We went to Silver Lake on Friday. It was warm enough to swim, so the girls went in their bathing suits and life vests, and they had their first real experience of a western Washington lake. This particular one is really a glorified pond, but there was a beach with sand and a roped-off kids' area, and the girls loved wading and splashing around. They went waist-deep, which was as far as the rope went, but decided not to go further, even though I said they could. (I didn't say I would go with them. I had not worn a bathing suit. I was prepared to get wet going after one of them, but I was not excited about it, and maybe they noticed that.)
I noticed the distinctive smell of Washington woodland, a sweet woodsy smell, which now that I think of it probably comes partly from overripe blackberries. They noticed the sand and how the underwater plants started growing a few yards out, and the freshwater clamshells, and how in this beach there were no waves and no tide. But mostly, Chloë noticed...wait for it...the ducks. There were a dozen or so mallards and wood ducks floating near shore, and she was absolutely charmed by them, especially when they swam right near her. "I've never seen a duck so close before! Look at its webbed feet!" This flock was very tame; they had obviously decided being chased by small children was worth it for the free food. "That boy is feeding the ducks!" she said, pointing to a boy around eight or so who was tossing chips to the waiting birds nearby. "I wish we had brought food."
"We brought animal crackers," I said, and then as her face opened with hope, "but it's not good for the ducks to feed them." She asked why, and I told her (there was also a helpful sign not far from where the boy stood). I could see and hear her reluctance, but she said decidedly, "Then we shouldn't." I was proud.
* * *
We went to the Lynnwood Skate-and-Bowl on Saturday, for the Norwescon kickoff. Chloë has skated three or four times before, but Maia never has. When they got into her skates she had some trouble standing, but she worked at it, and shuffled gamely across the carpet. After some practice she fell down a slight incline--not her first fall, but her first one that hurt. She cried, naturally, and said she didn't want to go on the rink, so Eric took Chloë out, as she was ready to move on. But they hadn't gotten more than a quarter of the way around the rink when Maia said, "I wish we were with Chloë and Daddy," and I said, "We could go out and try to catch them, " and she said, "Okay."
We stepped into the rink. She was mostly shuffling her feet back and forth, and steadfastly ignoring all my attempts to teach her otherwise, but she clung to my hand and managed some forward movement. She fell a couple of times, but she kept getting back up and shuffling some more, and every once in a while she would exclaim, "I'm doing it!"
Meanwhile ahead of us, Eric reported later, Chloë was struggling to get better, and crying, as she too often does, "I can't do it." We've noticed that Maia tends to be better at things that require physical agility--I blame jaundice--but I don't know how much of that is her much more positive attitude. Chloë has shown determination to do a few things--such as guitar; she got one for her birthday and has been surprisingly diligent about asking for "guitar lessons" from me and about working on her fingering, even though she finds it difficult. (We're looking for a place for lessons around here with an actual teacher.) But most of the time if she has any sort of difficulty, she dissolves into tears and won't keep working on the problem without a lot of prompting. Maia has that reaction sometimes, but more often she just goes ahead and tries things. We never quite caught up with Chloë on that trip around the rink (though Eric spotted us and visited), but at our closest point I commented to Maia, "We're halfway across the rink," and she looked back and said, "No, Mama. Not halfway. Look!" I looked back and realized that while I'd meant halfway around the rink, we were all the way across, and she was awed at the distance she'd skated. She wanted to stop after we completed our circuit, and not long after that we traded our skates for bowling shoes, but she was so excited and proud of herself, and so was I.
Showing posts with label coordination. Show all posts
Showing posts with label coordination. Show all posts
Monday, September 14, 2015
Friday, January 27, 2012
Status report: Maia, month 9
Maia at nine months is just below 21 pounds, 75th-90th percentile, so her growth has slowed a little...though we still need to go out and get convertible carseats to replace the infant carrier with all haste. I'm sorry to see it go. She caught a recent cold of mine, but has otherwise been in good health...although she had a little fever today, most likely from the same cause of her sudden incessant drooling. That's right, ladies and gentlemen: we've entered teething! I'm pleased, since she's still not keen on purees and teeth would make me happier about giving her real foods. Though lack of teeth hasn't been stopping her, and she's got a fine pincer grasp. Lately she's had apple, banana, grapes, mango (rather insipid, from a restaurant), clementine, bits of bread, vegetable Cheeto-style puffs, plenty of Os and oatmeal, more Stage 3s, pasta, roasted sweet potato, boiled regular potato, and some tiny bits of gingerbread cookie (YES I'M A BAD MOTHER).
