Lily is 11 months!

Today Lily is 11 months old. I can't believe how fast the time has gone. She is getting so big and so is her personality! She is such a character sometimes. Lily loves to be the center of attention and when she knows it, she doesn't give it up easily. She gets VERY VERY hyper sometimes too which just adds to it. She wiggles like CRAZY when you hold her. She always wants me to pick her up and then when I do she wiggles so much it drives me crazy so I put her right back down. If I walk by her she will always reach out and snag my pant leg and it makes me have to stop and then she'll pull herself up to me and want me to hold her. She is becoming a very big momma's girl. When I try to hand her off to someone she clings on for dear life! It's so sweet, but really hard when I have to get something done that requires two hands.

Lily pulls up to anything and everything right now. She will walk behind her walking toys and along tables and chairs and anything else she can get her hands on. About a week ago, she learned how to go down the stairs. She has only fallen once down a few steps and didn't get hurt at all. But she has gotten stuck hanging head first down the stairs several times. Just today she has learned how to go down one step head first so when she tries it on the big stairs she has a hard time getting her legs around her to start going backwards after the top step.

Anytime she is outside on the grass or cement she walks on all fours. Apparently she doesn't like the feel of the grass OR scratching her knees on the cement. She can climb up the little kid picnic table and holds onto the rail of the tramp and cries to get on. She loves jumping with Dylan because he doesn't bounce to high for her yet. She giggles and thinks it's so much fun!

Lily is now a pickier eater then her big brother TJ, which until now, I thought was impossible. The problem is, she's not even a year old yet. UGH!!! I will finally find something that I think she will eat and she will take about 3 bites and then turn her head away, hit my hand so the food goes flying across the room OR she will spit it out all over me. Then if I DO get a bite in her mouth she will take it out with her hand and throw it down on the floor so the dogs can eat it. Which also has become one of her favorite things to do. She still doesn't obey very good when I tell her not to do that, but she has started obeying when I tell her not to play with the doggy dishes. For a while there, she would go over to them and dump out all the water. Which although it was a pain to keep cleaning it up, it actually is better then what Dylan used to do. Every time he got a chance to get to the dog's dishes without me seeing him, he'd grab handfuls of dog food and put it into the dog water. We ended up with a LOT of wasted dog food there for a while.

Back to Lily and eating, she does NOT like bland food at all. The only food I can usually get her to eat has some kind of a spice to it. She seems to usually eat beans; pork and beans, refried beans, chili etc. Anything that she decides that she'll eat, she always eats it better if she can feed it to herself. She does NOT like baby food and hasn't for quite a while. I still have quite a few cans left so I still try all of the time to get her to eat it. I usually give the left overs to Dylan. He used to wouldn't eat them because he thought it was only for babies until one day I had a bottle of bananas and when I told him that they were bananas he finally tried it and liked it. Now he always calls baby food bananas. It's cute.

Right now Lily has a bad ear infection in her left ear and a bad sore throat and cough. She just got on an antibiotic a few days ago and is doing quite a bit better now. For a while there she was waking up so many times during the night that I thought I was going to go insane. I told Tommy that I was going to put her in the basement and let her scream all through the night. He didn't go for that, so I am glad she is doing better. In fact, last night she only woke up one time during that night. She got up at 4:44 a.m. and didn't want to go back to bed. Luckily she eventually did.

Lily has started to love splashing in the bath. The problem is, when I bath her and Dylan together, he thinks it's so funny so he starts doing it too, but he splashes a lot more than she does so it gets EVERYWHERE. She also likes to stand up all the time in the bath tub which makes me crazy. She has fallen more than once, but still seems to think it's fun. Lily is still in a playpen in our room. Mainly because I want her to sleep through the night better before I put her in with Tyra. I don't want her waking up Tyra all night long. I think it's a good thing we have her in one though instead of a crib because every time I put her in Dylan's crib for what ever reason she stands right up and acts like she's going to start climbing out or bounces so high I worry that she's going to flip over the edge. I think it will be a while before she learns to climb out of the playpen. I think she might go right from the playpen to a toddler bed because I think she'll learn how to climb out of the crib pretty quickly.

When I first started teaching Lily signs she was doing really good with them, but now she has decided she doesn't want to anymore. Instead she just yells at me for "no" or gets really excited when her answer is "yes" about something. Which makes me so sad. I love when babies sign. I think it's the cutest thing ever!

Lily is now wearing mostly all 12 month clothes. Some 6-9 month one's still fit though. She doesn't like long sleeved shirts. Every time I try putting one on her she tugs at the sleeve forever. The first few times she'd cry about it but she is getting more used to them now. She got to go to the dentist this last month. She has four top teeth and two bottom teeth still. She finally doesn't look like a snaggle tooth anymore. Her two bottom teeth came in first and then her two teeth just outside of her front teeth came in. Then only one of her front teeth came in and grew really fast so she looked like a snaggle tooth forever before her second front tooth finally came in. It looked really silly. She just got weighed at the doctor the other day and is now 22 pounds. She is still in size 4 diapers. She can fit into size three in some brands, but size four holds more so less diaper changing for me! So, we're going to stick with that for awhile. :)

I may have said this before, but I used to only think boys were loud. Boy, was I wrong? Lily is one of the noisiest kids I have ever had, if not the noisiest. She is especially noisy first thing in the morning if I can't get food to her as quick as she'd like me too. Sometimes she will yell at me between each bite. I do have to say that it is VERY difficult getting much done with her around. She hangs at my legs and tugs at my pants and cries the whole time I'm trying to do dishes. If I am walking around the kitchen trying to clean she will follow me around crying for me to pick her up and like I said before, if she snags my pant leg as I go past, she pretty much has me. She loves playing with my keys and OF COURSE my phone. Luckily she hasn't figured out that the toddler lock game is a bad thing for her yet. But Dylan on the other hand screams and throws a tantrum when I put the toddler lock on now. He likes to play "Angry Birds" and then eventually messes with it enough that he downloads things, sends text messages and even calls people for me now and then. Grrr!

Anyway, I sure have loved having this little miss in my life. I can't believe it's already almost been a year. It seems like only a couple months ago I was in the hospital having her. She is still such a miracle to me. If I had the choice I would never ever change the experiences that I have had with adoption, but it's been so neat to have this experience too. Not very often does a day go by that I don't thank my Heavenly Father for allowing me to be able to have this experience. I am so grateful to him for that and for my other four beautiful children and the experiences that came with them. I love them all so much!