10 Months

The month of October has really flown by, and yet again, we're at another monthly milestone.  I don't have a lot of updates for Isaiah this month...he's mostly just perfecting the skills he already has.  Once he decided to crawl, he took off pretty quickly.  The ladies at daycare joke that they used to have no trouble keeping up with him because he'd pretty much sit in the same spot playing, but now they're always having to call his name as he's disappearing under tables, etc.  When we're out of his comfort zone (i.e. home or daycare), though, he's still quite reserved and tends to just sit and look around at everything.  Chris is claiming this trait as his own, and I tend to agree.

I'm letting Isaiah eat table food for most meals now.  He still eats the baby food well, and we often opt for that because it's healthier than the take-out we pick up on some of our busiest nights.  I'm not really sure if I could say what his favorite food is--he eats almost all food really well, and it's definitely showing in his cheeks and thighs these days.

Isaiah really enjoys when we read to him, and his favorite book is "Where's Spot?" that Aunt Deda gave him.  It's a pop-up book, and he absolutely LOVES to open the little pop-ups and see what's behind them.  He likes to help turn the pages too.  I'm hoping we can continue to cultivate his love for books.  A few weeks ago, we made the decision to unhook the TV at home.  We've literally only turned it on once in the past 3 weeks, and that was to watch part of a UT football game.  We don't have anything in particular against TV, but it was consuming too much of our rare free time in the evenings, and it took that drastic a step for us to reallocate our time.

We went to the Fall Festival at our church this past Friday, October 22nd.  It was so warm that I had to wait until after sunset to even attempt putting on Isaiah's full giraffe costume.  Even then, we didn't keep it on long.  He only took a one-hour nap at daycare that day, and he was so exhausted, that he fell asleep mid-bite of his applesauce during dinner at the festival.  We enjoyed visting with friends and seeing their kiddos all dressed up.  We look forward to many Halloweens to come and the accompanying festivities.



We've had to make a really difficult decision recently.  One night last week I was home alone with Isaiah while Chris was at a meeting.  While I was sitting on the floor with him, he quickly crawled toward Frankie and grabbed some of Frankie's fur on a paw (which are very sensitive).  Before I could get there to pry his hands loose, Frankie snapped at him pretty fiercely and knocked him over.  Thankfully there was no serious harm after the fear subsided, but it really scared me, and I honestly expected to see blood when I went to grab Isaiah.  Frankie has always been jealous of Isaiah, though he's never been ugly to Isaiah directly.  He usually either ignores him or licks him sweetly.  Now that Isaiah is mobile, though, we feel that this situation is likely to repeat itself, and we'd never forgive ourselves if Isaiah was injured because we were too attached to Frankie to let him go.  We also feel that Frankie would probably benefit from being in a home where he can have more focused attention--let's face it, Frankie is a needy dog.  When we adopted him, we signed a contract saying if we ever came to a point where we couldn't keep him, we'd have to give him back to the rescue group.  We've contacted the director and she's in the process of trying to find Frankie a good home.  We love Frankie and he's been a good, loyal companion, but we know that in the end, this is the best decision for our family.