She adores Chloë's sippies. If we give her her own, she'll play with it a bit; but what she loves is to motor over to wherever Chloë has left her milk or juice and suck at it with all she's got. We know she's gotten some this way, though it's hard to say how much. Chloë just kind of lets her. Maybe it'll become more of an issue when she's a more efficient thief.
She's been cruising everywhere, and walking while holding our hands, and has started letting go to try to stand alone. She fails miserably and falls after about half a second, but she's trying...oh my goodness is she trying. "It's so soon," I lament, but she doesn't seem to hear me.
She's still Miss Wigglebutt, refusing to stay still for diaper changes (though giving her something to chew on and singing the Changing Maia's Bottom song helps) or keep her socks on, zeroing in on any piece of paper or tissue we happen to leave about. She's still waking up in the night, anywhere between 2:30 and 6:30 depending, and I'm worried that we're keeping her up too late at night; she almost always falls asleep while we nurse and only barely rouses when I put her Sleep Sack on her and deposit her in her crib. I'm going to start putting her down a little earlier and see whether that helps.
She and her sister continue to get along well. She likes to pull Chloë's hair--mine too--and we're trying to get her to stop; but she also likes to go see what she's doing, particularly if we're reading, or crawl on top of her, or suck on the fingers that Chloë readily offers. She likes to be tickled, and flown, and surprised, and to bounce in my arms when I come home from work. I still worry that we're not giving her what we gave Chloë, but I think she's doing just fine with what she's got.
Monday, December 12, 2011
Squiggles
Chloë can draw circles now! And squiggles! She's been good at lines for a while, and would occasionally scrawl across the paper and proclaim it a plane, or a cloud, but when I ask her to draw a circle, or a triangle, she's said, "I can not." But the other day she was doing actual loops and intentional zigzags. She gave me the picture, but I forgot to bring it into work. I'll have to do it tomorrow.
(In all honesty, I don’t particularly admire the pictures she makes. I'm glad she enjoys them and I'm glad that this developmental step has occurred, but the pictures themselves don't move me and I don't actually want one up in my cubicle. That's normal, right?)
She's been very keen on the Christmas decorating. "Mama, want to decorate?" she said hopefully all weekend, even after I told her we were all done. She loved putting the berry picks into the garland on the staircase, and "helping" me put up the snowflake lights. Now she wants them on all the time. She was happy when we picked out our tree from Andersons (a little tabletop tree, which is exactly what it's going to be with the crawling baby and all) and is excited to put ornaments on it.
Unfortunately that won't happen until Tuesday, but that's because today is Cookie Day, when Mimi and Addie and Rae come over to make cookies until dough oozes out our ears. Hmm, maybe I shouldn't say that when toddlers are involved. Anyway, she likes cookies and she likes her family and she likes baking with Mama, so it should be a good night. We're going to make sugar cookies with sprinkles. Usually I make the type of cutout cookie that needs to be iced, but she's not that good at squiggles and circles yet.
(In all honesty, I don’t particularly admire the pictures she makes. I'm glad she enjoys them and I'm glad that this developmental step has occurred, but the pictures themselves don't move me and I don't actually want one up in my cubicle. That's normal, right?)
She's been very keen on the Christmas decorating. "Mama, want to decorate?" she said hopefully all weekend, even after I told her we were all done. She loved putting the berry picks into the garland on the staircase, and "helping" me put up the snowflake lights. Now she wants them on all the time. She was happy when we picked out our tree from Andersons (a little tabletop tree, which is exactly what it's going to be with the crawling baby and all) and is excited to put ornaments on it.
Unfortunately that won't happen until Tuesday, but that's because today is Cookie Day, when Mimi and Addie and Rae come over to make cookies until dough oozes out our ears. Hmm, maybe I shouldn't say that when toddlers are involved. Anyway, she likes cookies and she likes her family and she likes baking with Mama, so it should be a good night. We're going to make sugar cookies with sprinkles. Usually I make the type of cutout cookie that needs to be iced, but she's not that good at squiggles and circles yet.
