The Experience that is Camille

Camille was 10 months old on November 5th.

We tried calling her CJ for a while, but it didn't stick.

She has 2 teeth coming in. Right now just the top ridges of the front bottom teeth are poking through. But it still hurts when she chomps on your finger.

She's a crawler. And getting faster. And going farther. Just the other day she ventured out on her own to explore the bathroom and study. She'll come find us if we're in another room.

Since Michael started the new semester, she's been going to an in-home day care. It's a grandmother who opens her home and hires other grandmothers, and they take care of up to 12 kids of various ages up to about 6 years old (cuz after that, they go to school). She's known as Nana. Camille loves it. And they love her.

When she says, "ba, ba, ba, ba," her whole face gets involved.

Once she started crawling, she started pulling up to standing, too. She won't sit still any more. We are her personal jungle-gym.

My name for her has lengthened to Bugaboo.

I find I run on autopilot and catch myself in the middle of calling Michael Bugaboo. He's kind enough to ignore this.

Her willfulness and temper are starting to show through sometimes. Like when she decides she doesn't want to eat vegetables, she yells and spits them back out. And when she opens her mouth to yell again, I shove them right back in.

One of her favorite toys is a little rubber duckie. We frequently find her chewing on it's head.

She's started understanding that Cheerios go in her mouth, and has recently become more fascinated with feeding herself. Now she's working on keeping them in her mouth once they get there.

She loves animal sounds. The duck says, "quack, quack," the bee says, "bzzzzz." She gives us that open smile and a look that says, You're kinda weird. But I like it.

She is happy, cheerful, smiling, talking and inquisitive 95% of the time.

She's a kicker. When she's sitting she kicks in a way that looks like she's rubbing two sticks together trying to start a fire with her feet. And she does it constantly. Nana says she runs 3 miles every day doing this. When you hold her up like Superman, she kicks more from the hips and looks like a swimming frog in mid-air.

She loves to lick the full-length mirror standing in the corner of our bedroom.

She loves her daddy.

She also loves the shiny jewelry he wears. Her favorite piece is his cross necklace. She is allowed to hold it when he's wearing it, at which point Michael does a fabulous Gollum impression. Daddy is the keeper of the Precious.

She has the best giggle when you tickle her collar bone.

She loves her pacifier. And not just for comfort reasons. She likes to spin it when it's in her mouth. She likes to chew on all sides of it. She likes to make these clucking sounds with it. She likes to try to cram the whole thing in her mouth sideways, with the nipple up in her nose, giving her an over-stretched, huge-mouthed, Joker-esque grin.

Michael is amused when I do things like try out her no-spill sippie cup to see how hard it is to drink from.

The ladies at my office call her SquishBug. They require regular visits and squish-time. They tell her that she's not a solid 20 lbs, but all fluff. One of the girls even took a picture of her thigh (oh, the drumstick!) because she loves it so much.

She talks and sings a lot. And loudly. Many conversations with her comprise a lot of grunts and growls traded back and forth. She makes this gurgle noise that sounds like one of the Jetson's cars.

At times you can look at her and start to see the little girl she's turning into.