Early October...

I cannot believe it's October already. This year is going by so fast and before we know it, Zach will be 1!

Zach is still working on mastering a narrow base of support. He will sometimes take a step on his own but isn't ready to walk yet. He loves to get around crawling and is really quite fast on his hands and feet - not the traditional hands/knees. He's still waving bye-bye and occasionally to say hi. We're working on blowing kisses and he'll bring his hand to his mouth when we say "blow kisses" but doesn't have the release down yet. It's very cute though! He'll also give a mouth kiss sometimes when I ask for a kiss - he usually doesn't stop at one though which gets a bit messy. He's doing really well eating - he loves strawberries and bananas this week. He's had chicken, cottage cheese, sliced cheese, broccoli, deli turkey, eggplant, rice, canteloupe, pancakes, waffles, peaches, mandarin oranges, yogurt...I think we're doing a better job giving him a mixture of food than we did with Avelyn. She loves all of the above so we have it in the house where I don't think we did when she was just learning to eat.

Avelyn continues to do well with her writing letters and numbers. She tried her homework on her own on the way to the dentist yesterday and completed it but instead of a 3 she did B's. It's hard to know how much to correct her and push her since she's only 4 and has a whole year to work on writing and really will still work on it in kindergarten too. For now I'm just glad she enjoys it and likes to write her name on everything. We've taken books out of the library for her to "read" - we only need to read them to her once and then she reads them on her own pretty accurately using the pictures and recall of our storytelling. She still loves to play dress-up and her latest activity is to play in her room. She brings up her bucket of "my little ponies" and her doll house and just plays and plays and plays. She'd stay up there all day if we'd let her! Right now she's working on what she wants to be for Halloween - it changes daily - yesterday it was a dragon, this morning it was bat girl and tonight she told me a butterfly. We'll make a decision this weekend so I can start making it!

I went out with Jessica and Rebecca Monday night for girls' night. It was a blast and it felt good to be out without chasing after our monkeys. Of course most of our conversation was about our monkeys but we still had a great time and vowed to go out at least once a month.

That's all for now...