Gemma was 13 months old...

a couple weeks ago...but I was slack and didn't bother taking a picture or doing any sort of write-up.  Today I decided not to let the entire month go by without taking a "growth" photo so I got her giraffe out and she got into the spirit of things by waving my debit card at the camera.  (I had been cleaning out my wallet and found an old expired debit card; I don't usually let her just play with my credit cards.)  I thought a picture of her waving my card around pretty much summed up life in our house these days:

If you look closely in the picture, you can see two of her brand-new top teeth.  We have had a rough few weeks as Gemma decided to pop out not one, not two, or even three, but four top teeth all at once.  And it seems like she is working on some more.  She got her first two together right at 6 months and hadn't gotten any more since; now it looks as if she's going to get an entire mouthful all at once.  Needless to say, the nights at our house have been less than pleasant of late.  Gemma began sleeping through the night pretty quickly after she was born, and when she did wake up, she would simply eat and then go right back to sleep (usually she would fall asleep while eating).  She has always been a great sleeper, but off and on for the past couple of weeks, she has been waking up and staying awake and crying for hours at a time.  We honestly have never had to deal with this before so it has been kind of difficult.  It seems like everyone else with kids her age is finally getting them to the point where they consistently sleep through the night; ours has done that all along and now she is keeping us up at night.  We are really hoping it is just teeth and that soon things will be back to normal.

She is not walking on her own at all yet, but her favorite thing to do is walk all around the house with one of us holding her arms.  She likes to walk from one person to another, and if you let go, she will take about one step on her own and then just launch herself into the arms of the person waiting to catch her.  Hopefully she will soon be confident enough to try taking a few steps on her own.

She is also still very small, but seems to be healthy.  She is still wearing a mixture of 9 month and 12 month clothes, but she eats everything in sight pretty much all day long, so I am not too worried about her.

And she is way too smart for her own (and my own) good.  The other day she figured out how to open my phone (and it is fairly difficult to open) and started calling my mom and then my mother-in-law.  Coincidence that she sneakily dialed both grandmas?  She is starting to get the hang of putting the right shapes in the right holes on her toys, and if you say anything with the word "berry" in it, she will blow a big raspberry at you!