Monday, December 27, 2010
Status report: Month 17
Chloë would say "Merry Christmas from the Overlord!" if (a) she could say any of those words and (b) she weren't throwing up left and right. Christmas was spent with a grandma recovering from a stomach bug and an aunt and cousin (a very huggy cousin) coming down with it, so I'm not surprised, though I am very sorry (and so is Eric, who has to keep changing his clothes as well as hers).
Other than that, it was a great Christmas. She got books and movies and clothes and electronic toys, and a new doll and a sock monkey and a fuzzy blanket, and a package of four nubbly balls that, along with her armchair, were really all she needed. She opened that first on Christmas morning and we had to open the box and get the balls out for her, and even after ten minutes of play we had a hard time convincing her that maybe she could look at the other presents that needed opening. She did enjoy ripping into the presents, hers and ours, and was restrained with difficulty from opening the ones still under the tree for her cousins and grandmas and such. And she was okay wearing her fancy Christmas dress for the family Christmas, though she was a little concerned when she was asked where her belly was and couldn't find it under the skirt.
Christmas was the first TV-free day she's had in a while, a trend we're not excited about. She asks for TV early in the day and keeps asking, even if she's seen a couple, and mostly we've been letting her watch one or two of her Baby Einstein shows. (She got a new one for Christmas, Baby Neptune, and the next day we watched it. Afterward she pointed to the TV and said "Baby," so I got out Baby da Vinci, which is what she usually means when she says "Baby" these days, but what she wanted was to watch the Baby Neptune one again.) We're not keen on letting her be a couch potato this early, so we're putting up with the whining and encouraging her to play with her blocks, or dolls, or Leapfrogs, or talking purse, or books, or...you get the idea. Mom brought her a couple of teach-your-baby-to-sign books, basically miniature ASL dictionaries with kids doing the signs, and she loves looking at these. Anything with kids or babies in it is tops with her these days.
This past month she has continued to pick up vocabulary at an alarming rate. She knows "honey," for example, and "pepper." She can say "car" pretty clearly. She's been practicing "Halmoni," based on pictures on the fridge and the webcam call we had on Christmas, and it's now more of a "Hah....eee" than a "Hal." She now uses "Mimi" we think to refer to Memaw, Eric's mom, though that one's hard to tell. She calls all cats, or at least all black cats, "Shadow" ("ahh-daoh") now, after Memaw's cat. "Ba" is box (normally her jewelry box), or sometimes sheep; "pih" is her piggybank; "gkaoh" is chocolate. (She learned it because she got it daily, or anyway every day she remembered to ask, up until Christmas because she got an advent calendar from Memaw, though we switched out the "chocolate" in it for Hershey's. We'll see how it goes from now on.) She's getting better at calling oranges oranges instead of apples; she was excited to correctly point them out in her How Are You Peeling? book this past week. The peppers still perplex her, especially when I point to the red and green ones side by side and call them both peppers. I don't know if she connects them with the pepper shaker on the table or not. Poor kid.
"Button" is now "buh," which I hear pretty frequently, as one of her favorite pastimes is to sit on the spare bed and open up my button tin and let all the buttons cascade out. Then she shows me the pretty ("piee") ones, or we play "button eyes" or "stack the buttons" until she starts flailing her hands about in the pile and flinging them about, and then it's time to pack them up again. She's good at helping put them away. She's also good, after having been told several times, about not opening up the little bags with the special buttons in them. "Nanana," she says, holding them up to show me, and I nod and say, "That's right, that's a no-no. Thank you," and she puts them to the side. "No" is showing up more and more. Sometimes it's in response to "do you want your drink?" which is okay; sometimes it's in response to "come here so I can put your diaper on you," which is not. The definition of "no" will, we know, be ongoing for pretty much the next seventeen years.
She can also name various body parts. Previously we would say "where's your nose?" or "where's your arm?" and she'd point to it. Now we point and say "What's this?" and she says "nohh," or "ahm." She knows her leg, and her knee, and her cheek and chin and back and bottom (which makes everyone laugh).
