Anna is 8 months old today! As far as I can tell on our horribly inaccurate scale, she’s about 17 lbs. We’ll get her official stats at the 9 month check-up.

We’ve been making a point to be busy lately and get out of the house so we don’t get cabin fever - the weather turned last week and it’s officially, soggily fall. The Community Center here is great - they have a ton of classes and activities, so I’ve signed Anna up for a few things. She is taking a multi-lingual sing-song/dance class. So far, we’ve learned some German nursery rhymes and bopped around a bit. It’s been pretty fun! Her swimming lessons start in two weeks; we’re pretty excited about that. Also, we took her to story time at the library last week and I think we’ll make it a regular thing. She was the youngest kid there by far, but she had a great time. She was so focused on the librarian and the other kids. I figured she would like it since she is so into books right now. Her favorite books are the touchy-feely kinds and the cloth ones that have lots of doodads to play with.

Other than that, she has finally graduated from slithering and doing the army crawl to a real, hand-opposite-knee-big-girl-crawl. Which means she is very into exploring the house and all the bits of stuff that are tracked onto the carpet as well as all the doggy’s fun things. It’s really fun to watch her discover everything. (And yes, Mom, we are baby-proofing everything.) She is learning associations - she gets very excited and jumps and yells when she sees the Cheerios box or the Baby Bjorn. And I’m pretty sure she understands “Doggy”, “Daddy” and “Mama.” At least, she looks at whichever one I’m saying. We do the signs for them and a few other things; I think she understands them, but isn’t doing them yet.

So, things are pretty exciting around here lately. We all of the sudden have a big girl on our hands who is mobile, self-feeding, babbling, babbling, babbling and absolutely delicious.