8 Month Update

Another month has come and gone (way too quickly) leaving me with a bouncing 8 month old today!! Charlotte has changed so much these past few weeks. Her personality is definitely starting to surface. We've quickly learned that our lives are going to be filled with constant laughter. She loves to giggle and is definitely a little clown. She's super animated and makes many different, funny noises and facial expressions. The picture above shows her most common grin. She's still scrunching up her face and smiling when she's full of delight. She attracts a lot of attention this way when we are out and about. That and the fact that she has learned to wave and immediately starts flapping her arm before I can pull her out of the car. She has also learned to clap. I love watching her little hands do this. Sometimes they meet in unison and sometimes she ends up slapping her wrists.



As you can see, this month has been full of tasting new foods. It's no secret that Ross and I consider ourselves foodies. We love cooking and trying out new flavors ourselves. Charlotte is always in the kitchen with us. She watches us cook and I always let her touch and smell the food and spices that we are using. This month she tried pears, bananas, carrots, oatmeal, green beans and sweet potatoes. Her top favorite is still peas followed closely by carrots. I'm still making all of her food from scratch and I'm excited to introduce her to more flavors now that her options have expanded. I just got done making blueberries and a mixture of apples & pears with a bit of cinnamon. Just last week her top tooth popped through giving her 3 teeth so far. She wasn't quite sure what to make of this new development and spent days rubbing her tongue across her teeth and even started grinding them against one another. So happy that habit stopped (shudder)!! Her hair has recently really started to fill out as well. She has definitely been rockin' some major cow licks lately which just make me grin. My favorite moments are when she nuzzles against me and let's me play with her hair.



Charlotte is definitely a curious, active, liitle girl. I spend every waking moment trying to come up with new ways to entertain her. Now that Spring has arrived we have been spending oodles of time outdoors. We blow bubbles, we watch the neighborhood kids play, we point out the birds and squirrels, we lay in the yard watching the wind blow through the trees, we take long walks discussing every new thing we see and greeting anyone who walks past us. We love being outside. Her new favorite thing to do is sit in the yard and pick up leaves or blades of grass. She studies each one before dropping it and analyzing a new one. She loves to read and look at books. We have many story times throughout the day. We've started going to the library regularly to check out a few books and even a couple videos. Her first word was mama closely followed by hi. I think she has been working on uh-oh too. We haven't mastered the art of crawling yet, but we are close. She gets up on all fours rocking back and forth, but then flops over and rolls across the room giggling. She loves standing up and even used my leg to pull herself up yesterday. I have to admit it freaked me out a bit. My little baby is slowly slipping away and leaving me with a precious toddler. However I'm really looking forward to this interactive stage. Thanks for stopping by and checking in on Our little Panda. Wishing y'all a sunshiny day!!!