Cai Alexander: Eleven Months

My little boy is almost one! How did this happen so quickly? I feel like we were just sitting on the couch listening to the voicemail of my nurse telling me I was pregnant!

Cai is a joy right now. Every day he does or learns something new. It makes life SO exciting for us.

Cai can...

• Point our noses. On people, but especially on his stuffed animals which is stinking adorable.
• Climb. On everything. 
• Walk. A few steps at a time so far, but he does more every day. Today he took about five or six steps from one couch to another.
• Sign the word "more" although he's only done it a few times.
• Wave goodbye. And this week he has started doing it without me waving first. He starts when I say, "Say goodbye."
• Communicate what he wants. He points where he wants to go, and has different noises he makes for different things. Technically, he says "mama," but it's not always in reference to me; it really just means I need something.
• Yell. This seems obvious, but he does it for certain things like today he helped me call the dog in.

Cai likes to...

• Feed his food to Cai when he's bored with it.
• Sit at his little table and chairs (which my dad made for me when I was about one and a half) and eat or watch TV.
• Watch TV. I've been careful to limit it, but it's super helpful when I'm getting my coffee and Cai's breakast in the morning and also when I'm making dinner. He particularly loves Sesame Street. When the TV is on a kid's show, he sits perfectly still and is completely enthralled, especially if music is involved.
• Play with stuffed animals.
• Throw Finn's ball for him.
• Greet his Daddy when he gets home from work.
• Be held by his Grandpa Jack.
• Be fed by his Oma (my grandmother). Especially because she tends to give him cookies and has let him try chocolate...twice.
• Be bounced on the couch.
• Climb on things and in things. He likes to crawl inside Finn's crate.
• Chew on straws.
• Press buttons. He can just reach the power button on our Wii, and sometimes stands in front of it and presses it over and over again.
• Pull books of the shelf.
• Eat! He tried shrimp last week and loved it.
• Read. Books about animals Crack. Him. Up. His favorite is Your Baby's First Word Will Be DADA by Jimmy Fallon.

Cai is sleeping a little better than he was before. He is backing to take longer naps (between 45 minutes and 2 hours). He naps twice a day, going down around 10:30-11:30 AM and 3-4 PM. We have had a few nights lately where he has only woken up two or three times, but most nights it's still 4-6 times a night. Last night he only woke up twice, but it took me an hour to get him to stay asleep. I still think a lot of it is due to teeth; even though he has six now, he is still drooling like crazy and chewing on everything. He occasionally stops nursing to chew on my shirt!