Cute Outfits and a little Jailbird

Bella pretty much looks adorable in anything you put her in but she has had some particularly adorable outfits lately! She is my little fashionista! And lately Bella has thought it would be funny to pull down her bumper and throw her pacifier out and look through the crib slats and stick her arms through the slats and pretty much anything that can turn her crib into a toy! In Bella update news: Bella's army crawling is really improving and she is getting so strong! She is working on getting into a crawled position from a sitting position. She has sporadically clapped a few times. She is working on the "How big is Bella" game but mostly she just throws her arms above her head and leaves them there so we haven't really perfected it yet. She think she is absolutely hilarious when she rolls over on her changing table and crawls to her basket full of changing stuff. Needless to say, we have been changing her on the ground a lot! We are just having SO much fun with her lately!

Bella's Halloween costume! Could she be any darn cuter???!? We thought we would give it a practice run last night to get her ready for our church's "Trunk or Treat" tonight. I'm not sure how long she is going to last in the costume but it will be cute for a picture!

Already starting to pull on her hat, hopefully she will keep it on for at least 10 minutes!

Practicing walking, not exactly something she is interested in yet. But she does think its fun when Dad tries to get her to walk and Oreo runs over to play!

Bella thought Oreo was funny!

Love them! So cute!

We had another fun family lunch on Saturday and she had a particularly adorable outfit on! Her little shirt had multi color hearts on it and she had a fun little jean skirt on and then she had some super cute black, pink and white stripey leggings and a little bow! She was so cute and she got quite a few compliments on how adorable she looked!

Such a cutie!

What I saw when I went into get Bella up from her nap, such a goofball! She looks like our little jailbird trying to break free of her crib!

And the other thing she is into right now, chewing on everything! Apparently her bumper is as good as any of her chew toys!

Hey guys! Can you come get me out of here already!

Waving hi (ok she may not have actually been doing this but it looks like it in this picture)

She's Just SO Fun!

I love playing with Bella in the mornings. She is just pure joy! Today we played with all of her toys but right now her favorite is definitely her new play table from Grammy Julia. It has legs that can attach to make it a small table but we took the legs off for now since we loves sitting and playing with it on the floor. One side is a piano and the other is assorted little toys. She loves both but especially loves the side with the piano and a little book above the piano keyboard. She LOVES to turn the pages. She giggles while she crawls to the table every day and giggles while she hits keys and turns pages, its so adorable. In other funny Bella stuff, we have noticed about 3 times now that when our dog Oreo barks, she will make a loud noise back at Oreo, almost like she is barking back at Oreo, such a silly girl!

Just got to her table, so excited to play!!

I just love her face here! She is loving it!

Playing and "reading" her book

Isn't she beautiful?!

Love her a lot!

Ohhh drooly! Also, her little wispy hairs flying out on the left make me laugh! One day you will have hair Bella!

She was VERY fascinated with the camera!

And as I was playing with the pictures I loved this picture in color but I also loved it in black and white and since I almost never do black and white, here is my sweet Bella. And no, we have not given her lash extensions, those are just her incredible eyelashes!

Homecoming!

This weekend we went back to our high school that we both attended. The high school where we met (though we didn't date while we both attended, only while I was still there). We hadn't been back since last year's homecoming when I was pregnant and it's always strange venturing back and seeing how the school has changed since we were in school and every year feeling older and older and seeing fewer and fewer people we know. Now the people we know there are friends that are teachers, no students, so weird! It has been 1o years since Rowdy's senior homecoming, yes 10, I may or may not have rubbed that in a few times to make him feel old, or make me feel less old :-) It's just so strange to have grown up at this school (I started going there in 5th grade and Rowdy when he was in elementary school also) and to be back there with our daughter. How did we get to be old enough to have a child? Seriously? Shouldn't we be going to the homecoming dance?!

Bella and I hanging out by the field. She was so sleepy, up past her bedtime but so cozy just cuddling with me.

Rowdy, Bella and I back at our high school!

She's Such a Big Girl!

Bella is changing in so many ways, and so fast! Here are some things that make her a big girl this week: starting to crawl, standing up so well! So she is just starting to do what I would call a version of crawling, to be more specific, it's "Bella crawling." Below you will see the anatomy of a Bella crawl. Also below, are pictures of Bella standing up in her crib. Now I must confess, these are staged. She did not pull up to a standing position. But she has been reaching for the top of her crib and grabbing things (like an extra pacifier I left there during her nap) and bringing them down into her crib. No more leaving things there! Also, a clear sign that we need to lower the crib. Here are Bella's big girl pictures....

Getting ready to make her move...

She sees what she wants.....

Making a first big push towards the item....

Biiiiigggg reach....

Making her BIG move!

Ok almost there....

Success!!! And you may be wondering what she was working SOOOO hard for??.....

Daddy's old cell phone, yes, her best crawling motivation is a cell phone, terrible!

Sweet success!

Big girl standing up in her crib

So sweet!

Love that face!

When did she get so big????

She loved being such a big girl!

Isn't She Lovely

I've said it a million times, and I know I will say it at least a million times more, she is so gorgeous! My sweet friend Jenny let me borrow her camera today and I got some cutey cute pictures of Bella. I could just take pictures all day long, which is basically what I did. So these will be Bella's "8 month old" pictures. There are a ton, sorry for picture overload but really, isn't that what this blog is all about?! :-)

Love her!

Blowing raspberries, she does this A LOT!

Sweet giggling girl

Chewing on those fingers, she has been up to this a lot as well

Such a big girl!

Yum!

More raspberries!

Love her pretty eyes

Hi there!

Playing with her moo cow, this is a great distraction during diaper changes!

Pretty girl

She's so funny!

On her third round of blowing raspberries in just this sitting!

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!