Emery Katherine turned 12 months old on March 8th...we officially have a one year old! She lights up our lives more than we ever could have imagined, and is the perfect addition to our family. Kyle and I are completely addicted to her babbles, squeals and smiles, and love her so much.
We went to the pediatrician for her 12 month checkup and here are her stats:
Weight: 20 pounds 11 ounces (40%)
Height: 30 inches (76%)
Head Circumference: 18.5 inches (92%)
PERSONALITY!
Emery has opened up this month and is less shy around others! She loves watching other children and really tries hard to communicate with them. She still signs all the time, with her newest ones being "please", "milk" and "pray". Her newest actual word is "bubba" (what we call Tyson) and says his name whenever he walks into the room. She loves the animals, and they are all so good with her.
She also has really branched out with her dance moves this month too. No more just head shakes but full on hip swings and knee bounces. It is hilarious and she cracks up while doing it! She also loves high fives now and smiles whenever we give them to her.
EATING!
Emery is still an awesome eater, and absolutely loves feeding herself. She is fully eating everything we eat for meals (most of the time she makes us eat healthier!). It is so nice to not have to plan ahead what we need to bring places, and instead just feed her the food from our plates! Some of her favorite foods are strawberries, spaghetti with sauce, and mac & cheese.
We also started weaning at the end of this month -- YEAH we made it a whole year nursing!! I get clogged ducts pretty easily, so we did a slow weaning process and as of last week (around March 21st) are just now done! We dropped the 4:00 pm feeding first, then the 12:00 pm (lunchtime) one, then the 7:00 pm feeding, and lastly the morning 7:00 am feeding. That order seemed to work the best for us, after the initial day of her refusing the bottle and just burring her head in my chest :( Once we got her distracted with a book, Emery actually liked the taste of cows milk so we didn't have to mix in breast milk which was nice. The temperature however did bother her, so we microwave it for a couple seconds to make it not so freezing cold. Emery loves to drink water out of her sippy cup, but milk however was not the case! We chose to let her wean to cows milk with the bottle, and now we're trying to wean her off the bottle... baby steps!
Emery will put about 3 signs together now... like for example she does "please" "eat" "more". Or she'll do "milk" "more" "please". It's awesome!
This is her sign for eat... putting one finger in her mouth:
PLAYTIME!
This was a big month for Emery because she started for real crawling (no more army crawl!) AND walking! When she first started crawling it was so stiff and she would pull her knees completely under her chest every time, too funny! She still isn't a super fast crawler but she can get to where she wants to go no problem now!
At the beginning of the month, she was loving cruising from the furniture to the walls and getting places that way. Look at those cute pigtails!
More than cruising though she loved pushing around her cart and would cruise on furniture to get to the cart then take off following us into the kitchen or living room. She still can't turn it very well though and runs into the walls a lot!
On March 3rd, 5 days before her birthday, Emery walked! She had been standing up for a couple seconds at a time, and taking about 2 steps between Kyle and I, but we didn't think it would happen so quickly. On the 3rd she took over 30 steps, waving every step of the way... what a big girl!
SLEEPING!
Sleeping at night this month for Emery was ROUGH,
and led to a very tired Guenther family. I think she maybe slept
through the night 5 or 6 nights total out of the entire month! One
thing is for certain, when Emery gets sick NONE of us sleep. Since she was waking up in the night she would sleep until 8:30 or 9 sometimes in the morning which would then have her morning nap be from 10:30-12, and afternoon nap be from 2:30-4:30 or so. I've also heard that anytime they are about to make a big jump developmentally that their sleep suffers... and with Emery just grasping crawling and walking I think that might explain it! We are thankful she's back sleeping through the night again!
RANDOMS!
- Her hair is still growing so quickly! We were able to do pigtails for the first time this month. We also noticed that it has a bit of wave to it and the humidity makes the ends curl up!
Here's a picture of real pigtails that we did one day:
- She still loves balls and says the word anytime she sees one.
- Emery caught some horrible viruses this month. For about 3 nights, the only way that she would get any sleep was on Kyle in the recliner. You can see below how sweaty she was, poor thing.
- We took Emery on her first bike ride this month and she loved it! Many more of these will be happening in the near future!
- Emery LOVES to read and 99% of the time spent in her room will be over at her book shelves. She loves to flip every page and knows where all the pop up sections are.
- At the end of the month we finally made the switch to the big girl car seat! She is still rear facing at the moment, although turning her around so she can see the dvd player is very tempting during long road trips!
- On the 24th of February, we {finally} had to lower her crib! She was up in the middle of the night one night and pulled herself to standing no problem in the crib. She had done that on our downstairs furniture before, but never in her crib. Crazy how she almost made it to 1 year old and still had the highest crib setting!
- And lastly, we celebrated Emery's Birthday in the Florida Keys! I posted about it here but just had to include this picture in her 12 month update!
Here are my iphone pics from this month:
Happy one year Emery, we love you SO MUCH!
We have to include Em's STINK face! She scrunches up her nose and whines when she is not happy... which was below when we were trying to get her to crawl on pavement :) Hilarious!
Thank you again, Andrea, we LOVE THEM!! 
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