Growing in Leaps and Bounds

Sophie's growth and development - both physically and mentally - is really blowing our minds lately. She is really enjoying her time learning how to stand up and to scale some of the furniture and got not one but two walking push toys for Christmas and she loves them both.

She has also really started pointing at things. She points at the Christmas trees multiple times a day. She knows what they are and when her Daddy reads a Christmas story to her and mentions the Christmas tree, she looks up at our tree and obviously knows what it is. She also is a waving champ and waves bye bye and hi all the time when waved to first. She also waves at the cats when they walk by and she also waves when you just say the words bye bye. You don't even have to wave, she just waves on hearing the phrase. It's pretty amazing to see these changes and new discoveries. We are trying to teach her more baby signs because she obviously can understand a lot right now. She knows the signs for milk and we've started teaching her "all done" in addition to "o's" to represent her cheerios. She has also started to very much dislike her diaper changes and we are convinced that with all the new discoveries of standing and scaling and moving around, she just hates being so confined.

She is still having problems falling asleep. She was doing really well for a few nights there but then we knew Christmas would be hard. Her routines were thrown a bit out of whack and she is definitely off her schedule now. She has a lot of trouble falling asleep on her own again and is crying a lot when we put her down. She also is teething still. This is all a pretty lethal combination all in all. We've had some rough nights these past few nights (4:30am wake up two nights ago and last night we were up at 3am.) It's all sort of a blur. BUT, she is also sweet and adorable and happy for much of the day so for that we are so very grateful. Even with the exhaustion and post-holiday wind-down we are thrilled to have this week to ourselves to just chill out and relax. Jim is off until Jan. 5th so while we may not be getting as much done as we'd hoped we sure are having a wonderful time just being together as a family all day.