12 months

I've been meaning to write this post all month!  Claire is now 1 year old!  I also failed to take 12 month pictures of her, so I am just using her birthday photos.  Here is our sweet little 1 year old:

12 month facts:

• At 12 months Claire was 19 lbs and 28 inches.  
• Claire understands a lot more of what we say... she knows what I'm talking about when I ask her if she wants milk, wants to get dressed, go outside, wear a bow, eat, give a hug, or if she wants her pacifier. 
• She is learning more body parts and will point to her hair, eyes, nose, face, and head.  
• Sometimes when I blow on her food she will blow on it too.  
• She loves to open and close the cupboards and tries to pull things out.  
• She has started to stand by herself for a few seconds without holding on to anything.  
• Claire knows how to sign "more". 
• She added a few new words to her vocabulary including "nana" for banana and "papa" for grandpa. 
• Claire loves giving Dan and me big cheesy grins and we love it!
• Claire gets so excited when she pushes her walker around the house...  in fact, she likes pushing lots of things so she can walk including her play table, kid chairs, her stroller, and the laundry basket.
• She is very busy and is usually always moving, especially when I'm trying to change her diaper or her clothes.  
• Sometimes when we are done praying it sounds like Claire says "amen" too.  
• Claire likes to laugh when we laugh.  
• Claire climbed all of our stairs (which is a lot!) all by herself. 
• She loves climbing on our treadmill even though she knows she's not supposed to.  
• Claire has these 2 toy phones and she always throws them down the stairs.  Every single day!  
• She loves books with flaps she can lift.  
• Claire says "bye bye" a lot and sometimes "hi".
• When she is done eating she throws her food on the floor.  
• She loved all of the attention she got at her birthday party.  
• Claire ate her whole cupcake at her birthday and was so excited about it!  

We love Claire so much!  This year went by so fast.  She is such a fun, sweet little girl.  We love her cute personality and are amazed at the things she learns.  We are so happy she is in our family!  

1

Happy Birthday to our sweet, beautiful baby Claire!  We love you soooo much!  You have brought so much joy into our family this past year.  Your name means "light" and you truly are a light in our family.  We feel so blessed to be your parents.  Hope you've had a very fun 1st birthday!!!

Love,
Mom & Dad :)

Almost 1!

For Christmas I got a DSLR camera, something I have wanted for a while now.  I really haven't had a chance to use it, but today I finally decided to read the manual (as well as lots of online tutorials) and set up a little birthday photo shoot with Claire.  I purchased a new lens for my camera after talking to a few photographer friends and I attempted to take some photos of sweet Claire.  I'm no professional, but these pictures are definitely an upgrade from my usual iphone photos.

Here's a sneak peak at what I got:

i love this cute little face!

Can you believe she'll be 1 in 10 days???  Time flies!  In fact, today was her due date.  More birthday pics to be posted on her actual birthday :).

11 months

How is my baby almost 1???  This year has gone by so fast!  This past month Claire learned a lot too.  She's got lots of new skills to show off.

Of course the only smiling photo is the one with her hand in her mouth.

11 months!

I have to post the photo with the bow in her hair.  Of course she promptly removed it right after I snapped the photo.  I wish she would keep it in!

11 month facts:

