8 Months Old!

Where has the time gone? My tiny baby girl, who lost so much weight and looked so scrawny for so long, is a chubby, active 8 month old. Her current unofficial stats: 18 lb. 8 oz., which keeps her in about the 60th percentile for weight, and 28 1/2 inches, which is around 95th percentile for height. Her hair, which has always been abundant, has become a source of much hilarity lately. I keep it in pigtails during the day to keep it out of her eyes, but when I take them out at night, she looks just like one of those pencil trolls kids used to have:



Caroline has started talking more and more in the last month. She says "mama" and "dada", and she babbles a lot. She's also starting to recognize and use a couple of signs, including the sign for "milk" which is what we use for nursing. She's still eating solids once a day, and she shows a definite preference for fruit over vegetables. She still doesn't really "get" the sippy cup, and her tongue still tends to thrust out any food that is more solid than the pureed stuff that comes in the jars.

Still no crawling yet. She is getting better at scrunching her knees up underneath herself, but she hasn't gotten the forward momentum thing down yet. If I put her down on the laminate floor in the study, she can kind of slide herself around, though, and she always manages to get herself to any toys that are out of reach, so she's moving -- just not very efficiently yet!



Oh, and she now has THREE teeth! The funny thing is that she got the bottom two just about the time that Anna lost her bottom two. Now, Caroline is getting her top left incisor, and Anna is just about to lose her top left incisor. So we've figured out that as Big Sister is losing them, Little Sister is finding them! Unfortunately, now that she has teeth on the top and bottom, she's figured out how to grind them. Now THAT is a sound that will send shivers down your spine .

I don't have a good picture of Caroline's new teeth yet, but here's one of Anna's first lost one. Now that the second one is gone, she has a big hole in her head!



Speaking of Anna, she made us so proud last Sunday. The children's choir was supposed to sing in church, but Anna was the only kid who showed up. So she sang a solo. She did a beautiful job, and she didn't look nervous at all. When she finished, she just glowed.

Anna has also recently qualified for the gifted and talented program at school. This is a HUGE relief for me because her kindergarten situation this year has been less than fabulous, mostly because there are a lot of discipline problems in her class, and the kids like Anna who don't get in trouble all the time tend to sort of get ignored. They're starting GT instruction this week, and I think they cluster the GT kids in first grade, so hopefully the school situation will look up really soon!

We took the girls to New Mexico and Colorado over spring break, and they got to see snow for the first time. I got a few pictures, and I'll try to post them in the next day or two. In the meantime, here's a picture of my two sweet girls together!



And here's one of Jimmy and Anna goofing off with one of the baby carriers. It's technically a "toddler" carrier, and it's supposed to carry up to 65 pounds. Turns out, they're not exaggerating! Anna weighs about 50 pounds, and Jimmy said it was surprisingly comfortable to wear her. Not that he would want to do it for long, but I guess if you had a monster toddler or something, this would be the backpack for you!