10 months!  What in the world, how has our baby gotten so big.  In only two short months he will be a year old.  Yikes!  Guess I had better start planning his birthday party!

I feel like a broken record, but Max is still not sleeping great.  I know when he is a teenager and we are trying to get him to wake up at noon I will look back at these days and laugh, but for now no one is laughing!  I wish I could say his sleeping habits have gotten better as he has gotten older, but that is just not the case.  He is still getting up multiple times at night and naps throughout the day are hit or miss.  We are lucky if he takes two, 1-hour naps! On a positive though he is starting to put himself to sleep better, at least during nap time.  So I guess we are getting there.  Slow and steady wins the race, right?!

Last month I mentioned that Max was thinking about walking.  Well, at 9.5 months he took his first steps (over Easter weekend actually).  You can see the video here.  In the last week he has really improved with his walking and is starting to master it.  He will actually start crawling some place and then halfway there stop and start to walk.  It really is quite different from Mikayla.  She took her first steps at 10 months and then didn’t really try again until she turned a year old.  At which point she started walking no problem.  I wouldn’t be surprised if Max is running in the next month!  We joke that he looks like Frankenstein when he is walking, and call him Frankenbaby!  He is still a little unstable and holds his hands and arms out to balance himself, which makes him look just like a baby version of Frankenstein!

Max has started to hold his own with Mikayla.  If she does something that he doesn’t approve of, he lets his voice be known and gives her a look that says don’t mess with me sister!  She is in trouble when he can really speak his mind!  But he still loves and adores her very much and will go out of his way to find her in the house and play with her.

Speaking of playing, Max has taken a liking to one of the local dogs on the mission.  He is a little tiny dog, the perfect size for Max.  He will also go out of his way to follow after him and play with him. 

He is 100% boy and loves being outside.  If the door is unlocked we have to really watch him because he is a quick one!  The other morning he was in his walker playing contently.  We stepped out of the room for just a second and when we came back he had climbed out of his walker and crawled out on the front porch!  This boy is going to be trouble!!  He loves playing in the dirt and eating rocks.  And he is perfectly content sitting on the front porch looking around at everything and everyone. 

We are still working on waving and clapping with Max.  Shaking hands is something that one of the staff members has really been encouraging with Max and he almost has it!  When she sticks out her hand he will grab it to shake about 50% of the time.

Max has become quite the jabbering boy and you can often find him playing in a corner talking to himself. 

I am starting to think that teeth will never arrive for our blue eyed, smiling boy!  It doesn’t seem to bother him though because he is still eating great and even tackling things he shouldn’t be able to master without teeth.

Max is still a momma’s boy, especially when he is tired or when I am trying to cook dinner!  Between him crying throughout dinner and dinner prep and trying to coax Mikayla into eating her dinner, I must say that dinner is not a pleasant place in our house right now!  If we can manage to eat early, say by 5:30, it isn’t nearly as stressful.  However, if we have a week like we did last week and aren’t eating dinner until 6:30 or so it is insane in our house!