Bella (almost 1) Playing in the Bath

Bella is almost 1 and she is constantly entertaining us. She does things just because she knows they are funny and will make us laugh, what a silly girl! She absolutely loves bath time and has recently begun drinking the bath water. It's the strangest and funniest thing! She will dip her face into the water and take a sip and she will usually look up at you after and smile or laugh because she thinks she is hilarious! The drinking isn't until about the 1 minute mark but I just thought she was so darn cute that I put the whole video up. A first birthday update coming this week, and lots of partying, tears (on my part), and celebrating our sweet baby girl!

Low Key 2011

So far 2011 has been filled with lots of family time and low key hangouts and we have been really enjoying it. So far the weather has been pretty warm for January, some might call it "beautiful" and while I have to agree I still would prefer it if it were a bit cooler. We have been enjoying lots of play time at the park with Bella, she loves playing with the leaves and watching the big kids on the playground. We did get a few really cold days and Bella even got to experience her first snow fall, and in Arizona! It was so fun to bundle her up and enjoy the day with her and see the snow falling in our neighborhood.

Sweet girl enjoying the park

She would carefully inspect each leaf and then hold up her favorites to show me

Here she is picking out her favorite leaves

More inspecting of the leaves

Having some fun in the grass!

Nothing better than some snuggles and kisses from Dad

All bundled up on the snow day, heading to enjoy a lunch just the 3 of us!

11 Months Old!

Bella is 11 months old! I just can't believe we only have one month (even less really) until she is 1! I find myself clinging to all the things that still make her my little baby but baby phase is quickly disappearing and 1 year old Bella is quickly emerging. She is getting so big and there are many days I feel like my heart may just burst with how much love I have for her! As much as I want to keep her tiny forever I can't wait to see all the changes that 2011 will surely bring. I can't find my camera today (I'm sure its burried in the diaper bag or in Bella's room or something, so today there is a sneak peak of some of the awesome pictures Jenny Spires took for us at Christmas. Bella had a 103 degree fever when we got home from pictures and may have been a little woozy from the meds she was on but we still managed to get a few smiles from her. Did I mention Jenny Spires is amazing?! Check her out here. And now, on to the fun updates about Bella at 11 months and pictures....

• Since about Christmas, Bella has made a lot of leaps and bounds in the gross motor skill department so that has been fun/challenging! She now gets in and out of the sitting position easily and constantly (she could do it before but was a big scaredy cat for some reason). She also could pull up before but would only do it sporadically and now she is constantly doing it and I will frequently find her standing up in her crib....too bad she doesn't know how to get down yet. She can fall to her butt but it usually freaks her out.
• She is filling out a bit, she will always be tiny compared to other babies her age but she is huge to us.
• She LOVES to share with mom and dad. She will play with a toy, maybe chew on it a little, and then hold it out to us, offering us to take it. We take it and she lets us examine it and play a little and then she usually holds out her hand to take it back, she's so dang cute!
• Rowdy apparently is the master of teaching her to make sounds. He taught Bella to say "uh oh" and to "roar" when playing with the lion. She will do "uh oh" with me occasionally but I have yet to experience to "roaring."
• She also loves to make a sound that sounds super duper inappropriate, it sounds like the bad version of "oh shoot", maybe one day we will get it on video and share it, but for now you can let your imaginations wander to how hilariously inappropriate it sounds.
• She had her first big night away from mom and dad on New Years Eve. She spent the night partying with Grandma and Grandpa and by all reports had a great time. We had a fun night out but as soon as we woke up we were pretty much ready to go get her and play.
• She started singing and dancing to Backyardigans (as seen in the last post) and its pretty darn cute. She also dances to a lot of different music she hears if she likes the beat :-)
• Everything in her world is "dada" sometimes a few other sounds but mama only pops up occassionally.....it seems to come and go for some reason. I keep trying to find the differences but most of the time a lot of it just sounds like "dada"
• She is funny and she knows it. She will frequently do things to see if we will laugh and if we do she will do it more and exaggerate it a little for effect. What a little drama queen we have on our hands!

Love her so much!

Beautiful eyes!

Silly girl! I wish I could put her in this outfit every day, she was so incredibly cute!

Bella Sings to Backyardigans

Bella has always loved The Backyardigans. She would always get so excited when the theme song would come on. Well now, she dances and sings along. You only get a little taste of her awesome dance moves in this one (it's where she shakes her arm around) but she loves to "whisper sing" along with the theme song. She does it pretty much every time now and so far we have only noticed her doing it to the theme song and she usually does it in the same parts! Love her teeny tiny sweet little voice!

