Has 11 months really passed??

I can't believe Samantha is already more than 11 months old! She'll be a year old in no time and it feels like we just brought her home yesterday. Since the last post (a looonnnggg time ago), Samantha is now cruising around on 2 legs at high speed. She can walk quickly while holding on to furniture and a bit more slowly while holding on to someone's hand. She easily picks things up while standing and can stand unassisted for several seconds at a time. She has several words/sounds, although they aren't perfectly formed (like "muh" for milk and "buh" for bear). She also says "oof-oof" when she sees a dog. She's regularly sleeping 10-12 hours at night now and is almost regularly taking one 3-hour nap a day. She still only has her 2 bottom teeth, and is still a picky eater.

Speaking of which, we are going to transition Samantha to cow's milk in the next few weeks. I'm very excited to not have to pump anymore, especially since Samantha stopped nursing altogether a few weeks ago. We've started introducing her to milk in a sippy cup, and she seems to like that just fine. Hopefully that means she'll easily give up the bottle, but we'll see. We have a freezer full of purees that Sam isn't likely going to ever eat, which is a bummer, but we can feed her most of the food we're eating for dinner now, so that is nice.

As for personality, boy does she have a lot of it! She definitely has her own idea of how things should go and isn't afraid to tell you so. For example, we've had to move Samantha's book shelf into her closet so that at bedtime we don't have to struggle to keep her from grabbing every book off the shelf and demanding to read it (we let her pick 3 or 4 and then only read those, which still makes her mad, but she gets over it much more quickly). Diaper and clothes changes are another struggle that require WWF-like strength to wrestle with her. On the flip side, when she's happy or excited about something (which is most of the time), she squeals with excitement and giggles and is just the cutest little baby.

All in all we couldn't have asked for a better, cuter baby. I think we'll keep her :)

p.s. stay tuned for a post about our bonding leave, including more pics!