• At the beginning of this month I would say to Claire "can you clap?" or "can you wave?" and she would do the actions I was asking about.  I didn't even know she knew what they were called without seeing the action.  It really surprised me!  
• She also understands "hi" and "bye".  If you tell her to say "hi" or "bye" she will wave.  
• Speaking of waving, Claire loves to wave!  Especially at kids (like every kid at church).  She always waves at Dan if we are walking out of a room and he is still in the room we are leaving.  It's super cute.  She also knows to wave when Dan leaves for work.  
• One other thing about waving, whenever I'm on the phone Claire will usually wave.  I think she gets confused because we often FaceTime different family members, so she thinks whoever I am talking to can see her.  
• When we tell her to give kisses she smacks her lips.  
• Sometimes when we pray Claire will clasp her hands together during the prayer (mostly at dinner).
• She is pretty much over baby food and just wants to eat what we are eating.  
• She loves bread, bananas, turkey, beans, and avocado.  
• She loves reading the Very Hungry Caterpillar book because it has little holes she likes to stick her fingers in.  She's also found the holes in her nose and puts her fingers in those too :).  
• This past month Claire got 2 more teeth!  Making a total of 4 teeth.  I thought she would get her 2 upper middle teeth, but she actually got the ones on each side of the middle.  
• During Christmas she really loved looking at Christmas lights.  We took her to one house where you tune your radio to a certain station and their lights flicker to the music and she loved it.  It kept her attention for a good 10 minutes!
• She likes toys that she can open and close.  
• Claire loves to pull items out of containers.  One of her favorite activities is pulling everything out of the diaper bag.  She also loves to pull all of her toys out of their bins and throw them all over her room. She does the same thing with her laundry too.  And every time I put my makeup on she has to take all of my makeup out of my makeup bag. 
• She has 2 toy phones and puts them up to her ear.  
• Claire really likes other kids.  Even kids bigger and older than her.  She is always crawling over to them to see what they are doing and wants to be right in the middle of it all.  
• She did not like Santa and cried when she met him.
• She knows the words "hair" and "nose" and will usually point to them.  
• Claire has started to pull out her books and look at them by herself, it's adorable.  She loves flipping through them.  She is also getting better at playing with toys by herself.  
• We have some play food in our basement and I was pretending to cut it and eat it and Claire copied me!  She made eating noises and all.  It was so funny.  She is getting pretty good at imitating.  
• A couple of times she has said "ba ba" for "bye bye".  She also says "pup" for "up".  
• Claire had her very first Christmas and got a walker, new clothes, textured balls, a big stuffed dog, books, and a lady bug ball popper. 
• The worst part of the month was when Claire got the stomach flu.  It was a sad few days.  

Claire is learning so much!  She is always surprising me with what she knows.  I really can't say it enough how much we love this sweet girl and are so grateful to have her in our family!  

Christmas

I know I am so behind on blogging!  Here are pictures of our Christmas.  We stayed in St. George and had a fun time spoiling Claire and seeing Dan's family.  I also went to see the movie Frozen with my mother in law and sister in law.  It was the first time I had been to the movies since Claire was born.  It was really cute too!

How perfect does Claire look in this picture???  Dan looks pretty good too ;).  Claire is showing off her new Christmas dress.  I'm sure the headband only lasted long enough for the photo to be taken. 

On Christmas eve we started a new tradition where we would try a restaurant we had never been to.  We went to this Chinese restaurant called Panda Garden.  We rarely get Chinese so we thought we'd do something different and we were pretty sure it would be open Christmas Eve.  We ended up loving it (and I rarely like Chinese so this is a big deal).  It is for sure going to be our Christmas Eve restaurant from now on (and probably more often than that).

After dinner we headed to Dan's parents for chocolate fondue, acting out the nativity, and opening Christmas pajamas.  

  

Family photo on Christmas eve!  I think Claire was waving.

Claire getting ready to open her pajamas.

She was pretty good at pulling the paper out.

In her new penguin jammies!

With cousins all in their pajamas.

When we got home that night we had one more gift for Claire to open.  We decided to start another tradition, on Christmas eve our kids will get a new Christmas book to read together in their new pajamas.

Claire reading her new book with daddy.

Claire went to sleep easily that night and woke up around 8 on Christmas morning.

Claire really liked pulling everything out of her stocking.

She likes ripping paper, so the unwrapping part went pretty well for her.

Checking out her new walker.

Yay Claire!  She doesn't really like pushing the walker too much, she just wants to play with the front.

We had a really great Christmas!  It was so much fun having Claire here to enjoy it with us.  I can only imagine it'll get even more fun as she gets older.