My little Annabelle has the sweetest smile...

Dear little Annabelle, won't you stay awhile?*

I can't believe she's already 8 months old. She's calmed down a little, but Annabelle still has her days of endless screeching. She’s back to good sleeping, so I can’t complain. On Tuesday, she took a 4 (!) hour nap, and has slept through the night 3 nights in a row. Now that I’ve typed that out, she’ll be up 5 times tonight.

"Why is it that the harder I try to get Murray, the farther away he is? And I get stuck under this chair?"

We’ve found that the screeching can sometimes be alleviated by singing her new favorite song, the title of this post. Doing the accompanying dance also helps. She’s now pretty good at pushing herself up to sitting, and continues to roll and army crawl wherever she needs to go. She’ll get on her hands and knees and rock or crawl backwards a little, but she has yet to go more than a couple inches forward. She’s also able to put her own pacifier back in her mouth. Mabes never really cared for a pacifier, so I wasn’t sure when this would happen. For some time now, I’ve put her to bed with a pacifier in her mouth and one in her hand, since she would yank out the one in her mouth to play with it, only to then get upset that it was no longer in her mouth. This week I noticed that she was waking up with a different one in her mouth than the one in her mouth when I put her to bed. As I put her to bed tonight I had a flashback to when my mom would put my baby brother down with a pacifier in his mouth and one in each hand. He’d rotate them throughout the night, and he always had to have three pacifiers.

Wailin' on her guitar from Uncle David

That baby brother starts college this week. A couple of weeks ago, I was talking to my mom about how Mabes starting school was this new, huge chapter in my life. I have a kid in school now, and that won’t end until… “you’re my age?” my mom answered. Shortly before Mabes was born, my parents came to visit and brought a giant box of baby clothes my sister sent. As we sorted through them, my dad had a funny look on his face and said, “As I’m watching you hold up the nightgowns and sleepers, I kept thinking of night wakings and diaper explosions and realized what a long road you have ahead of you and thought, ‘Man, poor Allison and Dave!’ But then I thought of the fun—the first smiles, first laughter, first steps, the funny things they say and do, the family trips, the school plays, the sports…and I realized you guys have some really great things ahead of you.”

As I gave Annabelle her pacifiers tonight, I thought about how it seems like only yesterday David had his pacifier collection and awesome bowl haircut. I thought about how my parents are now officially empty nesters, and after a day like today, that sounds kind of nice. But then I check myself--I know that soon enough, days like today will seem like a foggy memory and I’ll long for this:

Of course I took a picture.

It’s hard enough that my brother is old enough to go to college, so I’ll just savor these moments while I can.


*You totally want to watch Three Amigos now, huh?