She continues to be an excellent eater. She does very well eating things like applesauce and oatmeal with her spoon with not too much mess, and spearing things like cheese and eggs with her fork with great readiness and pretty decent accuracy. She gobbled up the green beans and turkey at Christmas dinner. Also, she seems okay with spicy foods. Eric was picking out a cheese cube from the tray and realized too late that it was a hot pepper cube, not Swiss. He offered it to me; I took it and was reaching for a cracker to eat it with when Chloë, who was in my lap, leaned over and took a bite. We waited for her to spit it out or make a face, but she swallowed, considered, and took the rest of the cube.
In the past couple of weeks she's been very keen on helping with chores. Our standard routine after meals is to get a wet paper towel to wipe down her hands and face. She's been taking it to "wipe her hands" for a while, but now she also wipes her face, and sometimes the tabletop, and when I get her down from her chair she wipes the chair, too. She recently started bringing in plates and food from the table after dinner--unasked. And she and Eric went grocery shopping one night, and when Eric started loading bags into the trunk of the car she started lifting bags to hand to him.
She continues to like me to pick her up a lot. This is becoming troublesome, since I'm now noticeably pregnant (here come maternity pants, at five months, sigh) and my back is noticing, and picking up a thirty-pound toddler is not helping. I've started coming down to her level and letting her climb in my lap, or sitting down and lifting her up that shorter distance, but we're going to have to work on weaning her off of Mama's arms as well as bottles. The bottle-weaning is going fine; we're doing sippy cups in the morning with no trouble. When we gave her milk at dinner the other night she commented "babul," and went right on. Naptime bottles will probably be the next to go.
Potty training, on the other hand, is at a standstill. Most of the time she refuses to sit on the potty seat. Sometimes when Eric or I am on the toilet, she'll come in and sit, but once her pants and diaper are off she sits for about two seconds and then rockets upward again. Though this morning while I was taking a shower she decided to try it, and removed her pants and diaper herself and sat for a while. The diaper thing is new. Oh boy.
She's a one-nap girl now. It's still usually before lunchtime, which we're probably going to have to work on, but her schedule seems to be working out for her. She often wakes around seven, and if it's earlier she's usually happy to get a bottle and a change and go back to bed, so that works out for me, too.
She loves, loves, loves her bath. We get her undressed in the bathroom while the water's warming up; then we plug up the tub, set her inside, and let her play in the running water until the tub is full enough. If she hasn't stood up too much (this doesn't happen much anymore), she also gets to play with running water afterward, while we're giving her a final rinse and putting away her toys. She tolerates the scrubbing; when I've finished one foot she'll hold up the other. She still hates having her face cleaned, but she's learned to tilt her head back when we wash her hair, which has seriously cut down on the stress of that part of the bath. She stands up while we wash her bits, and then again when she's ready to get out; Eric lifts her out and puts her into the towel I've got waiting, and as I wrap her in it and sit down to begin the process of drying her off (a process that must happen quickly or it doesn't happen at all), I say "Say 'bye-bye, bath,'" and she says, "Bah-bah."
She's very good at tooth-brushing time now, too. She says "ahh" and opens her mouth wide, even for flossing. She has eleven teeth now--four incisors top and bottom in the front, one first molar on the bottom, and two first molars peeking in on the top. Afterwards I hold her up to the mirror and say "Say 'night-night, Chloë.'" She waves at her reflection and says, "Bah-bah."
She can climb both up and down stairs unaided now, though we insist on accompanying her, especially when she's going down, and anyway she prefers to hold onto one of our hands as well as to the wall or balustrade. She can tell when she's got socks without traction dots on and is more likely to ask to be carried when she's wearing them. She's gotten better about keeping her socks on, especially downstairs (where we insist), though she's now growing keener on taking off her pants and occasionally shirt. We're not sure whether it's a good thing it's winter or not.
We've spent this month mostly saying "What a big girl!" and "What a good helper!" She loves to help, she loves to talk, she loves to show off, she loves her life. And we love her.
Other than that, it was a great Christmas. She got books and movies and clothes and electronic toys, and a new doll and a sock monkey and a fuzzy blanket, and a package of four nubbly balls that, along with her armchair, were really all she needed. She opened that first on Christmas morning and we had to open the box and get the balls out for her, and even after ten minutes of play we had a hard time convincing her that maybe she could look at the other presents that needed opening. She did enjoy ripping into the presents, hers and ours, and was restrained with difficulty from opening the ones still under the tree for her cousins and grandmas and such. And she was okay wearing her fancy Christmas dress for the family Christmas, though she was a little concerned when she was asked where her belly was and couldn't find it under the skirt.
