Our Baby's Almost One!

Charley is 11-months-old now, and I really don't want April to come (tomorrow), because then Charley will be 1 at the "end of the month." For one more day, she will be 1 at the end of next month. Of course I am very excited about her turning one, and all of the new things she will learn and do, etc., it's just that the year has flown by and she will never be an itty baby ever again!
This month she...

• Started crawling backwards...just recently. She really can get from point A to point B in a room now, but just not very conventionally. We think she's really close!
• She started mimicking Sadie and now pants when Sadie pants, or if you say, "What does a doggy say?" she will smile and pant. We probably shouldn't egg this on too much longer, or she won't be able to get into kindergarten b/c she won't be able to say, "woof" or "bow wow."
• Charley can help put her toys away in the toy basket. I will say, "Help mommy clean up" and she will put her toys in the basket one by one. She loves it! (next month - "Help mommy load the dishwasher." ha!)
  
• She can toss a ball back and forth with us. We'll toss her a ball from the ball popper, and she will toss it back (in bounce-pass fashion...doesn't get much air time).
• We are working on getting away from the bottle. She still gets one 2-3 times a day and then a sippy 1-2 times, totaling 4 of either per day. We hope to be bottle-free by 12-13 months. It needs to be ancient history by the time little sisbro comes along.
• She had another bad cold this month. She had very high fevers for two days (103-105), and then a runny nose/stuffed up head for like 12 days. We are finally snot free! (for now). Again, no infections arose from this illness, so we are really grateful!
• Still has just 4 teeth, but the two top outside incisors are about to pop through. Should be here any day now... we think.
• Charley now plays in her crib before each nap. She will play anywhere from 15min to an hour, but usually about 25 min on average. Several times she has fallen asleep sitting up, hunched over her blankets and lap. Fortunately she's a pretty sound sleeper, so I can go in there and lay her down and tuck her in. Anyways, this playing before sleeping is definitely a new thing and good thing for her.
• At the beginning of month 10 she learned (drum roll please)... how to put her paci back in her mouth... YAY!!! I had heard that most babies could do this around seven months, so when seven, eight, nine months went past, phew! I was really ready for it. It's quite possible that she was just delayed/slow in this area, for sure, but I do wonder if some of it had to do with the paci's we were using. They are the kind that only one-way-in-is-the-right-way-in, so I borrowed a friends "doesn't matter which way they put it in" kind, and she mastered it in like a day. Needless to say, I went out and bought some of our own.
  

Here's some pictures of Charley helping mommy.