Miriam at 10 months

I have no statistics for this girl since we haven’t taken her to the doctor since the nebulizer incident. I’m fairly confident she’s healthy and growing but, good news, we finally have insurance for the girls so I can take them to the doctor again. Now I just have to get around to making appointments.

At 10 months Miriam has fully mastered crawling. Her new preference is to do more of a bear crawl on her hands and feet. She is faster than fast and gets into trouble so easily. She’s our “silent but deadly” child, I suppose, our stealthy explorer. She just quietly goes about mucking things up and acting all innocent. Just this past Sunday she did the following: splashed in the toilet, took the Tupperware out, emptied the two lowest shelves on three book cases, pulled out nearly every toy we own, ripped up some papers and spread them all over the office, pulled everything out of the freshly packed diaper bag, pulled shoes off the shoe rack, took the stick out of the sliding door, climbed into the laundry basket, and even managed to get a little taste of her own excrement. All this before we even left for church and while maintaining that sweet air of innocence.

If you ask “Who did that?” she’ll look behind her shoulder to find a scapegoat.

After a recent storm, in which a few random boards and a whole section of the fence broke allowing the back-neighbour’s dogs to stick their noses into our yard, Miriam learned how to bark. Once when we were all admiring her new trick, Grandpa asked her what spaghetti sauce said. She answered with a bark. Grandpa said that proved she didn’t really know what a dog said but she really, truly, honestly does associate barking with dogs. And cats. And anything else that you ask her about. Basically if she sees an animal or if you ask her “What does a ____ say?” or if you mention the word “dog” then she’ll bark.

She was so tired when this video was taken because she’s been busy teething all day and all night. She is sporting a glistening row of four fresh teeth on the top and she got them in such a funny order. Her right eye-tooth broke through first (on August 10) and her left front tooth followed soon after. Then she got her left eye-tooth and finally (on August 29) her right front tooth. She is sleeping much better now, again, which is great. Getting up in the middle of the night to have her scream was starting to be a pain. She never wakes up simply to cry so I hardly even know what to do to comfort her—she’s the world’s cuddliest baby already but cuddles did nothing, nor did nursing or rocking or Orajel or anything. I’m glad it’s over…until the next round.

Miriam loves phones. We have two “functioning” phones that Miriam absolutely loves. I’m pretty sure they are the only toys we have that make noise and light up. Miriam likes them because of this—because real phones make noise and light up. The other day she found Grandpa’s old Blackberry that he gave to the girls to play with. She excitedly picked it up and started pushing buttons but once she figured out that it wasn’t going to do anything she tossed it behind her shoulder and crawled over to the nightstand where Andrew’s cell phone was sitting. She pulled herself up to her very tip toes and grabbed the phone. When she pushed buttons it lit up and she started gabbing happily. She even managed to unlock it and make a phone call (this could be added to the list of naughties that Miriam did on Sunday morning).

Her favorite syllable seems to be “da.” It comes up in her babbling conversations a lot. “Ma” is all but forgotten, although “sss” and “shh” are slowly creeping into her “vocabulary.”

She loves to go outside, whether just in the backyard or to the park. These pictures were taken a while ago—the weather has since gotten a bit colder so she probably won’t be wearing this outfit again. She can hold her own on this bouncy chipmunk pretty well—she’s only fallen off once and even then she was still dangling from the handle. She’s got a strong grip.

Her favourite thing to do outside, though, is still to put foreign objects in her mouth.

Her favourite bath time toy is this little rubber duck dressed in graduation regalia. Rachel is pretty understanding about this and will let her play with it when they bathe together with the condition that she gets to stay in longer than Miriam so that she can have a turn playing with it, too. Miriam absolutely monopolizes the duck and throws quite a stink if it’s taken from her without consent. She will even sneak into the bathroom in the middle of the day to play with it, which is how she discovered how much fun toilets are.

Let’s see…what else is new? We tried letting her use a bowl a few times. She thought it was great fun to fling the bowl and food around. We stopped giving her bowls of food. She still has no interest in walking, although she is getting great at climbing over any barriers we create for her. She’s cute and we love her!