Bella's First Christmas

We had such a wonderful and blessed holiday season this year! Having a child during the holidays is really the best thing ever! It just makes everything more fun. Rowdy took off starting December 23rd and doesn't go back until the new year so we are really enjoying some family time at home. We had a lot of fun going to parties and our church's wonderful Christmas Eve service where some good friends of our's directed/starred in A Christmas Carol and just enjoyed being with family and eating a lot of good food! We, of course, forgot our camera at the party the night before so our pictures of Christmas morning at our house and at Rowdy's mom's house are all on his phone, there will be another post with those. All the Christmas morning pictures below are from my parent's house. These pictures basically tell the story of our Christmas season.

We started out Christmas Eve with a family walk around the neighborhood. We got Bella all bundled up and really just enjoyed some relaxing time together.

Bella helped us get some of her Christmas clothes ready. She practiced wearing her little Santa hat too.

Our little princess at our church's Christmas Eve service. She did so great snacking on Cheerios and watching the show. She started to get antsy because all she wants to do right now is crawl and climb on things so Rowdy decided to walk with her about half way through but it was a wonderful show!

Before the show Bella took turns sitting on everyone's laps. Here she was sitting on Daddy's lap.

Here she is with Uncle Matt

Bella and her boyfriend Micah

Aren't they just so cute together!

Not exactly the happiest face, she was ready to be picked up but the picture showed her fun outfit the best. Oh how I loved dressing her for Christmas!

Bella with Grandma and Grandpa

Trying to get a good picture of the 3 of us. Bella wouldn't stop chewing on her hand so we went with it.

Love my family

Grandma Valley and Bella. She decided to ditch the bow for the Christmas Eve party and decided the Santa hat was just way cooler.

Opening some Christmas presents.

So many presents, so little time!

Bella and I checking out her presents

She LOVED ripping the bows off the presents and tearing the paper and shredding the tissue paper. It was basically baby heaven.

So excited about her new walker.

Trying out her new walker, she really liked it, and especially liked that she could put some Cheerios on the tray and see everything.

SOOOO excited about her new chair from Grandma and Grandpa! She loves climbing in/on it!

Merry Christmas sweet Bella!

Our Little Troublemaker

As Bella gets older and more mobile she gets more inquisitive and curious. Those are the nice ways of putting it. I might have said she was a terrorist that keeps dropping little bombs in our house. I frequently spend my days following her around from closet to cupboard as she rips everything out and once she gets bored I put it all back and then we do it all over again. But I seriously love to watch her little mind try to figure out what all these new little things that she finds are. The other day she went through all of my headbands and inspected each one carefully and then moved on to the next and I can't help but picture her wearing those headbands and looking pretty darn cute. Here are a few pictures of her being our "inquisitive and curious" little girl.

Momma left the computer unattended on the couch and Bella is obsessed with electronics and especially the ones she sees mom use like her cell phone and computer. She gets so excited when she is allowed near the computer but it is always short lived because as soon as she gets it she starts slamming her hands on the keyboard and inevitably we spend time after trying to figure out how in the world she: opened that/locked that/how the heck did she change that?

She figured out how to open cabinets and doors and is very interested in it. Any time she sees anything that looks like it is a door that opens she tries and gets irritated if it won't open. This is our pantry. On the bottom is all the tupperware, leftover shopping bags, and miscellaneous plastic type things. Basically, baby heaven.

And this is an example of cabinets taht need to be locked up.....in here she found the blender. Not exactly baby friendly.

Just another day pulling everything out of the pantry.

And this one she is actually totally supposed to pull everything out of, it's her toy basket (we need a bigger toy basket/more toy baskets since you can see we have been using a huggies box as additional storage....classy)

Double Digits! Bella is 10 Months Old!

