Almost a year old now....

Tomorrow Daniel turns 11mos. old and it's time for us to start planning his first birthday party! Matt and I have already agreed that he's going to have a big chocolate cupcake and we're definitely going to film the whole thing. I might even invite a couple of kids from daycare because I want there to be little friends for him to play with.
We're going to try to hold out until his first birthday to cut his hair, but as you can see from the pics, it's getting pretty long. His bangs almost fall into his eyes! And, speaking of his eyes, he caught pink eye at daycare a couple of days ago :-( He's fully recovered now, though, and back in business :-)
Daniel is becoming quite a scamp. He's a fast crawler and thinks it's a funny game to go into the kitchen or up the stairs whenever we take the gates down. In fact, under Matt's supervision the other day, he climbed up the entire flight of stairs to his nursery! Daniel can also climb onto the sofas and when he wants to get down, he just dives off head first. Usually we can catch him, but he's taken some falls - we mind it more than he does.
Like many others in his family, Daniel also seems to be quite musical. He likes to bounce in time with music (especially bluegrass) and babbles songs to us. It even seems that he can mimic tunes in ryhthm. We're encouraging him to play with a large, soft "keyboard" for babies, but mostly he chews on it. At least Matt likes to play with it ;-)
We're gradually starting to wean him and are still introducing him to solid foods, but he's quite picky. Daniel seems to be experimenting with standing on his own and taking a few steps - we just hope we'll have the camera ready when he gets the hang of it. I'm sure he'll be chasing the cat the first time he walks.
When he turns one, things will be getting really interesting for me because I'll also be going back to school. This time, I'll be armed with more babysitting resources, because I had to miss a lot of school last spring when Daniel got so many ear infections. We will have to see how my study time goes, though. He's already a handful and I can't imagine what it will be like when he's ambulatory!