Frankie at 8 months

Okay, so this post is about three weeks past due, but I wanted to post pictures of Frankie's 8 month photo shoot:



Where to begin? At 8 months this is what Frankie's up to:

• She's got a tooth! And it appears that the another one of the bottom and the top front teeth are on their way.
• She's crawling with the best of them. Okay, so she can't keep up with Nathanael, but I think we can finally call what she's doing proper crawling - she's past the army crawl stage.
• She's starting to cruise - I think that's the term - where she pulls herself up (usually with a little help), and takes steps while holding on to furniture (and Mommy perched nervously behind her ready to catch her).
• She can move from her crawl position to a sit, which, when she first figured out how to do, resulted in several sleepless nights for all of us. She'd get in a sitting position in her crib, and then forgot how to get back down, so would cry until we came and rescued her.
  
• She can wave, which sometimes she does at perfect strangers.
• Her favorite foods are Cheerios, yogurt and oatmeal, green beans, and apples.
• She is a very deliberate child. My dad noticed this when he was visiting, and it's one of the things I want to remember about Frankie at this age. Maybe she's always be deliberate, but at least right now she doesn't like to do something until she's sure of herself. She'll try it, and work on it, she's just careful about it.
  
• She likes her personal space. This one cracks me up. The two other babies she spends the most time with, Nathanael and Hannah, love to grab at Frankie's head, arms, legs, socks, whatever they can reach. Frankie gets really mad when they do this. Hannah's not crawling yet, and Frankie has figured out how to quickly move in, grab the toy Hannah's playing with, and crawl away before Hannah can lick her forehead (Hannah's preferred method of 'playing' with Frankie).
• She can find the one item on the floor that she shouldn't put in her mouth and put in her mouth. How do kids do this?
  

Frankie's favorite cheese is Brie, which turns into a sticky paste after she's been trying to pick it up for a while. Notice how she's gotten clumps of it all over her cup, and then cheerios have stuck to the Brie. It reminds me of one of those home-made bird feeders we used to make as kids that were pine cones covered in peanut butter and then rolled in bird seed (that really just went straight in the squirrels' bellies)