Ten months.

I can't believe Javi is so close to his first birthday! He's less likely to sit still these days so the monthly photos are really difficult to take! We all sort of end up in bad moods and because of this, 10 months may be the last photo of its kind. He's 22 pounds, 29.5 inches and he's hard to wrestle. 

Javi's personality grows a bit more every day. He shows signs of happiness, anger, sadness, frustration, and pure joy. When he's elated, he makes giggling sounds repeatedly and sometimes snorts. The more others laugh, the more he laughs and if you smile at him he just thinks the world is smiling at him. Literally... when strangers walk past he expects everyone to stop and smile at him. When people begin to clap... he thinks they're clapping at him!

This past month we made it without Sean for a week. I spent a lot of time with my parents and Javi started his swimming classes. He's loving the water, has since gone under water a few times, floats on his back and has even been "let go" under water and he just bounces back up like a pro. It's amazing. His school turns into a summer camp during the summer so he has water play there too and he needs to bring bathing suits and towels and hats and sunscreen and water shoes... all to school. When he goes off to school in the morning he looks like he's leaving for a long time!

He's had some firsts in the past month like trying watermelon (he didn't like it), drinking water from a straw (he's still mastering this), and eating cheerios (he thinks he's so cool because of this trick). Cheerios came in handy during our family vacation to Seattle this month, too! He did well on the plane, had a few moments of whiney, "what are we doing? why can't I crawl around?" but otherwise slept the whole time. In Seattle we spent a lot of time driving around, going to playgrounds (he still LOVES swings), seeing tourist-y things, watched a movie in a home theater and he went on a ferry! We celebrated his first 4th of July, went to a cookout and to a friend's birthday party at an indoor play space.

He's wearing mostly size 12M or 12-18M clothing and wearing size 4 diapers (though we still have a bunch of size 3s so we squeeze him into those when we're just around the house. The dr. gave us the go ahead to start eating more solids and we try to get him to have 3 meals a day in addition to his bottles. He's starting to want less formula because of this and loves to snack on cheerios and drink water. The doctor also suggested we begin more milk mixed into the formula but we've yet to do it. 

He loves to clap and throw his hands up in the air and wave them around. He squeals and screams and babbles mostly saying da-da. Sean was really excited that his "first word" was da-da until he started calling everything da-da and we realized he's just saying the sounds and is making no association that Sean is da-da. So... there's still hope his first word will have something more to do with me.

He's teething and loves to have anything cold against his gums. We use Hyland's teething tablets which seem to work though they really upset him as they are dissolving. Generally he's a happy guy and when he's crying there's a reason (sometimes we don't know the reason though!).

I have started thinking about his birthday and while I can wait because I don't want him to grow anymore, I'm equally as excited!