11 Months

Dearest Hayes,

This has been such a fun month full of milestones, learning, growing, and has also at times been pretty exhausting.  You have way more energy than I do! I'm convinced you will never be chubby because you are constantly moving. You just want to walk, walk, walk. You like to hold one of my hands and walk around ALL day. You had been taking 3 or 4 steps on your own but just recently you walked all the way across the room! You are a bit of a scaredy pants and still want me to walk with you but you could totally do it by yourself. You also started crawling "normal" this month but the army crawl is still your preferred crawl of choice.  You also learned to crawl up the stairs- an activity that we repeat multiple times through out the day.

It is so fun to see your little personality showing. You're a bit rebellious at times and do things you know you're not supposed to.

Example:
You will hold out your sippy cup over the edge of the table and look at me and I'll tell you, "Don't drop it Hayes." Then you'll pretend like you're going to give in and give it to me, but snatch it back and hold it out again, look at me, drop it this time, then look at me again like, "what are you going to do about it?" haha already testing your limits. You'll even pretend to pick up something off of the floor and proceed to put "it" (nothing) in your mouth just to get my attention!

You fold your arms for prayers and it's the cutest little thing.  Sometime if I start to feed you something and we haven't said a prayer you will fold your arms and remind me. You can sign "more" and "all done."

Words you can say this month:

"du-ch" (sounds like dutch) - duck
"doj" (sounds like dodge) - dog
"ma ma" -momma
"da da" -dada
"ight" - light
"hello or ello" - hello
"ch or cheesh" - cheese
"ch" - lunch
"hot" - hot

You try so hard when we try to get you to say new words and will often get the starting sound right like ba for book or la for love. I swear you are such a smarty pants! But maybe I'm bias. You are just growing up so fast!

I've been working on your "lemonade stand" themed 1st birthday party and it's proving to be more work than expected. haha Hopefully it will turn out as cute as I'm envisioning! I can't believe I will have a 1 year old next month!

You are such a sweet little boy. I love your cuddles and "loves" you give all the time. You often say "ahh" when you give hugs because we always say it. You let your momma and daddy know you love us.

We have started going to a play group and I've found you're kind of a shy little guy! You hang out with mom and take everything in for awhile before deciding it's okay to interact with your baby friends. I think you will get more brave as time goes on.

You randomly decided you like bottles this month so you are now completely weaned off of breastfeeding. Yay! You also have been sleeping so well this month! Bedtime is 8:30 p.m., you wake up around 5:30 a.m. for a bottle then back to sleep until 8:00 a.m.  It was a rough 2 weeks of sleep training last month but we finally stuck to it and it has proven to be worth it. Everyone is much happier with more sleep!

I love being your mom Hayes.  Although, you drive me crazy sometimes and I'm usually exhausted by the end of each day, I feel so blessed to have you in my life and know this is the greatest job in the world.

Love you baby boy,
Momma

Try to block out my annoying voice in this video...

I got Hayes to say a few "words" on video before he completely attacked the camera.
Sometimes he'll say them better but he tries so hard!