"10"

Luci May is 10 months old today.
As I was thinking about writing this post, I was reminded that I didn't commemorate my other 3 children's birth date each month during the first year. I started feeling a bit bad about that. I did keep a journal for each of them. Tate has a lot of entries, chronicling most of his firsts. Em's is not quite as full, but respectable. And Jack's journal is just plain pitiful.

Here is an excerpt from the third entry in the journal. He is 14 months old. It reads, "Let me try to remember the milestones of your first 14 months...Okay, I don't know when you started rolling over. Or when you got your first tooth. Or even when you started crawling." Poor, neglected child. In my defense, my Dad died that year and we moved across the country. Plus, I had a two year old that I was trying to keep from drinking tylenol and wiping poop on the walls. Who had time to journal?

So, should I feel guilty that Lulu now gets a blog post the 9th of every month? Naa. It's not like my other kids are complaining about the attention Lulu receives. They are part of the reason she gets so much attention. Case in point: I found this creation today lovingly made by a big sister...
Plus, that's just the way it is. I'm a blogger now and writing posts like this are in the 10 commandments of Blog Land. Sure, I wish I had written down more and taken more pictures when the others were little. But it doesn't mean I treasure those memories any less. Maybe I treasured them more because I was just living them, instead of thinking about how to blog about them. Who knows? I do know that most of us moms dish out heaping plates of guilt on ourselves and I'd like to cut back on that in my life. Maybe that can be my holiday diet.

So without further adieu, I give you Lulu Fest: the 10 month edition...
This has definitely been a month of exploration because this little crawler is on the move. And fast. Lulu would like to recommend the top toys of 2009 that she has discovered...

(The dog's water dish)

(A sifter, found in the toybox kitchen cabinet)

(the onions in the other toybox pantry)

(paper or wrappers, any kind will do)

(the laundry basket)

(Mommy's hoodie strings...our version of apron strings)

(the doingy door stopper thing)

And the number one toy of 2009: a wet diaper. No picture of that because of course she has never found that laying in the middle of the living room floor and tried to eat it.

No matter where she roams and what she tries to get into, before long she always ends up here...
clutching onto my legs. It melts me.

While we are on the subject of how she has the ability to melt me into a little puddle, she still does the "flirty": her little head tilt and coy smile. I was in a panic a couple of weeks ago because I thought "the flirty" was gone forever. For about 4 days, she stopped doing it. Even Gunga couldn't get it out of her. It turns out that Lulu doesn't feel too flirty when she has a cold. I guess it's hard for anyone to be flirty when you have snot constantly dripping out of your nose. Now that the cold is gone, the flirty is back...And I am happy. When she's 16, I probably won't be as excited about her being flirty.

My sweet friend Rhonda, met Lulu for the first time recently and said "It's like her face was made to smile." I couldn't agree more...
Love that smile. Love that baby.