Almost 1 year

Hard to believe it's been almost a year since Aria was born. Time moves slow and fast all at once.

As you can see, she looks much more like a little girl now. She has four teeth - middle two up top and middle two on the bottom - and a couple more are breaking through. Her vocabulary of babble words has expanded quite a bit, and on several occasions she's repeated words back to us - such as dog, bow wow wow, and even butterfly. As we carry her around the house she points to things and makes a sound that I can't quite describe but seems to mean "what's that?".



She's a prolific crawler, able to motor around the living room with startling speed. Likewise she can pull herself up to standing no problem. In fact her favorite game now is to stand up on that chair she's sitting on in the above picture. She hasn't yet taken any steps without holding on to something. It seems like she just hasn't thought of it yet.

Her personality becomes more apparent every day. She laughs whenever we laugh, and she talks a lot. Also just in the past few days she's learned to cry when you take something away that she wants. A not so fun development but hey, what are you going to do, let her play with that Bobby Crosby bobblehead? Oh, ok, sure, I guess she can play with that. No, it's not a big deal. Oh, it broke? OK, whatever.

She's eating a lot more solid food now. She's on to more complex baby food like winter squash, peas & brown rice, apples & plums, rice cereal mixed with breast milk, etc. We like the "Earth's Best" brand for whatever that's worth. Safeway recently started carrying it, they are all organic and the flavors are really good. She also is eating more solid food - she'll take bites of banana, rice, avocado, melon, etc. A couple days ago she ate nearly half a banana for dinner. We've tried peas but she just plays with them, never puts them in her mouth. Of course she's still eating cheerios too, she loves them. Getting into a good routine with the solid food is taking some getting used to. We are so used to the convenience of breast feeding (no mess, little fuss) that we still sometimes forget to bring other food along when we go out. But now we are pretty good about feeding her at least twice a day. She has cereal nearly every morning and some kind of baby food for either lunch or dinner. At dinner time we also experiment with letting her eat some of what we are eating. Tonight we were having tacos with fake ground beef and we let her eat some of that. She seems to like most of the food we give her.

With the food, diapering has changed a lot. I won't go into a lot of details here but I'll just say that it ups the ante a whole bunch when it comes to changing a poopy diaper. She's like the toxic avenger now. We open up all the windows and break out the hazmat suits.

In other news, I took a much-needed vacation for a weekend and went back to King's Canyon to do some hiking. In two days I hiked over twenty miles (13 the first, 9 the second). It was exhilirating. Below are some pictures of the country. Definitely want to go back there. It's a magical place.