Auggie is 11 months (and 12 days)!!

It took me entirely too long to write this post! Auggie is nearly 11 and one half months old... which means he's nearly one! But that's for later. Now is for 11 months!



Auggie is excelling in all aspects of life! It's a delight to watch him grow. He is a diligent worker when it comes to fine motor skills. He picks up every little piece of fuzz or debris on the ground and inspects them thoroughly. (Unfortunately there's a lot of debris on the ground right now.) He has also completely mastered getting finger food into his mouth. Although if he's eating anything squishy like bananas, kiwis, or cheese, about fifty percent of his meal is first mushed to oblivion in his fist and then about half of that makes it to his mouth. Stella loves mealtime for Auggie but we do our best to keep her away. More than once we've caught Auggie giving her a snibble of the fruit du jour and then finishing off whatever was left after her licking. Yes, gross, I know. :)



Now that I'm a "stay at home mom" we do our best to not stay at home too often. Auggie and I go to story time at the library once a week and love it. He gets to observe other kids, usually about 25 or more, and attempts social interactions. There is a creature of the day (bee, frog, etc) which we learn the sign for, then we do finger play stories, sing songs, and, best of all, play instruments to music. Auggie is rockin' with the maracas. And he's particularly keen on the animal-shaped maracas. We've made friends with a couple of story time regulars which is an added bonus.


We invested in a Bio-Park pass which gets us into the Rio Grande Zoo, the aquarium, the botanical gardens and some sort of beach that I've never heard of before. (Yes, I too am wondering what sort of beaches there are in Albuquerque.) We went to the zoo on Thursday and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. It's no Brookfield Zoo, but it has all the classic animals like giraffes and elephants. In fact, Auggie loved watching the giraffes walk around and was mesmerized by the parrots..

Auggie enjoys many aspects of almost-toddler life. He likes playing with his ball, loves his new activity cube (this wooden thing with attached gadgets and gizmos that I found on craigslist), he climbs ALL THE TIME, he gets a huge kick out of the lion-heads in the 'fountain' that came with our house and calls them 'daaah's, he thinks his Carl Marx/grandpa doll is fabulous, and enjoys watching airplanes when we walk Stella in the morning. And this is great, instead of having one of those fancy baby-walker toys that you can buy at Toys-R-Us, Auggie pushes Stella's dog food bin (which has wheels) around the kitchen. I always end up laughing because Stella looks at me every time with this freaked out look on her face as if she's trying to whine, "Mom, Auggie's trying to steal my food!" He also helps out with the housework and pushes laundry baskets back and forth from the laundry room for me. Not bad, huh?



We're down to nursing about 3 times a day and once at night sometime between 4 and 6am. We did however beef up the nursing last week because Auggie caught his first cold. I figured he could use as many of my antibodies as he could get, and thankfully he's all better now.

A new part of our bedtime routine is brushing Auggie's teeth. After changing into his PJs and his pajama diaper, I give Auggie his toothbrush and he chews away while we read books. It's actually the perfect solution to a problem we were starting to have–Auggie wouldn't sit still while we read books before bed. Now we kill the hygiene and literacy birds with one stone.

Verbally Auggie is excelling. He's no longer stuck on one vowel or consonant but mixes them at will and mimics words that Dan and I say. He's echoed words/phrases like "all done", "stella" - which comes out more like "eh'a", and he even said something that sounded exactly like "elephant" while we were reading Goodnight, Gorilla. He waves, and just last Tuesday he learned how to clap!! He is so hilarious when he claps because he can get a room full of adults clapping and smiling like idiots (myself included). It's great. He also signs "all done", although that also means torture time is next, as in washcloth to the face and hands, so he's not done it recently.

The stinkerpants in Auggie comes out every once an awhile, as it should. Of course he doesn't know he's doing anything he shouldn't be, to him it's all exploration, observation, and learning. Auggie loves to poke at my seedlings outside. (Ahem. Most of them are dead now anyway thanks to the ridiculous Albuquerque wind.) He is all about eating rocks, still, and sticks his fingers in every crevice he can find.

Sleeping has been a challenge, but after a few rough nights things are going much better for everyone. During our road trip the only way to get Auggie back to sleep after waking was to nurse him. Oh boy was that a pain. Yikes. I slept horribly on our road trip as I'm sure you can imagine. Well, after making it to Albuquerque, settling in, shipping out to Chicago for my brother and sister-in-law's wedding, and then coming back here, I had tons of mercy on the poor kid with regards to sleep. He was waking up at least 3 times a night to nurse, despite being more than 10 months old, but since everything was so out of whack I decided to give him some time to adjust. Well, adjust he did not. The 3 times a night thing continued well past our first month here, and it became so bad that I finally started letting my mind wander in the cry-it-out direction. I would have happily nursed him once a night, but how do you communicated to a baby that he'll have to cry during x hours of the night and be nursed during y hours of the night.. Not going to happen.

Then one day I read a post from a blog I occasionally follow about how two parents finally let their daughter cry it out, and after 2 nights they were all in sleeping bliss every night. That was all I needed. That night Auggie woke 3 times, and I didn't get up until 6am to nurse. It was hard, but seriously, he's 11 months old!! The next night went much better, and so on and so forth. Until he got sick. We picked up an extra feeding, but are now successfully back on the right track. Auggie usually wakes up sometime between 5 and 6am and I will feed him then.. Not bad.. Got my once-a-night deal going after all. I don't mind.

In other exciting 11 month old news, Auggie became a cousin! Yay baby Anna!! And, Uncle Dave and Aunt Elisabeth came to visit. He had a blast hanging out with them! (And so did Dan and I. :)

Well.... 12 months is just around the corner!