Happy 8 Months Bella!

Bella is 8 months old now and just so fun and sweet! Her sense of humor is really starting to come out and she just has the funnest laugh in the world. She finds the oddest things hilarious....like picking out clothes from her drawer and when I had to change a not so lovely diaper. She was so proud of her stinky diaper and thought it was hilarious when I made a face and said "stinky stinky." She just brings us so much joy and we can't wait to have so many fun things coming up in the next few months, first Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Years and then her birthday! We know they will all be here before we know it! Here are some fun things about Bella at 8 months old:

• She LOVES to eat. Particularly, she loves to feed herself. She has gotten so good at feeding herself puffs and other small things, she almost never misses her mouth. She will shovel more and more food into her mouth so excitedly that if you give her a handful of puffs they will be gone in 2 minutes flat. Food is the best distraction for her, she absolutely loves it. She has tried french fries a few times now and, while not the healthiest, she completely loves it and well, she can always use the extra calories :-)
• She seems to be getting back to normal with naps and goes down for naps pretty easily and sleeps for long stretches again, thank goodness! One new favorite games when she is in her crib is: throwing her pacifier out of her crib. Generally (I think) she pushes the pacifier through the spot between her bumper and matress. She may also have started tossing it over the side of her bumper. If we go to get her from nap and we can't find her paci we generally just look under the crib and there it is! She also loves to pull down on her bumper so she can see out. It is VERY entertaining to watch her monitor when she is in her crib. The funny party is, she can go from playing like this to being asleep within seconds, literally. We have looked at the monitor and seen her sleeping with her arm holding on to the top of her bumper, crazy girl.
• She is thisclose to crawling (I think). I always say this but she is scooting really well and starting to get more movement forward on her belly. I don't know if I would call it army crawling, it's different. She frequently plants her toes into the ground and gets her but up in the air and then moves forward little by little. It's not army crawling, but it's not up on all fours crawling, it's Bella crawling. Her best motivation for crawling is my cell phone, this girl loves her some technology. We will see what month 8 brings in terms of movement, I think it will be a lot.
• Her favorite phrase right now is "dadadadada." I don't know when we will officially call it her first word, I guess when we can really, without a doubt, tell she is directing it at Rowdy. She has said mama a lot, but not as much recently. She has said baba a lot as well but dada is by far her favorite. But sometimes we can't tell if she is saying it to her duck and our dog, both of which could sound like dada. Of course, Rowdy absolutely loves that she babbles dada all day long :-) She has also really started testing the boundaries of her voice lately, she screams, I mean screams at the top of her lungs. Sometimes when she is frustrated, but also when she is happy. This girl has some lungs on her (as all the customers in babies r us now know because she screamed and babbled all up and down the aisles there recently, not out of anger, out of joy and just flat out fun, she sounded nuts! She is a very vocal little girl right now.

Love that smile!

Wearing dad's hat, she wasn't super excited about it, ha! But she looked so cute that I had to post a picture of it. Plus, how cute are those monkey jammies, love them!

Playing with her train, we spend a lot of our time doing exactly this, playing on the floor with toys.

That's all for now, more pictures and updates to come soon, I promise!