Top Eleven

Levi Bear is 11 months old. He's nearly 12 months, but I'm doing all I can to distract myself from that sad fact. I never commemorated his 11 months because of my camera issues. (If you're lost, I mentioned it here.)

In no particular order, here are 11 things I want to remember about my Levi.

1. He is obsessed with Zoe. His favorite spot in the house is standing, supported by the window sill, at the living room window facing the back yard. I just leave the blinds up all the time now. He's also started barking at her. It doesn't really sound like a bark, but the first time he did it, I was holding him and Zoe barked. Levi looked toward the back yard and made his barking sound. He won't do this on command, so don't even bother. :)
2. His eyes are still blue. This surprises me. Bryan and I both have brown eyes and our girls have brown eyes. Addi was about 8 months old before her eyes changed from blue and Libby was younger than that, so I really expected his eyes to be brown by now.
3. He finally has teeth! Two to be exact. They came in about a day apart and (knock on some very heavy wood) weren't a big deal at all.
4. Levi's a professional crawler! No attempts at walking, standing on his own, or really even cruising have been made by our little boy. But he loves to crawl really fast, pull up on everything, and climb the stairs.
5. He's gone from laughing at "No" to completely ignoring it. The laughing was sort of cute, the ignoring, not so much! Sometimes, he'll shake his head with a look-how-cute-I-am smile plastered on his face if you tell him "No" more than once. That happens a lot. Think he knows exactly what he's doing?!
6. Levi has started patting my on my shoulder when I'm about to put him to bed. The routine is: I hand him his pacifier and blanket, he turns his body and pats my shoulder, then he lays his head down on my shoulder and stays perfectly still while I rock him, sing him a song, and then lay him in his bed. I wish we could keep that up until he's 14!
7. His other obsession is the remote. We have a couple, but he prefers the tv remote. In times of desperation, I've handed him the dvd remote before and it's no good. Apparently.
8. He loves crawling under things. Tables, chairs, beds, you name it! He also loves banging on everything. That is one of the differences I've noticed between the genders - Boys are loud! That and besides the word "MaMa", he grunts!
9. Levi is sleeping a lot these days. He is usually up by 7:15, takes a morning nap at 9, takes an afternoon nap at 3, and is in bed by 7:30. His ideal schedule would probably be to sleep until 8, morning nap at 10, afternoon nap at 2 and bedtime at 6:30, but we can't really make that work with Addi in kindergarten. The past two days he's slept from his afternoon nap until I wake him up about 11 to eat and then he's gone right back to bed until morningtime. Poor Bryan hasn't seen him since Monday!
10. He is still nursing about 3 times a day and I'm trying to cut that down to 2. He's perfectly content nursing and demands it sometimes. He has to be done by April 18th because I'm not taking him to Savannah with me! I'm so thankful I was able to keep it together enough the first couple months to nurse him. He was the first baby that I thought about giving formula. I just didn't know if I could continue with how often he was wanting to eat. I knew if I could get past the first few months, the rest of the year would be a piece of cake.
11. Levi has been the greatest surprise of my life! God blessed our family with an incredible little boy and I know He has amazing things in store for Levi.

I have pictures to post, but because I don't want to deal with re-formatting this post after I add them, I'm going to post them separately below. Enjoy!