Isabella is 10 months old! We are just loving every second with her. There is something about having a child around at the holidays that makes them so much more fun! Even if Bella doesn't understand this year we know she still loves how pretty our Christmas tree looks! I can't believe that this month last year we were having a baby shower for her. How has it been a year? Two months and counting for party planning!! Eek! She is getting so big and changing every day! Here are some updates on Bella:

• We had our first big trip with Bella this past month. We went to Wisconsin to visit Rowdy's family and also took a fun little quick trip to Chicago. She did great on her very first flight!
• Our first trip led to our first real illness. Bella started out with a stuffy nose and it progressed to some chest congestion and then she completely started refusing fluids. And of course, the dreaded fever, so we went to the doctor and they confirmed that Bella had the flu. Boo! That's all I can say about having a sick baby, it is NOT fun! The funny part was she really was such a trooper and was generally in a good mood as long as you weren't trying to make her drink fluids. I think we are finally starting to get back on track after that and I hope our next illness is a long way away!
• Bella seems to really prefer "real" food as opposed to purees now. She will still eat her purees but she loves to feed herself. She is very adventurous with food too which I love! She seems to really love garlic (good little Italian girl!). She had her first experience with pasta and red sauce, she seemed to really like little pieces of bread with pesto, she tried hummus (didn't seem to be her favorite) but she pretty much loves to eat whatever is on my plate. The best was on Thanksgiving. Grandpa gave her just a taste of his cheesecake and she LOVED it! She couldn't get enough of it and would start anxiously shaking her hands at him if we wasn't getting the spoon full of cheesecake to her mouth fast enough. The whole time I was trying to mentally run through all my books to figure out if she was actually allowed to have cheesecake (aside from the obvious over-exposure to sugar....oh well, it was a holiday) but I couldn't, in the moment, come up with a problem and she never had any sort of allergic reaction and I think it may have been the best day of her life! Seriously, she looked like she was in heaven while she was eating that cheesecake!
• She loves to play the "how big is Bella" game now.
• She claps......all the time :-) It's the cutest thing ever. And when she does somethigng "good" she claps for herself and looks at you like, "come on...that deserves a clap!"
• She seems to be starting to understand "mama". She still babbles mama and dada constantly for everything but I have seen her actually say mama and look around for me, I absolutely love it!
• We are getting our first little tastes of her "will." She definitely lets you know if she doesn't want certain foods we are feeding her. She holds her hand up in front of her mouth and turns away. And we have experienced a few occassions of little "tantrums." You can't really call them tantrums yet, thank goodness!! There have just been a few times where she has something that she wants and maybe isn't supposed to have and we go to take it and give it back to someone or put it away and she protests and makes sure you know she isn't happy about it. Thankfully these are momentary and very rare but I can see what lies ahead for us when she can start using her words!
• She is such a busy body. She is all over the house and seems to really love cords. New forms of baby proofing are happening all the time around here!
• She just had her first "good day" in the church nursery. We haven't really left her in there much, not because we don't love the church nursery staff, but because she usually would freak out. So generally she is only in there if I am going to be working in there or my mom is going to be working in there. Today she went in there all by herself and lasted the wholes service!! It was great! Usually I am just waiting for our number to come up on the screen that pages us to let us know that our child needs us but not today! They said she was the star of the nursery and did great and didn't cry or anything! Of course, right when she saw me she started crying! Poor little thing! But it was nice for Rowdy and I to both be able to sit all the way through a whole service together.
• No walking in this house, but she is getting stronger every day and each day she manages to do something new and amazing!
• Her love affair with cheerios continues. She would drop what she is doing at any given point in the day to eat cheerios, she is obsessed.
• She is the LOVE of our lives and seriously, her laugh is just the best thing in the universe. She cracks us up every day!

I mean, can I squeeze that sweet little face!

LOVE her!

I just love the many "looks" Bella gives!! She is so expressive with her face and definitely has a little personality. We like to say she is "sassy"!

Sweet little face!

Doing her favorite thing right now "clap clap"

This is what nap time looks like with a super sick little baby. She was SO exhausted! Poor little thing, I had to go in to get her up from nap early because we had her doctor's appointment and she could not be woken. I turned the lights on in her room, turned the humidifier off, took pictures WITH flash, started slowly whispering Bella and increasing my volume, trying not to startle her, started rubbing her back and finally had to say her name at like full volume and she finally woke. I almost never get pictures of her sleeping because she usually wakes up the second I walk in the room so this was extra fun for me because I LOVE watching her while she sleeps, she is so peaceful!

This picture just cracks me up. She looks so tiny sitting on this big couch! This was on Thanksgiving before we went to feast on yummy turkey.

Our family on Bella's First Thanksgiving!

Helping Daddy hang ornaments on Bella's first Christmas tree.

Love this picture of Rowdy and Bella

Helping get the ornaments out of the boxes

Silly girl!

Love my sweet girl!

I can't get enough of that smile!

Holding on to the tree, she loved it!