Where did this month go...9 months old!!

Sophi turned 9 months old yesterday and had her 9 month check up. Here are her stats:

Weight: 18 pounds 1.5 ounces - 50%
Height: 27 & 1/2 inches - 50%
Head circumference: 17 inches - 25%

This month has flown by! Sophi is so much fun these days, but soooo busy!! She is a much faster crawler than she was last month (although still using the gimpy crawl) and can get from one room to the next in the blink of an eye! Surprisingly Sophi has become quite the babbler. She strings "sentences" together constantly in her own little language and I frequently catch her carrying on conversation with Shiloh (who is always unamused!). She can now say Mama, Dada, More, Bye, Bye, Hi and Shiloh (shiloh is more of "dido").

Not only has she become quite the talker but she is also quite the eater. She LOVES to eat, as soon as we place her in her high chair she immediately begins saying "more, more more." Her new favorites include blueberries, kiwis, yogurt, bread and cottage cheese. She loves to feed herself and if left to her own feeding will stuff her mouth full!

Sophi officialy has a tooth! It is on the bottom and makes her adorable smile that much cuter! She is still cruising everywhere and gets quite the workout everyday doing laps around our coffee table. She has the strength to stand up on her own without support but doesn't quite have the confidence. She can walk holding onto to one hand and I am afraid our crawling days will soon be disappearing, I am pretty sure this girl was born to walk!

Sophi graduated to a big girl car seat this past month. Thank you Lolly and Pops! She loves it and although there are days where I miss being able to carry the sleeping girl in without waking her up I am loving it too!Sophi loves to read these days, especially loves to the turn the pages herself and touch EVERYTHING on the page! I think she is going to be a reader like her daddy...not like her mommy!!
Sophi LOVES her daddy and one of her favorite things to do these days is play and laugh with him! I so enjoy watching them together. So sweet!

Sophi has been spending more time with her new friend Caroline which has been so much fun! It is slowly helping us learn how to play with others. She has not quite learned the concept of personal space and loves to literally climb all over her buddies. Poor Caroline! We are really working on being gentle as apposed to tackling. Who knows, maybe football is in her future?! This past month we have really enjoyed taking swimming lessons with Caroline and her mom Ellen as well as spending time at the park and zoo.

The girls love being together and so do us moms!! Ellen and her husband Jeff moved here from Birmingham, AL and I always feel like I'm back home when spending time with them! Yeah for southern friends in California!

Even though this past month has gone by so quickly our precious little girl continues to bring us such joy and makes every day so much brighter. She is one of the best things that has ever happened to us and we feel so blessed to have her in our lives!

We are about to embark on a 2 week adventure as we travel back to the south to spend time with our families and celebrate my niece Evie's first birthday!

The affects of "No Impact"

So in my previous post I mentioned that Josh and I recently watched the documentary "No Impact Man" in which a man and his family attempt to live for a year without impacting the environment. There were many things about this film that were eye opening and challenging to us both, especially convicting to me being the the constant use of my plastic bags (if you know me at all you know I can't live without my ziplocks!).
Surprisingly one of the things that impacted us most after watching this film actually had less to do with the environment and more to do with family. In an effort to not use electricity and spend more time together the "No Impact" family stopped watching tv for the entire year of their experiment. It was very eye opening and refreshing to see how much the couple and their 2 year old daughter grew closer to each other as a family and more aware of the world outside their living room after a year without tv.

SO...in an effort to remove one of the biggest distractions in our home keeping us from each other and the world outside our own living room we have decided as a family to stop watching tv for a full year. Ok, I know what you are thinking, we are crazy. Honestly, sometimes I think that myself. But hey, what can it hurt, right? At the end of the year we hope that we will be better people with a much richer life for having taken this challenge .
Why I am telling you all this? As a way to hold ourselves accountable! Our contract with Dish Network, although it has been great, will end at the end of August this year and we will not be renewing it. We will be on vacation most of the month of September so come October 1st our year of no tv will officially commence.
I will probably be cramming in my tv time up until that point but once it begins I hope to record our experience through our blog.
If you haven't seen this documentary yet you should check it out. You never know what you might find yourself challenged to change!