns to look at me with a sly grin on her face and then proceeds to go back to whatever she was doing and laugh while she's doing it.

Her top 2 teeth have finally made it through after a month of trying. Hopefully we'll get a little break from teething before the next ones come.

And Bridget is still a big fan of the bathtub. She will hardly let go of her rubber ducky the whole time she's in it, and she'll even sit and kick her legs when you tell her to "splash, splash." I have fun sculpting the little bit of hair she has with the shampoo. Maybe some day it will really be long enough for pigtails.

Giggles

Lately Bridget will get into moods where anything and everything makes her laugh. I was able to capture just a little on camera, but prior to getting the camera out she was laughing even harder and longer than what you see here.

And even though this doesn't have anything to do with the video, I also have to mention that Bridget learned to say Mom on Sunday. I don't know that she's calling me by name yet, but just making the sound because it always comes out in a long stream of "mom, mom, mom, mom," but she does it a few times a day now.

9 Month Stats

I took Bridget to the pediatrician yesterday for her 9 month checkup. Luckily, she didn't have to have any shots, so it was a quick and easy visit. She's 22 lbs. 3 oz. (93rd percentile), 29 inches tall (90th percentile), and her head is 18.5 inches (above 97th percentile). She's still doing pretty well with strangers, and the doctor even commented that she seemed to like him better than most 9 month old babies he sees. So she's still very healthy, and to quote the doctor "there's nothing small about her."

Labor Day Weekend

We had all sorts of plans for accomplishing things around our house over the long weekend, but we only accomplished half of them due to some unforeseen events. On Saturday Nate installed a new faucet in our kitchen. After 3 trips to Lowes and Home Depot and several more hours than he anticipated, the task was accomplished, but in the process some water leaked through the wall into the bathroom below and now we get to repair the paint that bubbled up. At least we have a fabulous new faucet that's a thousand times better than the nasty old one we replaced. I also worked on painting the dining room. It took me several tries to get the right paint color, and I ended up just mixing my own from a couple different ones that we had because the 2 that I bought just weren't quite right. We also purchased a new BBQ grill - nothing fancy but it does the job. And then we spent the rest of our day cleaning and getting ready to have my family over for a BBQ on Sunday. I should also mention that Nate and I had to speak in our new ward on Sunday so we had to prepare talks on Saturday as well.

Sunday afternoon my sisters and their families came over (Jill, Rob, Elaine, Charlotte, Megan, Jessica, and Matt) for dinner. The weather turned cold and it rained a lot so we had to stay inside, but it was great to get together and visit. We tried to get some good pictures of the girls together but none of them would sit still long enough to get one, so here's the best of what we got:

Just as my family was leaving that night our power went out due to the storm going on outside. And it stayed out for 23.5 hours! I don't think I've ever been in a power outage that lasted so long, and you never realize how much you use electricity until you don't have it. All night long I kept waking up because I was worried about losing all the food in our refrigerator and all of the things we wouldn't be able to get done on Labor Day without power. First thing Monday morning Nate loaded up most of our food and took it to his Grandma's house to put in her fridge and freezer, so we only ended up losing a little of our food. We really didn't do much the rest of the day, but it was nice to finally have some time to relax.