Between Easter and Juliana's birthday

Henley kept choking every time we tried new foods, so I'd say she didn't really start "eating" purees until a few weeks ago (around 8-8.5 months) versus Juliana who was introduced to purees at 5.5 months and eating foods at school by 6 months. But we did start trying to include Henley at the dinner table with entertaining toys.

This is also very distracting for Juliana because she is so sweet and worried that Henley is playing or enjoying herself.

Juliana has been working hard at writing her letters at school and came home one evening with this "homework." She enjoys tracing a dotted line or solid letter versus writing it herself, but she worked hard at it. She has just now started writing her name pretty consistently. She can also spell it, but she typically says "J-U-I-I-A-N-A" because, I imagine, a lowercase "L" looks like an upper case "I".

One of Juliana's highlights in the morning is to say good morning to Henley. This doesn't always happen as sometimes Henley is awake before Juliana, but this is a very big deal to Juliana. Henley has a special squeal/yell she does when she sees Juliana and her whole face and body light up with excitement. As you can tell in this picture, Henley's crib was at the higher mattress setting, but once she started really crawling, we quickly moved it down.

This was actually before Easter, but we made a visit to Abingdon to see Nana and Papa and other family in the area. We got there late on Friday night but Henley is such a good, sweet little baby that she was social and pleasant for a little bit while we visited before everyone went to bed- way past bedtime. Juliana is definitely more of a schedule kid and baby.

Juliana is getting really great at dressing herself in the mornings, and I do my best to embrace her unique styles. What is a really big deal to her, is jewelry (which she is not allowed to wear to school- more my rule than school's because it comes off and gets lost), lipstick (chapstick, as you can see in this picture), and sometimes headbands or braids in her hair. I believe this is going along with her identifying of what it means to be a "girl" versus a "boy" and these are the things she's gravitated to. Which is interesting because I rarely wear jewelry and even less often do I wear make up. But when I do, she's sure to comment on it and tell me I'm beautiful- lol.

For months Henley seemed to be having a hard time with teething. So we tried a frozen wet washcloth to soothe those gums. She's not a huge fan of cold though.

We traveled to Lolli and Pop's and enjoyed dressing up in costumes from when Caitlin and I were kids.

Juliana's class organized a play date at a park one (chilly!) Saturday morning and Henley was a bit skeptical about her first time in a swing.

I switched Henley over to 6-9 month clothes and was thrilled to have 2 weeks of cooler weather so she could wear all the cute 9 month outfits that Juliana had worn. Since Juliana was a spring baby, all of my 9 month clothes are long sleeve fall/winter styles, and I was worried that Henley wouldn't have an opportunity to wear them! I thought I'd be able to get away with her wearing 6 month summer clothes because of the short sleeves but I've discovered this week that they're too tight length wise so I'll either be shopping for 9 month summer clothes or seeing if she can survive in 12 month summer clothes ;-)

Juliana drew a picture of our family.

Henley started rolling over in her swaddle but we felt that she still needed it to help fall asleep at night so we started transitioning her to one arm out, then two arms out, and now she's out of it completely. I had the idea to try and introduce a "lovey" to transition from the need of the swaddle, and so we tried her little pink bear. She placed him over her face in this picture. The lovey hasn't lasted though, as she typically falls asleep holding her paci over her mouth- so funny.

Joining us for dinner one night, Henley looked like a skeptical food critic who wanted to know what we were eating and doing, but didn't want to participate (I believe we let her tried a small bite of mashed potatoes and she choked- thankfully she's over that reflex now for the most part and is enjoying eating).