Ten Months (yesterday)

Finn turned ten months yesterday. TEN MONTHS!

I swear that it takes another nine months to start crawling out of the chasm that having a baby leaves in your life. M. and I are finally starting to move toward functional WITH a baby. Except our baby really isn't our baby any more. He's our little pre-toddler. It's sad in a way but he's so AWESOME that I can't be too sad about it.

So, my favorite Finn things are...

He laughs with us. M. and I will be driving along and laughing about something and out of the back seat will come this little "ha ha". Our boy has a sense of humor!

He shares. Now he will try to give his bottle to M., even sticking it in her mouth. Then he laughs at her. He gives us his toys. He feeds M. Cheerios and toast off his plate. It's so sweet.

He says "mama" and "mum" and we're pretty sure it's in context of us.

He kicks his legs when he wants more and thinks that the word "more" means "open your mouth, silly, I'm about to shovel food into it".

He drinks from a cup. For some reason he doesn't use a sippy cup but we have this really small plastic cup and he grabs it and drinks from it, barely spilling any!

He talks to strangers. We'll be out and all of the sudden he's talking to someone, trying to get their attention.

He's sweet. When we breastfeed in bed, he strokes my arm or my belly, and if he is feeding while we are all in bed together, he'll put his free arm behind him and reach out for M. then they hold hands.

He's still challenging. He's an intense child and requires a lot of time and energy. His sleep is crap. When he melts down he's totally overwhelmed and unreachable, and it's really hard as a parent to have to hold your child through his trauma without being able to resolve it. We take it a day at at time and they seem to be getting better in general. I like to think that we are a good match for our mecurial, fantastic, intense, passionate child.

We love our boy. Our almost one year old boy.