What I learned this weekend…

First, I want to apologize for the lack of blog posts over the past few weeks.  Work has kept me incredibly busy.  I won’t go into details, mainly because you didn’t come to this blog to read about me,  you came to read about an 11 month old little girl named Ashlyn.  And I don’t blame you.

To start out, Ashlyn learned how to stand about a week ago.  One minute she was working at it, holding on to ledges and window sills, and the next thing you know she’s standing up on two legs banging on the glass.  And once she figured it out, she decided to practice.  She caught us by surprise this weekend by exploring around the entry way, and before we knew it she was up on the first step of the stairs and working on the second one.  It was a big “uh-oh” moment which resulted in a dash to Target for a baby gate.

I also learned that Ashlyn has crazy hair.  She has a lot of it for her age, and it goes everywhere.  Interestingly, once it’s in place it likes to stay that way.  The picture on the left (below) is her hair several hours after taking off the little bands that were holding up some pigtails.  The other two pictures are just random pictures showing her varying hair styles.

And lastly, a very happy birthday to Great Grandma Russell!

I be crawlin’

These last few days have seen quite a bit of activity from Ashlyn, with some pretty big milestones being achieved.

On Saturday afternoon, while visiting Grandma and Grandpa Wolfe, we put Ashlyn up on the table so she could play with a remote control.  Instead of flopping on her stomach as she used to do, she got up on her knees.  One step, two steps, and off she went across the table. 

Now I don’t feel like I’m cheating when I buy things for Ashlyn with the “crawler” symbol on it. 

Take that Gerber!

Since then, she’s started to crawl more and more.  She still gets tired pretty quickly and goes back to the army crawl, but she’s trying, and I have a feeling she’ll be crawling more and more every day.  Time to baby proof.

She’s also sitting up from a stomach position, and today was the first day she’s pulled up to her feet on her own.  She did it three times today in fact.  Unfortunately, we had to learn that one from daycare and we haven’t been able to reproduce it at the house.  So instead of a picture of her pulling herself up, here’s a picture of her with a bubble Mohawk.

To Uncle Scott, from Ashlyn

This is a story from Ashlyn…

(editors note:  Ashlyn does not have a very large vocabulary.  Most of her typing was along the lines of “kkkkkkkkkkkkkkad#AD”, so we had to take some liberties in the translation.  Enjoy.)

When I learned that I wasn’t going to see Uncle Scott on his birthday, I got pretty upset.  My mom and dad told me that I was going to see him in a few months.  A few months!  That’s practically forever.  (editor’s note:  This may not seem like a long time to most of us, but keep in mind that 2 months is 20% of her entire lifetime).

So I put on my birthday hat and took a plane to the desert.  My dad is cheap, so I had to fly coach.

When I got there I took a ride on this thing to see if I could find Uncle Scott.  If you aren’t sure who is who in the picture below, I’m the one in the pink.  The hat was only a disguise, I’m not really in the Army.

Uncle Scott must have been wearing camo, because I never saw him.  So instead, I came back home and typed up a blog post.

Happy birthday Uncle Scott!

10 months…

Today marks Ashlyn’s 10 month birthday, which we celebrated by knocking down block towers, making a mess of bananas, and splashing around in a bath.  For this post, I thought I’d highlight some of Ashlyn’s favorite things, and some recent firsts.
Ashlyn’s #1 favorite thing to do is knock down block towers.  If she sees a tower, she will find a way to get to it and destroy it.  As you can see below, the mere sight of a block tower sends her into a frenzy of destructive baby fury, which can only be satiated by demolition. 

Unfortunately, Ashlyn did more than knock down a few block towers.  I think we paid around $3.00 for this thing, which I believe is a spoon holder, so Ashlyn is already in the red.

In other games, she also enjoys whatever this game this is called.  It’s tiring for the adult, but Ashlyn seems to get a kick out of it.  We’re hoping it will help with the whole crawling thing.  She’s getting better every day, but still hasn’t made that final adjustment to push her body fully off the floor.

She’s developed a few new things of note over this past month.  First, her hair is filling in, which is giving her an interesting hair-do, especially after baths.  Sorry for the blurry photo, the camera decided to focus on the wrong thing.  She’s also learned a very strange sleeping position, which she seems to prefer over most.  She’s actually sleeping in the picture below, I turned the lights on to get the picture and she didn’t budge. Strange baby.

And finally, although I don’t have any pictures to back this up, she’s started to learn how to put rings and blocks INTO her little toy bucket, instead of randomly throwing the contents OUT of the bucket onto the floor.  As GJ (grandma Wolf) would say, “she’s a genius!”.  Happy 10 month birthday little one, only two months to go to the big 1!