My Little Pudgy Princess

I can't believe how old my little Emma is. It's seems it took ages for Sergito to get to this point and Emma seems to have reached it over night. What point is that you might ask. Well, let me enlighten you. In short it is the point where they should be crawling, but they're not. As a mother, I suffer from a tummy time trauma. In other words, my children do not get enough tummy time because I feel sorry for them and as a result they are crawling impaired. I have tried to be better with Emma than I was with Sergito, but she still resists and I still give in. She doesn't mind being on her stomach, as long as I put the toys right where she can reach them, but if she has to work to get them (which would be the point of putting her on her belly) it becomes a very traumatic experience. I am however extremely amazed at how far my children learn to reach from a sitting position. Here you see Emma, reaching, reaching, reaching. . . and then she just gave up.

So close, and yet so far away!

Emma recently went to the doctor for her 9 month check up. He "encouraged" me to make her work for her toys to help her learn to move around. So in my determination to be a better mother I decided to leave her on her belly and make her work for her bottle. Well this upset her considerably and when Sergito couldn't take it anymore he lovingly handed her her bottle. Much to my distressing surprise, soon thereafter I discovered that Emma did not know how to roll from her stomach to her back. She has done it in the past, but apparently she doesn't know how to do it consistently. I was certain that if I left her to herself, desperation would soon lead her to discover how to roll over so she could drink her bottle, but a few minutes later, this is what I saw:

Emma: drinking her bottle sideways. Not quite what I had in mind, but ingenious none the less.

But she has reached other important milestones such as eating and drinking. Since anything Sergito does is considered cool, sippy cups are very appealing to her and she gets very upset when I take Sergito's away from her. So, I bought her some of her own which she loves and never fails to drench herself with. It's been difficult to convince her to eat anything more solid than baby food consistency, so in order to overcome her distate for solid foods, her father gave her a chocolate chip cookie. As you can see here, it was a big success. However cheerios continue to be a big no no in her book (she'll put anything that's not food into her mouth, but if it's small, edible, and solid - no can do).

Every mother, or at least most, dream of having a little girl they can dress up and put bows in their hair. . . Well I'm no different, but I must add to my dream, that I have always wanted a girl with curly hair (probably because my hair is so straight it won't hold any curl), and yes curly hair was on my list for the ideal husband, lucky me that Sergio fulfilled that requirement:) It seems that in Emma I may have my dream come true because her hair is beginning to curl on the edges, and here is a picture I took attempting to show them off.

Here's my little princess with her first ponytail

(I know it looks more like a fuzzy palm tree, but we didn't have much hair to work with).




Emma - learning how to drive. Cars are one of her favorite toys, again whatever Sergito likes, she likes.

Here she is playing at the museum

Emma has also started acquiring teeth. Here she is showing off her pearly whites with her daddy who always gets the biggest smiles. On second thought the pictue is too small to see her teeth, but it's still a cute one so we'll keep it.

Emma has also been experimenting with her voice. Unfortunately she seems to be most inspired at church. Last week she decided to sing along with the hymn which was great because even though she was very audibly inspired, she stopped as soon as the hymn came to an end. The problem generally comes when someone is trying to give a talk or a lesson and she decides that if they can talk she ought to be able to speak as well, which might not be such a bad thing if she kept to to the cute baby talk, but that's no where near as exciting as screaming. Naturally as soon as we take her into the hallway where it's quite, she no longer feels the need to share. Here's a video of her expressing her melodious voice.