Dakota is 9 months old. It seems impossible that time has gone so quickly. In just three short months, she'll be a full year old. She now crawls everywhere (yay! finally!), and has three and a half teeth. She's got three on the bottom, and one is cutting through up top. Lucky for me, she hardly notices now that teeth are coming in, I just wonder how she'll handle having her molars come in when they decide to make an appearance. Dakota is just a happy, beautiful child who brightens my day every day. She's just starting to pull up on the furniture, but luckily hasn't found much that she can reach to pull up on yet. What we really enjoy now is that she finally gets to sit in a high-chair when we go out to eat. She's getting to eat rice puffs and learning how to mash them up and "chew" them. She absolutely loves them too! Before I know it she'll be walking, then running, and able to eat almost whatever she wants. We're working on teaching her how to open her mouth so we can brush her teeth, but so far I think she likes the taste of the tooth and gum cleaner (it's berry!) too much, and she just sucks or chews on the toothbrush. At least we're trying to start her on good habits though! Summer is fun for us, trying to keep her cool enough is a bit of a challenge, but we're doing well. Luckily, she loves water and will gladly go swimming or sit in a cool bath when it's really hot. But I love my daughter, she's just a joy I couldn't imagine not having in my life.
We had the second of our four-wheel drive trips this past weekend. We didn't take Dakota with us for Moonlight Madness though. The drive is done at night, and many of the obstacles are just too rough for her to go on this year. Chad and I had a really good time though. We drove up Saturday morning, went on the day-time run, came back to kabobs for dinner (super yummy, thanks Debbie!), and packed up and went on the night-run. The trail was particularly rough this year, so we're glad we had Dakota stay at Grandpa David's while we were gone. The day was hot, and the night got pretty cold. I came back needing to stand by the fire to warm up!
