ONE YEAR

 

Holy cow.

One year. 

I can hardly believe that my baby is a year old already!!! This year has been so hard and wonderful and full of laughs, cries, silly faces, funny noises, milestones, and so, so much love.

I'm still very behind on Liam's monthly posts, but wanted to at least get this one together for his actual birthday.

A one year old Liam can make a multitude of noises, pull up on things and walk along them (he's even let go a couple of times and stood for a moment on his own! I haven't seen it yet though), wave, clap, "sing", drink from a 360 cup, and he's learning to go back to sleep on his own. He's starting to kind of figure out the signs for "more" and "all done", though he often equates "more" to clapping since his hands are supposed to go together. He's just moved to a bigger car seat because he's so dang tall, which has been an adjustment since I'm used to being able to stick him in the seat while I finish gathering whatever we need to leave.

His favorite foods are blueberries, cheese cubes, and yogurt (and clearly chocolate peanut butter cake). I still can't get him to eat eggs. He likes to "finger paint" with his food all over the high chair tray, with a very serious expression as he does so. He's been enjoying interacting with River (our dog) and Fritz (our cat), but is still very much learning what it means to use his "soft hands". He has been getting progressively more noisy during church and loves to crawl around the entire building after Sacrament meeting each week. His resting face is still incredibly serious, but he does have a big smile and joyous laugh when he's in a good mood. Some of his favorite things are staring at the ceiling fan, singing songs with Grandma, getting into cupboards, and chewing on any sort of drawstrings on clothing.

There's not a ton of rhyme or reason to the pictures from this month, so it'll mostly be a photo dump and I'll share some more here and there as we go!

We were figuring out whether a sippy cup 
or 360 cup worked better for him and 
he decided that the answer was both

The way this kid falls asleep on
people cracks me up

The result of me trying to take a cute
picture of him snuggling his remote

The pure joy of watching the ceiling fan

My family has had this ball for as long
as I can remember and he loves it!

He likes to feed HIMSELF yogurt

Fritz likes to participate in the middle-of-the-night feedings
He also sleeps in the crib with Liam most nights

Liam found part of a cross stitch loop
and decided that it was a pretty
great toy and teether

Church is exhausting

He got his first big war wound this month. It's
healing up pretty nicely, but looked pretty
gnarly at the beginning!

Asleep in his new, big car seat

These next few are from the couple of walks that I've been able to take with him recently as it's been warmer on and off:

It was too muddy to let him explore on
 the ground, so we stuck with the bench
for now

My Dad has noise cancelling headphones and Liam isn't quite sure what to think of the quietness when he wears them:

The way they squished his cheeks this time 
cracked me up

We had to sit in the car for over and hour the other day waiting for prescriptions for my parents on base. Liam does NOT like to sit around. He's fine in the car seat as long as the car is going, but once we're stopped, he's done. So, naturally, this was a bit rough. He did alright considering once I unleashed him into the back seat. 

I've tried to feed him PB&J before and he wasn't too interested, but this week he loved it and got it EVERYWHERE:

He ended up with a very stiff chunk of hair
that he had swiped jelly into

Examining his handiwork

We actually celebrated his birthday already so that Jonathan's parents could come over from Ohio to do cake with us. I didn't find out until almost the end of the night that it was my father-in-law's actual birthday that day! 

Liam put out the candle all by himself... with his hand. Whoops. 

After taking some time to calm down, he thoroughly enjoyed his cake! He started out just poking at it, but eventually it ended up all over him, the dining room, and eventually the bathroom. He decided to casually cross his leg over the plate and into the cake and had us all laughing. Watching him on a sugar rush during his bath was honestly a joy because he could not stop laughing as Jonathan played with him with one of the bath toys. He hasn't had much in the way of sweets up 'til this point, so the cake is by far the most sugar he's ever had at once. 

A funny story about Liam from this week:

A brother in our ward asked me to hold his 6 month old son for a minute while he went out of the chapel to grab something. Dad (Grandpa for Liam) was holding Liam a few seats down. When Liam saw me holding the smaller baby, he was NOT happy. He quickly got a grumpy, jealous look on his face and dove over Philip to get to me. He then proceeded to GROWL at the baby! He needs to stop learning his communication skills from the dog... It was pretty dang funny though!

I can't end this one year post without doing a little walk through memory lane, so here we go! Here's is Liam through his first year:

First Year of Life