Dahlia is 8 months old. The last time I wrote in this blog, she was 10 weeks old. I can’t believe 5 months have passed by! Things are moving fast.

There have been so many firsts in her life within the past month:

• Her first words were mama. She looked straight at Megan, said the magic word, and moved quickly to her mother. She already understands Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs!
• She’s crawling. We practice everyday and she gets faster and more confident. Right now, we play a game of chase where we both crawl from room to room. My knees have never been this sore!
• She’s practically standing. To prevent her from exploring too many new things without our supervision (because of her new mobility), we setup a fence in the main room. This has just allowed her to practice standing up with support. Fortunately, she’s learned to fall on her bottom recently so we don’t have to stick a helmet on her
• She has teeth! We’ve been trying to get her to play with food. It’s a messy exercise, but the entire family gets into it. . We always end it with a bath.

She smiles at us all the time. It used to be something that we could only expect for short stretches during the day. Now, she just spends most of her day finding new ways to laugh and giggle. It’s still as extraordinary as the first time we saw her do it.

Over the past few months, we’ve never been so tired or so happy. However, I have struggled with balancing work and family due to a large amount of travel and a long commute. As we thought about the future, we were not sure whether Florida was the best fit for us. We decided to make a change and I will be looking for new opportunities this month. It’s exciting but it’s also scary because we have a little person to consider.

There are a lot of photos in this collection. Just imagine how many videos we have taken! In time, I’m sure DJ will think this was excessive but she’ll never know how much these moments affected her parents.

Some of the key events that occurred during this period were my sister’s weddings in Los Angeles and Houston as well as Christmas with Megan’s family.  We also got to see DJ’s great grandfather for the last time.