Wonder Parenting: Double Digits: Retta at 10 Months

Woah, wait, how did this baby get to be 10 months old already?!! Seriously, only two months until I'm baking a little baby cake?! Ugh, it's great to see your baby thriving, but little people are great measuring sticks of time passing. At least I can look at her and think about all the good stuff that's happened to us because of her over these fast 10 months.

Retta is full of it at the moment....chomping on anything in sight to get those two top front teeth to break through. Our coffee table now has a cute little bite-mark border around the top edge, as do most of our books. Over the past month I've retrieved a giant ball of cat hair, multiple wood chips and pieces of bark, a tube of paint, a tube of diaper ointment, and a shard of glass from our daughter's mouth (I really do watch her vigilantly, I swear!). She has developed lightning fast Go-Go Gadget arms as well- while riding around the house in her baby carrier, she flings an arm out and grabs whatever is in sight, like a blender jar full of smoothie ingredients. Retta and the cat's food dish also seem to share some sort of magnetic relationship, and in the last week she has banged her head on more objects than I can count. It seems like nearly every day I am wondering if I need to take her to the E.R., or at the very least invest in a bouncy house for our living room that she could just bop around in. As our neighbors like to remind us, "It's all about containment right now!" So true, so true. When we are going somewhere and I finally have both girls strapped in their carseats and have that momentary piece of mind knowing that they can't get into something and hurt themselves, I feel so at peace. After we buckle the girls in, Aaron and I have started joking, "We have achieved containment folks!"

The wonderful thing is that the little grins and giggles, the waving, the blowing kisses, the wild tub splashing, and the peekaboo more than make up for all the baby chasing. Every chance I get I find myself drinking in that baby smell and that soft baby fine hair that's just starting to get a little curl to it, and kissing those cherub cheeks... and every time I hear, "mmma mma, ma-MA, MAMA!" I want to capture those cute sounds in a bottle and keep them close to my heart for all of time.