Holls...Between 10 and 11 Months...

Love her one-toothed grin. All our jack-o-lanterns this year will be our best imitations of the above smile.

The school semester started at the end of August, and the Grover fam has been blindingly busy. Hollie is walking like a maniac, Dave is attending classes and teaching classes, and I am teaching classes and studying for my qualifying exams in eighteenth-century literature. David and I also recently took on rather large responsibilities at church—the largest we've ever been asked to take on yet—so we find ourselves working closely with the local missionaries and church leadership when we aren't doing school stuff. We still don't do the daycare thing, so Hollie has become rather like a baton that David and I tag each other with as the one arrives home so the other can leave.

In the brief spaces during her waking hours that Hollie gets us both at home, she tries to situate herself so that she can be touching both of us at the same time. If one of us so much as goes to the bathroom, she gets mad. Poor little dear. We have spoiled her with our summertime laziness of being together all the time.

Fortunately, we still have plenty of Grover Family Adventures with the three of us. This morning was the first lick of autumn—crisp, cool, rainy morning of 57 degrees. We bundled up our babe, walked to the neighborhood marketplace to buy an apple and some eggs, and then returned home to eat humongous stacks of caramelized cinnamon apple 'n pecan pamcakers (pictures maybe someday, on a gloat-about-the-crap-we-eat post). We love fall at our place. We love it better than all the other seasons. We are jealous that Hollie will always get to celebrate her birthday at the brink of everything spooky-ookie and crispy-spicy (crispy-spicy in a fall leaf kind of way, not a chicken nugget kind of way).

So yes, Holls turned 10 months. In a week or so, she will be eleven months. *sigh* My poor mom has been checking in with this blog almost daily waiting for updated pictures and video. And there certainly has been plenty to document.

So here is a brief summary of stuff:

• She walks! Everywhere! She squats and crouches and stands and bends and even runs a little bit. She climbs up our mattress (we still have no actual bed) and then climbs back down to the ground. She can stand up and dance on her own now.
• She sleeps! All night! Yes! You heard right! That said, she was working on her second tooth last week and that woke her up a few times. But at least she sleeps for five hour stints rather than the every-2.5-hours-feeding schedule she was on a month ago.
• She eats! Real food! Well, real-ish. She is getting more of an appetite for foods-that-aren't-milk in general, but now she will also eat puffed baby cereal pieces and little pieces of bread and bananas. She loves to suck on pitted fruits that Dave or I help her eat, too. (She likes to feed me puffs, too.)
• She points! At books, at trees, at us, at nothing, at everything. If you hold out your pointer finger to her, she'll reach hers out and make them touch, E.T.-style. She also likes to point at all of the eyes of all the animals and people in her board books. Obsessed with eyes, this one is. She started poking David in the eye this week. We have no knack for discipline yet.
• She loves books and songs. She will sit quietly in your lap so long as you have a book or a song for her. She'll make David and I go through a stack of 15 board books in one sitting, and she'll sit through a good half hour of songs (but then my throat gets dry so we have to quit).
• She tells jokes! But most of them aren't funny. Like the joke about throwing books off the shelf and onto the floor. She thinks that one is hilarious, especially after we say "No." in a stern voice. See item four, re: we are the worst parents at disciplining our child.
• She throws tantrums! But they are mostly cute and consist of her shaking her fists and growling. Not screaming, not crying: growling. She also tries to bite us sometimes, but the jokes on her, she only has 1.2 teeth.

Here are a million pictures, followed by a video.

Hollie Margaret meets Grandma Margaret who drove from Florida to Texas to meet her great-granddaughter. They discussed politics and philosophy.

Hollie meets Grandma Barbara in Utah; she walks in grass for the first time ever (West Texas has prickly, terrible grass). She met both grandmas during the worst of her Stranger-Danger period. This is as cuddly as she got for either one of them. Poor great-grandmas.

I call this her "basset hound" look. Let's just say, if David and I are ever imprisoned, Hollie can crawl over and save us, a la the hound dog in the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.

We call this her "Grandma Face." David swears she looks like his Grandma (his mom's mom) when she pulls this face. I'll let my sisters-in-law be the judge of that.

First pair of jeggings, a present from Auntie Pan-Pan (my sister). This is what it is like to take pictures of her these days. She is always on the go, rounding corners, wobbling on the brinks of disasters, grinning madly.

Just before heading to a baptism for a local member of our congregation. We've already given up on ever looking as fashionably hip as Holls.

First toe-nail paint job. She slept on David while I painted. Cupcake Wars was playing on Hulu in the background. David was making jokes about the French way Florian said, "These cupcakes have really captured the spirit of baseball."

Here is a video of Hollie walking. I didn't have time to show all the gems we've captured, but here is a taste. The first bit is Hollie on the actual day that she turned 10 months; the second bit is the last week. We were trying to capture her walking and growling like a zombie (her latest trick). It is eerie, particularly since I've been watching a lot of zombie shows on my computer lately (don't ask—it's embarrassing. Okay, it's AMC's Walking Dead. It is DISGUSTING, and I watch them with my eyes shut and the volume nearly on mute. I do NOT let Hollie see or hear it, but I confess I hold her while she sleeps when I watch it. The characters are so compelling and I am such a sucker for post-apocalyptic narratives! Oh my, oh dear). Anyway, Hollie plays a pretty convincing zombie, but a super cute one. You can't hear her as well as I wish you could. She can get to growling pretty loudly sometimes.