Happy 13th Month Birthday!

So, another month has come and gone. It's been another fun, but busy month for our little boy.

Andrew has learned the signs for drink and bathtub; and we finally made headway with him signing please when he wanted the broom out of the closet around two weeks ago. Now, if he wants something and you ask him to sign please, he will rub his stomach instead of his chest, but close enough. I love the rubbing of the belly. One time, he wanted a book and signed please without any initiation from me. Mommy was so proud!

As for talking, he hasn't learned to say any new words, but I think I forgot to mention last month that Andrew can say "Papa" for my dad and "ba" for ball and balloon. He also makes the "ba" sound for book too. We have been working on the other vowel sounds. Andrew must say "Dada" at least twice as much as he says "Mama". When I ask him to say "Mama", he says "Dada." Little punk! When he wants his Daddy, he will say "Dada", but when he wants me, he screams. Hopefully, he will learn new sounds and words quickly and will be able to verbalize more.

Sleep training has been going fairly well. He is able to sleep in the crib the whole night. Sometimes, we do let him off the hook and take him out early in the morning. We have good nights where he isn't taken out until 6am. But then there are bad nights where he is pretty pissed off at 3am; and Mommy and Andrew end up sleeping on the floor in his room. Sometimes, I know he is just so hungry and will let him nurse. We have had some great nights with him sleeping 6-7 hours consecutively. Our next step is to let him cry it out with little or no consoling from us. Oh, how I hope it goes well.

Drew loves to dance and still loves his toys and books. He has made good progress with his dexterity and ability to manipulate objects with his shape sorter toys. At first, he could only fit in the circle piece, but now, he is able to fit in the triangle and square pieces. Of course, we have to show him where the pieces go. He hasn't figured that out yet. Drew is really cute with pushing his cars around and makes motorboat noises to imitate car sounds. Andrew loves his Little People Barn that we got from the Armstrongs. The little tyrant likes to stuff the animals out of the window and allow them to fall onto the floor.

We moved Andrew into his new car seat for our trip to San Antonio; and he seems to like it much better. He spends most of the time looking out the window and checking out the scenery. It's funny because sometimes, he will motorboat like he does when he plays with his cars at home.

Here are some more pictures from Andrew's 1 year photo shoot if you haven't seen them on Facebook yet. I know they are a month old now, but still wanted to share them as I just picked up the files from Andrew. The rest can be seen at http://thelenzes.shutterfly.com/88 on our new shutterfly site.