10 months.

my sweet little bug.  you turned 10 months old on wednesday, but i'm only getting around to writing now.  the weeks are flying by faster than ever and 10 months feels sooooo big, perhaps because it's double-digits now.  you got sick for the second time in your life last week - you woke up with a fever last friday and when i took you to the doctor saturday, she said you had hand foot and mouth.  kk thought that was the grossest-sounding disease name of all time, and i must say i'm not crazy about it either.  we insisted on calling it hoof and mouth the whole weekend.  but, i guess you got it from one of the kiddos that was here for the shower the week before?  that's all i can think of since you haven't been around many kids at all, and it's usually something you would get at daycare.  in any case, your fever was short-lived, but you were in pain.  you never got the bo-bo's (we mustn't call them sores...) on your hands or feet, but the doc said she saw them in your mouth (you stubborn thing would not open your mouth to let me see).  i'm guessing they were the reason you would cry out in pain if i missed an acetaminophen dose, and you didn't eat much for a couple of days.  you also didn't sleep through the night for about a week, but you seem to be moving back in the right direction, thankfully.

anyway...even with the sickness you have been all over the place.  you dance non-stop so we've taken to inventing songs about everything.  there is a lot of singing in this house.  you "share" your food with us, which is adorable.  you call etta "tetta" and talk to pippa and the dogs frequently.  you lay your head on us or one of the pets in a very sweet way that just about breaks my heart every time.  you say mama, dada, dog, tetta, puh (i am pretty sure this means pool, as you say it when you're pointing and looking directly at the pool), no (according to the new nanny, though i haven't heard it yet), and various iterations of other words we think you might be trying to say, but you aren't quite there yet.  you have stood independently a few times, but you sit or squat down immediately when you realize you're standing.  you've started cruising a little bit but still prefer crawling as your primary mode of transportation.  you are obsessed with cats - when i read you any book that has cats or pictures of cats in it (particularly goodnight moon), you point to them and squeal.  in goodnight moon, you look for the place on the rug that the kittens play on most pages and you look at me as if to ask "where did they go?" on the pages they're absent.  i love that.

you're gaining weight more slowly and only weighed 18 lbs 9 oz when you were at the doc last saturday. i think that's an appropriate gain, but you are still so busy all the time and you lose your appetite when you're sick, so that may be part of it.  you're still a great eater and have started signing "more" when you eat.  you haven't quite gotten the closed-hand part down, but that requires a lot of dexterity and you are very deliberate when asking for more of something.  you still have just the four front teeth.  you also love to turn a light switch on and off.  when kk was taking care of you for that week in august, she would hang out with you on the porch every afternoon to wait for me to come home from work.  you and i have started waiting for daddy (especially now that the weather is finally kind of cooling off), and the nanny brings you to the porch to wait for me too.  this is probably everyone's favorite part of the day, and you're starting to make a name for yourself in the neighborhood as you wave at everyone that walks or drives by.

i could talk about every tiny little thing that you do for days, scooter.  justin and i started making a list of all your nicknames today, and this is what we have so far: scooter, pooter, bunny, bug, bean/the bean, rabbit, monkey, pete, m'a quitte', poot magoot, vladmir, skee-do, skeeter, sweet pea.  i'm sure there are more, but those are the most popular right now.  anyway.  we love you so much, sweet child.  you enrich our lives daily and we cannot believe you'll be one in less than two months.

as is evidenced by the pics below, you aren't big on keeping still.  you also still love to put everything in your mouth.  you're a trip, little bug.