1 month until Miriam is 1!

That means she is 11 months old now!  She has grown and changed so much in the last month.  She started crawling, slowly, then decided crawling wasn't good enough.  She started pulling up on things, unsure at first, then started cruising around holding onto furniture.  Now she moves all over the place, both by crawling (very quickly!) and holding onto furniture.  She hasn't taken steps by herself yet, but I'm sure that will be happening in the next couple months.  She can stand up by herself, she's shown us, but doesn't have the confidence to do it very often.  (Last time she did it was unplanned...she wanted to hold on to a toy with both hands, so she let go of the table and was standing.  As soon as she realized that she wasn't holding onto anything, she quickly dropped the toy and grabbed back onto the table.)  And actually, since I started typing this post two days ago, she stood by herself several times today.  She was playing with Mario on the floor and supporting herself against him, then just let go and stood by herself, holding a toy.  She's pretty steady on her feet once she does let go of us!

Her favorite activity these days is destruction.  Basically, she spends her time making our living room (as well as her bedroom) look like they were hit by a tornado.  She loves to pull books off the shelves, diapers off the shelf, toys out of the basket, clothes out of the closet, etc.  In recent days, we have seen some interest in putting toys and clothes back where they belong, so there is hope that she'll eventually clean up after herself!

She's started exploring more finger foods and can feed herself pretty well if we put food on her high chair.  She loves frozen blueberries, cheese, yogurt and sweet potatoes (still).  She gets frustrated sometimes when we want to feed her food with a spoon...she just wants to pick up food and eat it herself!

We flew to Indiana at the end of January for my grandma's funeral.  Mario and Miriam came with me, and it was precious time spent with family, remembering my grandma.  On the day we flew back (January 31), we discovered that Miriam had 4 teeth coming through on the top.  Since then all 4 of those teeth have broken through, and they don't seem to be bothering her as much as when she was teething. 

Here are some photos from the past month of Miriam.  Next time I post an age update about Miriam, it will be that she is a year old!  It is truly hard to believe.  We watched some home videos of her today, and she was such a tiny little thing...not so much anymore!