Joel is 10 Months Old!

My sweet Joely Poly is 10 months old! Yeesh! Not a whole lot has changed with our littlest man since he turned 9 months, he has mostly just improved and mastered all the skills he already had. Cruising along anything he can pull up on is his favorite past time, and I am convinced he could walk if he felt the urge :). He can stand pretty well, but always sits down and crawls if he wants to get somewhere and can't reach anything to hold onto. He can get anywhere he wants to VERY quickly by crawling, so I think he may just keep cruising and crawling to get around for a while longer.

Joel continues to be more and more vocal and has found his LOUD voice! Yelling at his big brother to get him to laugh or just get his attention is super exciting. His favorite time to scream is during meals where he will often let our long strings of AHHHHs to show his love for all things edible. Thankfully he remains a great eater and will eat almost anything you put in front of him in surprisingly large amounts. If he is unhappy you can almost always fix the problem with a little snack...just like his brother and Daddy. He also seems to be on the verge of adding words to his babbling and we often think he said things such as: bye bye, dog, more, all done, hi, and cracker. None of these words are easily understood or often used yet, but he is making so many more sounds now and at seemingly appropriate times...I can't wait to hear his sweet little voice start to communicate with words!

He won't have another check up with the doctor until after his birthday, so I won't have any new stats for a while. However, I can really tell he is growing because he is taking long naps, sleeping ALL NIGHT and eating as much as his very hungry big brother. His little leggies are getting longer (and his pants getting shorter) and he seems to be slimming up a bit. If he keeps it up he is going to keep measuring taller and bigger than his brother (which is surprising because Levi is always on the big side for his age). I have a feeling it won't be long and I will be the smallest person in the house. I like the sound of that :)

A "normal" day in the life of 10 month old Joel goes a little like this: wake up around 7:30am, nurse and then eat some breakfast (fruit and cheerios or oatmeal usually), nap #1 around 9:15am usually lasting 1.5-2 hours, wake up and nurse, lunch around noon (usually 1 fruit, 1 veggie, cheese and/or meat and a carb), chase brother around the house and explore anything he can get into, nap #2 around 1:30 or 2pm usually lasting 1-1.5 hours, wake up and nurse, play OUTSIDE!, dinner around 6pm (whatever we are all having...even with only 4 teeth he can eat practically anything that you chop up into cm cubes), bath around 7:30pm, nurse one last time (usually more of a snack), then if he isn't too sleepy books, and finally bed with big brother at about 8pm

I cannot believe that in two short months we will be throwing a birthday party for Joel! I feel like I was just pregnant, yet at the same time he has blended into our family so well that it often feels like there have always been the four of us in this house. Joel continues to amaze us, teach us, and cause us to love more than we thought possible. One of the two biggest ways we feel overly blessed by our God!