11 Months Old

Long time, no post. Our little 11 month old tornado is keeping me VERY busy. Zoe has changed significantly in the past month.

• She is cruising all over the house (using push toys) and I suspect she will take her first solo steps very soon.
• She is very vocal and "talks" all day long. She only says a few recognizable words, but some of them are priceless. My favorite: when asked "what does a lion say" she ROARS in her tiny voice. (It's so damn cute)
• She feeds herself (and the dog) at meals and even uses a fork on occasion.
• She has 8 teeth.
• She's a climber and an investigator...so we've installed lots o' gates around the house in the past month.
• Perhaps the most amazing change, in my opinion, is her emerging personality. Zoe is so happy and joyful. My mom called it months ago-- Zoe is going to be the comedian in the family. She does silly things all the time-- just to see if we'll laugh.
  
  
  
  Here are some highlights from the past few weeks:
  
  We were in Connecticut a couple weeks ago to celebrate my mom's birthday and Zoe met her Uncle Rich (my little brother) for the first time. I wasn't sure how Zoe would react to all of his tattoos, but she was fascinated.
  
  
  
  I watched [in mommy horror] as daddy put Zoe on the big slide at our neighbor's house. I should have known that my litle danger girl was going to love it :-)
  
  

Here she is investigating a mini pumpkin in the yard. We're planning on taking her to the pumpkin patch this week to pick out a big one!



Zoe wakes up happy and smiling every day. She is such a joyful little girl. The only downside to her hair growing....no more Zo-Hawks :-(



On a totally unrelated topic...I had a very cool experience this month. I had the opportunity to do a tattoo...a real permanent tattoo...on a real person. Let me note for the record that I am in no way even remotely qualified or experienced to do a tattoo- which is why this is SO cool. The subject/victim was my brother. He's a tattoo artist, so at least one of us knew what they were doing. He was adding his new niece's name to his ever-expanding body art collection and decided on a whim that his big sis should do the honors. What he failed to consider before making this decision is all of the payback that I owed him for all of the miserable little brother stunts he pulled as we were growing up. Needless to say, my tattoo was more like acupunture (with an ice pick) and he cried like a little girl. (Okay, so he didn't cry...but he did bleed.) We have some video of this event, but I have to edit out all of the expletives before posting :-)