So, I have not written in quite a while! Not sure what to blame this on, let's just say I've been busy.

Amara is eight months old today. Some new advancements are that she says mama and dada now (and not necessarily in that order). She waves goodbye. She does the army crawl and stands/walks with help. She's doing the whole finger food thing now, which terrifies me to pieces! She goes from floor to sitting on her own. She does the butt scoot while sitting. And she is becoming increasingly more amused by the pets every single day, which was her entire motivation for figuring out the army crawl. My days of sitting on the couch are slowly whittling away as my baby is becoming Mobile Baby.

Today we went to church. I have entered a new chapter of my life and we go to church now. We are not "churchy" by any means. I go because I believe in God and my spirit needs it, needs to be cozied up right next to him, and in his presence once in a while. It just FEELS good, and I'd like my daughter to be brought up very familiar with this. We went a couple weeks ago and I held Amara the entire service, not quite willing to let her go. But for some reason, today was a different story and I dropped her off at the nursery before entering the sanctuary.

I wanted to cry. I just kept thinking "what if she thinks I abandon her in that madhouse of teetering, bottle-toting fussy babies? She doesn't belong in there, she is a happy baby, a good baby who deserves attention" and "what if she catches some sickness, some virus" or "what if they give her finger foods and she chokes"....what if, what if?! The anxiety for me to leave her in that environment, which has never been done by the way, was unreal! I kept glancing at the "Come Get Your Baby" screen, waiting for my number to start flashing. 148. What if she is scarred for life from me leaving her in there? Part of me was justifying everything....it is probably good for her to be in that environment once in a while, probably healthy for her little immune system to be exposed to a little bit of germs, good for her ego to not be the center of attention for once.....and on and on.

Did we survive without major catastrophe? Well, yes. But I was the first to pick my baby up, I swooped in and grabbed her up like a mother hawk. She was playing, on her tummy, reaching for a toy that was rolling away. She was fine. I had thought about going to check on her in the middle of the service but would that be phobic?! Overprotective? Ridiculous?

It actually ended up a good thing because they passed around communion in church and there's no way I would have been able to juggle all that and a baby kid too. She is getting to the point where she has to have playthings, she has to be able to be loud and vocal and squeal at all the cool, wondrous, madly impossible things that blow her mind. And, while she did wonderfully in church a couple weeks ago, I think it actually is healthy for both of us to be in those settings without each other. Just....doesn't feel healthy. I thought I would be less distracted without her there, but I think I was more distracted!

So, another week of errands, chores, dinners to cook, exercises to do, playdates to be had. At the end of this week, her hair will be a little thicker, a little longer. Her brain will have developed just a little more, with all the things she can learn in a weeks' time. She will be one week older. These weeks fly by, they morph into months and now we are 3/4 through one whole year. We are watching her sprout before our very eyes, a process I will watch until the day I die. It is so beautiful. There is nowhere I would rather be.