Beau turns 8 months, is displaying characteristics of a shark, and I win the mother-of-the-year award.

I said the thing about the shark because Beau cut his first tooth the other day. And the next-door-neighbor tooth is on it's way through as well! For those of you who don't know much about teething babies (i.e. me nine months ago), they usually get the bottom two teeth first, so those are the ones he is currently working on. I tried and tried to take a picture, but he squirms and puts his tongue over his new tooth every time. Plus, you can hardly see it. They'll be visible to everyone soon enough.
So, Beau turned 8 months old on the first of the month. I can believe that he will be a year old in a mere four months! He is so much fun! He weighs over 20 pounds now! I am not sure how long he is, but he is filling out every bit of 12 month sized clothes. He is eating all kinds of baby food and loves everything we give him. He gets to hold a spoon and a training cup, but he is still just playing with those things at this point. He is learning to feed himself pieces of food (baby puffs) that are placed on his high chair tray. He is so verbal and loves to babble. He says mamama, dadada, bababa, gagaga, shrieks, squeals, growls, and other noises that are difficult to classify. :-) He LOVES to play. He loves to bang blocks together and play music on his little piano. He loves anything that makes noise. And he continues to enjoy listening to and eating books. Especially Pat The Bunny. He is still a great napper and nighttime sleeper, which is nice. Also, as I have transitioned back to working about a day each week at The Riley Institute at Furman, Beau attends Buncombe Street Methodist CDC for two half days. He is basically just there for about one feeding and a playtime before I come to pick him up. He loves other babies and is really enjoying playing with his friends. He gets very excited when he sees them. It is so cute! We still attend the Bouncing Babies class each week and he loves that too.
It has been really nice now that Beau can bathe outside of that lame baby tub. We both hated that thing. It really cramped his style. He loves the big tub! He has a handful of really fun squirty toys. It is hard to decide when to take him out because I think he could stay and play for over an hour if we let him.
Here he is banging a toy on the water.

This face was accompanied by a shriek of happiness.

He has the most expressive eyebrows!

Ok, so on to the Mother-of-the-year portion. I get the award for reading cookbooks and not paying attention to my child. Because when I looked up, he was here:

He can roll, and scoot himself backwards even though he can't crawl yet. So, that is the only explanation I have for why my child ended up under the ottoman. The good news is that I think we can say that he is not allergic to dust. So, there.