Ivy is 10 months old!

Ivy turned 9 months on Christmas, and that seems like just last week! Wow. Ever since we came home at the end of that terrible cold spell affecting much of the US and Canada, I've been preoccupied keeping our house and our rental properties warm and dry. We've had several frozen and burst water pipes, despite taking every precaution to prevent them. I've had to call our HVAC guy close to 10 times for various things. We've been outside multiple times in below zero (-20 C and colder) weather thawing frozen air intake pipes to our boiler. I am so ready for this cold weather to end!!! We have another cold wave hitting tonight through Wednesday.

Ivy got her first hairdo today...the kids were so excited. Dio proudly wore a matching topknot to church until the elastic fell out.

New developments this month:

• Clapping her hands
• Making fish lips


• Mimicking everything we do
• Learning to laugh when she's being tickled, rather than just squirm and grunt
• Clicking her tongue
• Blowing raspberries on my chest or belly...she loves to do this when she's done nursing
• Sitting on her knees (well, she's been doing this for about 2 months now). She still doesn't ever sit down on her bottom. 
• 2 bottom teeth! We had a rough time with the second tooth. She had a fever for 5 days. The tooth came through after the first night, but she still slept horribly all 5 nights. I had to keep her in bed with me in order for us to get any sleep...and now she's cosleeping much of the night. I never, ever thought she'd be back in bed with us. But I'm being pretty Zen about it. I love cuddling with her--even though half the time it's more like pinning her down so she'll stop wiggling or crawling in her sleep--and I know this time will pass too quickly.On the up side, this past week she's slept nice long stretches at first, from 7 pm - 2 or 3 am. Then she's up quite frequently and mostly in bed with me. 

Ivy is a little jokester. She loves to be in on the action when her siblings are laughing about something. She'll join in and do something funny to get them to laugh at her.

She loves to be with her papa. More than me, often. If I'm holding her and he leaves the room, she cries and throws herself towards him.

She spends hours pulling books off the bookshelf and then reading them.

And I love this picture of Inga.