Happy Belated 1st Birthday Justice!

I can hardly believe it, but my little baby turned 1 year old on March 4th!  It has been an amazing year and I love him more and more very day!  He seriously just gets cuter and cuter all the time and I am completely enthralled with observing him grow and learn new things.  The last month is a bit of a blur in my mind, but I will try to remember the key fascinating and exciting things I can share with you as well as his birthday celebrations.  (**Again – if you’re reading this via RSS feed, I don’t think the videos work for some reason, so you’ll have to visit my blog directly to view them**)

1.  He has completely mastered the conventional crawl and will now crawl at lightning speeds to his destination!    It’s quite funny watching him sometimes and trying to understand his thought process, as he can be a little indecisive and crawl somewhere, then come back, or look like he’s going in one direction and then make a sudden course change.  He sort of crawl like a bull-dog, in my brother’s words, with his hands pointed slightly inwards, but I think it’s super cute! 

2.  He’s getting really good at walking while holding onto things.  His favorite thing to do is walk while pushing our dining room chairs or especially the office chairs that have wheels and walking with them.  He will also walk along any piece of furniture or object that’s an appropriate height.  The funny thing though is that if you try to take his hands and walk with him, he’ll just go limp and collapse to the floor.  I guess he only wants to walk on his terms! 

3.  He finally kicked the yeast infection that was plaguing him for almost 2 months – yay!!  His bum is clean and clear!

4.  He’s showing off his smarts these days – he got a bunch of new toys for his birthday that require him to use more of his mental capacities and problem solving skills.  He still needs a lot of encouragement and help in order to figure things out, but we are very proud of him when he does!  I just figured out today that he now associates the phrase “Good job!!” with clapping, because we say that and clap our hands every time he does something – lol.  So now, if we say “Good job!!” he will clap his hands.   He looks quite pleased with himself too when he accomplishes something and totally looks up at us for approval and affirmation – very sweet!

5.  No new words really, but he’s definitely talking a lot & is very vocal.  His sounds are also very guttural and manly – think “Tim the Toolman Taylor” (if you’re old enough to know who that is). 

6.  Justice learned to eat some finger foods by himself!  He has held and eaten portions of an apple slice, a cracker, and a baby cookie so far.  But after a few bites, he usually gets bored with it and throws it or just crushes it and makes a mess with it. 

7.  Sleeping is mostly the same.  Usually 8pm – 6am or 6:30am if we’re lucky.  He seems to usually wake up once during the night and need some help going back to sleep, but mostly we get to sleep through the night, which is fabulous! 

8.  Two more teeth have come in on the bottom this last month, so we are now at a total of 8 teeth!  Here’s a video of him mowing down on his shirt to try and alleviate his teething discomfort – haha.

9.  Along with standing and walking, Justice is learning to climb!  He will often climb over us if we’re playing with him on the floor or try to climb over things we put in his way to block him from stuff we don’t want him getting into (see video below).  Just this weekend, he actually climbed the stairs from our basement to our main floor all by himself!  I was there of course, encouraging him and providing some incentive, but he did it all on his own – I was so proud of him!

10.  Justice had his first haircut at an actual children’s salon.  He was a perfect angel and just did great! I think he was pretty consumed with the movie playing & the new surroundings, because he didn’t break a smile the entire time – lol.  He got a faux hawk and looks SOOOO adorable!  It definitely made him look older though – not my little shaggy baby anymore.

11.  He LOVES emptying all our cupboards, drawers, shelves – anything he can get into and reach!

Finally, for his birthday, we had two celebrations – one with our friends from Sanctuary House of Prayer and another one with my immediate family.  For the SHOP party, I made chocolate trifle – one for all the kids that looked like dirt and was in Justice’s dump trucks – complete with gummy worms & spiders, and then another traditional one for the adults.  Sadly, Justice didn’t really get too dirty and wasn’t too impressed by the trifle – I think because it was too cold and he didn’t like the feel of it on his hands.    Then with my family, he got a sweet haul of gifts of clothing and toys & we had a great time playing and celebrating our little man.  Here are pictures and videos of all the activities.