8 months old

I can't believe how fast my little girl is growing. I visited my friend who had a baby this week. Her baby was born 5 oz bigger than Clara, but I don't remember Clara ever being that little! Clara has definitely developed her own personality. I love watching all the things she discovers to do. She loves to look at books, her soft pink blanket, and being thrown up in the air. Here are a few pictures we took of her the day she turned 8 months old, which was on Wednesday.At 8 months old, Clara can do quite a bit. She can go from laying down to sitting up all by herself. I'm very grateful for that because she hated trying to crawl because she would inevitably end up falling onto her tummy, and then she got stuck. She would whine until I came to sit her back up. But now there is no more whining. Yeah!

Clara has also started to wave. I'm not really sure if she is just sticking her hand out and moving it, or if she really knows she's waving. Either way, Mom and Dad are always quick to wave back and say, "Hello." That way she learns what moving her hand like that means. Here is a picture of her waving at Daddy.Another first that Mom did this week was paint her toe nails. It was quite the feat. Dad had to distract Clara while Mom hurried as fast as she could. The end result was Clara being fascinated with the bright red fingernail polish for quite a while. It was fun to watch her grab the bright red things and be surprised to discover that they were her toes.Another blog worthy event that happened this week is the fact that we had no hot water for 24 hours. I called our maintenance man at 9:30 in the morning. He finally showed up at 5:30, but only stayed for 5 minutes. He said he needed to get some tools and that he would be back in a few minutes. At 7:00 he still hadn't returned. I needed to leave for mutual, so I called our on site managers letting them know it was OK to let the maintenance man into our apartment if I wasn't home. She then informed me that our maintenance man had called her to say he didn't know how to fix it! I was supposed to call a different guy. Since I was busy with mutual for the next 2 hours, by the time I called the other guy, he had already gone to bed for the night. He came over first thing in the morning though, for which I was extremely grateful. I really didn't want to take 2 cold showers in a row. Turns out, it was something I could have fixed as soon as it broke! Turns out the water heater breakers trip semi-frequently here. I did check the breakers the first day, but none looked tripped. So I found the one marked water heater and flipped it just in case. It wasn't tripped, so I figured it had to be something else. The second guy that came to fix our water heater thought it was strange that there was only one breaker for the water heater. Sure enough, there were 2. I didn't see the other one because the two breakers for the water heater weren't next to each other! Since I didn't know to look for 2, I figured I had found the only one. The second one was tripped, even though it didn't look like it. So we finally had hot water. I must admit that as I look back on this week, I felt somewhat nostalgic as I had to boil quite a few pans of water just to do dishes. However, at the time, I definitely didn't have that attitude. It really made me feel blessed for modern inventions!