Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving with family and friends. Camila and I enjoyed our Thanksgiving at my parents. My poor dad, he was the only guy there since Fabricio is still in Geneva. Here's a picture of all the girls: my mom, Grandma Bentrup, me & Camila, and Melissa. :) We missed Fabricio a lot, but fortunately he'll be home in just a few weeks. Which means that, yikes, Christmas is only a few weeks away! Camila has been up to several things lately. She just started "clucking" her tongue. I have no idea how she figured out how to do that, because it's not something that I do. Maybe daycare? She also is getting really good at "shushing", which I find adorable. It's a great way to get her to quiet down when she's hyper, because she'll try to imitate me now. :) I'm amazed as she seems to understand some of the animal sounds I've been teaching her. The other night she was reading through her book and stopped on the page with a cow and said "booo" (Camila's way of saying "moo"). She looked at me, almost as if she wanted to make sure she was saying it right. She is still in love with cats (poor Fabricio. I'm afraid he'll lose out on that battle some day. Hopefully there are some good allergy meds for him, or better yet, maybe he'll outgrow his allergies!) She was reading another book of hers yesterday, stopped on the page with the kittens, and gave them a kiss. And of course, whenever we're at my parents she terrorizes the cats by chasing them around. She's pretty quick too, and occasionally gets the cats into a corner which they do NOT like. As a result, Camila doesn't know that cats say "meow". She thinks they say "hiss", and will hiss right back at them every time she sees the cats! Silly girl! Here are just a few pictures of Camila in her Thanksgiving outfit.

A new trick

Camila has been able to push her toys along the floor (either walking on her feet or "walking" on her knees) for the past few weeks. However, this weekend I put her on her ride toy to see what she'd do. After a few minutes she figured out that she can ride it by pushing her feet, in effect going backwards across the room. We spent a good length of time with her riding the toy across the living room, her running into the couch, wall, ottoman, and me having to reposition her so she could do it all over again. :) I think the last picture captured how much fun she was having. ;)

Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!

Just a quick update

Sorry I haven't updated the blog in a while. It's been tougher this time with Fabricio in Geneva. I think it's because the holidays are coming up and I'm sad he's not here to enjoy it (although he will be here for Christmas) and the economy is so horrible right now it's just depressing in general. Anyway, here's a quick update. Camila is always on the go, never in the same place for more than a minute. It's hard to keep her entertained so I can make dinner or clean up in the kitchen. And tonight she stood on her own (unsupported) for a few seconds. Maybe she's closer to walking than I thought? I still think it will be a couple of months, but maybe I'm wrong. I just appreciate that she waits to do things until she's comfortable. For example, she didn't pull herself up to stand until she was comfortable sitting back down again. I've heard stories about babies crying in the middle of the night because they stand up and can't figure out how to sit back down. Fortunately we haven't had that with Camila yet. :) While I'm not too thrilled about this, it's quite amusing. She has no problem identifying "dada", but ask her who "mama" is, and she pats herself. I think it's because I've tried so hard to teach her who mama is by pointing to myself. So, she just turns around and does the same thing, pointing to herself. :) However, she has no problem shouting for mama when she's upset about something or wants me to do/give her something. I think she's yelling at me. ;) I'm also trying to teach her that the cow says "moo". Camila believes a cow says "boo". :) And at daycare today Lori was teaching her to say "shush". She's not quite there yet, but she'll get there. I got her to do it once on the drive home. She's basically done with baby food. SHe doesn't eat any at daycare. I'm not sure what I'm going to do, b/c I have a cupboard full of baby food! Hmmm...I think that's it. Check out the image on the tv. I had Entertainment Tonight on in the background, and I think they were talking about some cele getting plastic surgery. What a perfect moment to take a picture of Camila!

Camila's birthday party

We were able to celebrate Camila's first birthday on Saturday. My parents and sister came down, and we had Camila's favorite dinner - and mine - (pizza), opened gifts, and ate chocolate cupcakes. Yum! (We really just had pizza because it's the easiest!) Since Camila had never had any type of dessert before (except a bite of brownie that I snuck to her one time) I wasn't sure how she would feel about her birthday cupcake. It took her a while to understand that she could eat it, but ended up picking at the frosting and cupcake until she ate almost the whole thing! It was towards the end that she finally decided to pick it up and stuff it in her face. She also got the hang of opening her gifts, but she took her time. We ended up only having her open the gifts from Melissa and my parents, otherwise we would have been there until 2:00am. :) (I wrapped up some gifts that I've already let her play with.) I was also concerned about daylight savings, but it worked out pretty well. We ended up keeping her up until 9:15, since she had her birthday cupcake at 7:30 (yes, I know - what were we thinking?!) With so much going on she didn't even realize that it was an hour past her bedtime, and she slept until 7:30 (new time). Whew! My struggle now is that she is really resisting her 2nd nap. I don't think she's ready to drop it yet (or rather, I'm not ready for her to drop it!), since she can't make it past 10am without her 1st nap. I don't know if it's because Fabricio's home so she wants to play, or if that was just a coincidence. But sometimes she does only take 1 nap at daycare, so maybe I need to accept it and try dropping that nap....

Happy Halloween

Happy Halloween! Here are some pictures of our little cow. :) We spent the day at a local apple orchard (what a beautiful day!) and tried to get some pictures of Camila sitting on the hay bale. Too bad she kept trying to climb off! That night we didn't do any trick-or-treating with Camila. She's just a little too young. But we did enjoy a dinner at Buffalo Wild Wings. Yum! The bummer was that someone took all our candy (we left it in a bowl out front) so we had to scramble looking for stray pieces of candy to hand out to our neighbor!