Cruisin' With Kenna

It's time for another baby update! Kenna is officially mobile now and often finds herself in quite a predicament, as you can see here--she managed to scoot backwards all the way under the train table but couldn't get back out! While she isn't exactly crawling in the true sense of the word, she does manage to maneuver her way to wherever she wants to go, whether it be by rolling, doing the army-man crawl, or the butt-to-knee-flip-flop action, which I have not witnessed any of our other kids attempt in their early active stages. The latter move goes like this:

1. Kenna is sitting.
2. She lunges forward onto her hands and knees, pushing herself up and trying to crawl.
3. She wiggles around a little bit, then flops her rear to a different spot from where she was originally sitting.
4. She is now sitting again, facing a different direction and positioned about a foot away from her original spot.
5. The process repeats itself.

So, it has begun. We now have to be EXTREMELY careful to pick up any number of choking hazards before we allow Kenna to get on the floor for exploring time. (Whose idea was it to bring marbles into this house, anyway?!) Before too long I'll have to do an overhaul of the toy storage area to be sure that she can't open a drawer and get into something dangerous for little people. Other than that, the family room is pretty safe. We will, however, have to train her to leave the CDs and movies alone, as they are completely within her reach. If she trains as well as Charis and Arden, that should not be a problem. I leave it to your imagination to decide how things will progress should she prove to have a learning curve more like Tobin's.


At 9 months old, Kenna is quite verbal, chattering to herself and anyone who will listen most of her waking hours (and possibly some of her sleeping ones, too). No intelligible words yet, but lots of mamamamas, dadadadas, and babababas, with a few lalalas thrown in when she's especially excited. She absolutely loves to eat (when she's not sick, that is), as evidenced by this shot of her sporting the ever-fashionable Banana Mouth. She will eat anything we give her from a jar--I gave up making our own baby food when we had to move. I still mash up bananas and give her the no-sugar-added applesauce that the rest of the family eats, but I haven't steamed and processed food for her since we were in the old house. I can get jars for a quarter at the Commissary, and it just seems easier to keep the pantry stocked with so many other demands on my time. She also enjoys finger foods such as Rice Chex, Kix, Cheerios (though she's become rather bored with those lately), crackers, and little bits of cheese and bread. She is now at the point where anything we're eating looks MUCH better than what she has on her tray, so it's always easiest to feed her when we're not at a meal ourselves.

Kenna is, thankfully, an amazingly good little sleeper. She is so consistent I could nearly set my alarm clock by her. She wakes for her first feeding anywhere between 6 and 6:20 a.m. without fail. Her morning naps are quite long, stretching anywhere from 2 1/2 to 3 hours, which is a huge blessing as we get a lot of schoolwork done during that time. Her lunch comes right before the kids and I eat, and then she naps while the older kids have "quiet room time," also known as "Mommy's office time." Most of the time she still has a short evening nap as well, since none of us particularly enjoys meltdowns during our family dinner. We wake her up for one last nursing before bedtime, and she goes right back down without a fuss...unless you count a few seconds of wailing from the time it takes us to walk from her crib outside her doorway. Then she's quiet! I guess she just has to have the last word.

I guess that's about it for this month's Kenna update. Next month I expect we'll be teaching her how to read. Ha! Just wanted to see if you read this far! ;-)