Clara Jane at 12 Months Old

This is the last monthly post specifically about Clara's development and I am backdating it for the 19th even though I didn't get around to writing it until two weeks after Clara's first birthday.  I know these probably aren't the most fascinating posts in blogosphere land, but I love looking back at each of these posts specifically about what she has learned in the course of a month and seeing the pictures of how she has changed from month to month. 

At 12-months old, Clara is a great little walker.  She just toddles around all day long.  Sometimes she goes faster than she is able to or gets tripped up, but she just stands right back up and keeps going.  She falls a lot more early in the morning when she first wakes up and is still sleepy, which is sort of hilarious to me.  Lately she has been going into the office in the mornings and pulling Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities off the shelf and carrying it around the house with her, periodically stopping to sit down and rifle through its pages.  There are lots of other books that she could pull off - some with much more colorful spines - but she always goes for Dickens. 

Some of the funny things she does include throwing her food on the floor when she is done eating.  She does it very purposefully and she laughs about it.  I haven't figured out how to break that bad behavior and Paul laughs at her when she does it, so he is probably just reinforcing it.  Clara recently learned that her little brush is used to comb hair and will stroke Paul's hair or my hair with it for a few strokes before moving on to her next toy.  She loves being chased around the couch, bed, kitchen island or anywhere basically and giggles like crazy when I stop chasing and "hide" from her so she can come back to see if I am still there, then I jump out and grab her.

Clara's new favorite food is cherries.  I cut them in half and remove the pit and she eats both halves on her tray before I can get another cherry prepared for her.  If there are blueberries and strawberries on her plate with cherries, she eats all the cherries first.  She also seems to enjoy cauliflower and falafel, which are two new foods she tried this month. 

Clarabelle still takes two solid naps a day - usually an hour and a half to two hours each - and she goes to bed between 7:15 and 8:00.  As long as her room doesn't get too cold, she sleeps through the night, but we've had a few nights with cooler temperatures and she has woken up whimpering until we plug her heater in and cover her back up with her blanket. 

At her one year doctor's appointment, she had to get four shots (two in each thigh) and then had to have blood drawn from her arm (which was awful and she first arched her body in a soundless scream and then writhed until they finally finished) to make sure she didn't consume any lead paint laced chips or breath in lead dust during our remodel (thankfully there were no traces of lead in her system - we were hypervigilant trying to keep everything cleaned and keep Clara removed from the remodeling areas).  She weighs 20 lbs. 5 oz. (37th percentile) and is 2' 6" tall (72nd percentile).  Her little noggin is still tiny (16th percentile).

We love our toddler girl.