Mid July 2011

In the middle of July, Josie was just mastering pulling up on the foot of our mattress and on the couch. It made her pretty proud!

July Trip to the Mountains

Josie went in the pool for the first time on this trip and found out that she really loves it. It is in her personality to be open and interested in most new things, but she was REALLY interested in the pool!

All the girls, from the left: Amy, Grandma, Lilly (Mark?) Josie and Lisa

July 2011

Josie now takes naps two or three times a day in her crib. When she has a nice nap of more than one hour, she wakes up very happy and crawls to the end of the crib to stand up and call to us--even more cute than this photo can capture!

July 2011, Playing Pat-a-cake

Grandpa has made a tradition of playing pat-a-cake with each of his grandchildren from the time they were very small. With Mark we saw his determination when he would get Grandpa's hands and make him start again. Lilly loved to climb up Grandpa's chest at the end

Josie's unique addition is to bite Grandpa's thumbs.  We have wondered off and on if this might be due to teething, but so far (at 8 months) there is no evidence for that.  She just built this routine and enjoys continuing it!

June 2011, Josie plays a game!

These pictures really are a quick sequence. I was making the bed and shaking out the blanket. She somehow got ahold of the edge and hid behind it. I'm not sure if she was imitating my shaking of the blanket initially, but she did think it was fun to make me disappear and reappear by moving the blanket all on her own.

June 2011

Now that she can get around on her own, she can decide how she wants to interact with things like books

And she can decide when to be done and crawl away.

More of her little footprints. I'm really glad that I took a few pictures of these. I was really busy in June working on a big project and then we went on some vacations. I'm just getting around to June pictures now in the middle of August and I can really see how much she has grown in the last two months.

June 2011, Army crawling

In mid June, Josie mastered tummy crawling, she seemed to use one knee and the other foot to propel herself forward, along with her elbows.

I LOVED finding her little footprints in our carpet. You might not be able to tell exactly, but there would be a long repeating pattern all the way across the livingroom or from our bedroom to the bathroom.