10 months.

**Excuse me while I finally publish old drafts.

Jackie boy,

This is the month you really came into yourself. You are hilarious and opinionated. You finally stopped rolling and started crawling. It has helped you get around faster and also seems to get you into more trouble. Once you figured it out, you got super fast. You are pulling yourself up on all the furniture and walking around the place. You cruise around from couch to table to couch like it's no big deal. You are super brave and with all the bumps and falls, you never seem to cry about them. I try not to overreact about your falls, so when you look at me I give you a little clap and you smile. You instead cry about more practical things like car rides and having socks on your feet. You also have figured out how to use those crib slats to pull yourself up to a stand. It means putting you to bed has become somewhat of a headache for everyone. You stand at the corner of the crib closest to the door watching for one of us to come in (we have a video monitor so we get to see the play by play). Even when you are so tired you can barely open your eyes, you figure out how to roll over and pull yourself up to a standing position. You stand in that corner and cry and cry until one of us comes in to lay you back down again.

Have I mentioned before that you are a bad sleeper? You're a bad sleeper. We've tried the training, and you will not be trained. But we love you, even if you try and stay up late every night. It isn't that you have trouble sleeping through the night, it's the getting you to sleep part that you have trouble with. You are such a night owl, which will prove helpful when you go to college and need to study late into the night, and when you inevitably have a bad sleeper of your own to take care of.

Besides mama and dada, ball was your first word. You would hold up a ball to us while saying it, and now your new thing is saying "ba, ba, ba" over and over. And over. And over. You usually say this while pointing emphatically at something.

You are officially off pureed food. Whole foods all the time now. You love your independence and love to feed yourself. You still eat two fisted, shoveling that food in as fast as you can get it.
The loves of your life are water bottles. I mean it. If you see one anywhere it's "ba, ba, ba, ba" pointing at it until you get it in your hand. You will drink as much water as I'll let you have.
grunting and babbling then a silence means you are up to something. You also love to play with blinds and light switches and the little doing-y door stops. You love to take things out of containers and put them back in again. It distracts your for quite a while, and it's super cute to watch you get so serious.

You like to do these fake laughs. You put on this cheesy face and then give this big hearty chuckle. Your voice is this little raspy thing that I love. When I became a mom I expected to love you unconditionally, but I didn't expect to start crying in the grocery store when you do something sweet or want to take pictures of your every expression. It's a fun ride we're on. Thanks for being a cool kid and teaching me all sorts of things.

Mom