Christmas was the first TV-free day she's had in a while, a trend we're not excited about. She asks for TV early in the day and keeps asking, even if she's seen a couple, and mostly we've been letting her watch one or two of her Baby Einstein shows. (She got a new one for Christmas, Baby Neptune, and the next day we watched it. Afterward she pointed to the TV and said "Baby," so I got out Baby da Vinci, which is what she usually means when she says "Baby" these days, but what she wanted was to watch the Baby Neptune one again.) We're not keen on letting her be a couch potato this early, so we're putting up with the whining and encouraging her to play with her blocks, or dolls, or Leapfrogs, or talking purse, or books, or...you get the idea. Mom brought her a couple of teach-your-baby-to-sign books, basically miniature ASL dictionaries with kids doing the signs, and she loves looking at these. Anything with kids or babies in it is tops with her these days.
This past month she has continued to pick up vocabulary at an alarming rate. She knows "honey," for example, and "pepper." She can say "car" pretty clearly. She's been practicing "Halmoni," based on pictures on the fridge and the webcam call we had on Christmas, and it's now more of a "Hah....eee" than a "Hal." She now uses "Mimi" we think to refer to Memaw, Eric's mom, though that one's hard to tell. She calls all cats, or at least all black cats, "Shadow" ("ahh-daoh") now, after Memaw's cat. "Ba" is box (normally her jewelry box), or sometimes sheep; "pih" is her piggybank; "gkaoh" is chocolate. (She learned it because she got it daily, or anyway every day she remembered to ask, up until Christmas because she got an advent calendar from Memaw, though we switched out the "chocolate" in it for Hershey's. We'll see how it goes from now on.) She's getting better at calling oranges oranges instead of apples; she was excited to correctly point them out in her How Are You Peeling? book this past week. The peppers still perplex her, especially when I point to the red and green ones side by side and call them both peppers. I don't know if she connects them with the pepper shaker on the table or not. Poor kid.
"Button" is now "buh," which I hear pretty frequently, as one of her favorite pastimes is to sit on the spare bed and open up my button tin and let all the buttons cascade out. Then she shows me the pretty ("piee") ones, or we play "button eyes" or "stack the buttons" until she starts flailing her hands about in the pile and flinging them about, and then it's time to pack them up again. She's good at helping put them away. She's also good, after having been told several times, about not opening up the little bags with the special buttons in them. "Nanana," she says, holding them up to show me, and I nod and say, "That's right, that's a no-no. Thank you," and she puts them to the side. "No" is showing up more and more. Sometimes it's in response to "do you want your drink?" which is okay; sometimes it's in response to "come here so I can put your diaper on you," which is not. The definition of "no" will, we know, be ongoing for pretty much the next seventeen years.
She can also name various body parts. Previously we would say "where's your nose?" or "where's your arm?" and she'd point to it. Now we point and say "What's this?" and she says "nohh," or "ahm." She knows her leg, and her knee, and her cheek and chin and back and bottom (which makes everyone laugh).
She continues to be an excellent eater. She does very well eating things like applesauce and oatmeal with her spoon with not too much mess, and spearing things like cheese and eggs with her fork with great readiness and pretty decent accuracy. She gobbled up the green beans and turkey at Christmas dinner. Also, she seems okay with spicy foods. Eric was picking out a cheese cube from the tray and realized too late that it was a hot pepper cube, not Swiss. He offered it to me; I took it and was reaching for a cracker to eat it with when Chloë, who was in my lap, leaned over and took a bite. We waited for her to spit it out or make a face, but she swallowed, considered, and took the rest of the cube.
In the past couple of weeks she's been very keen on helping with chores. Our standard routine after meals is to get a wet paper towel to wipe down her hands and face. She's been taking it to "wipe her hands" for a while, but now she also wipes her face, and sometimes the tabletop, and when I get her down from her chair she wipes the chair, too. She recently started bringing in plates and food from the table after dinner--unasked. And she and Eric went grocery shopping one night, and when Eric started loading bags into the trunk of the car she started lifting bags to hand to him.
She continues to like me to pick her up a lot. This is becoming troublesome, since I'm now noticeably pregnant (here come maternity pants, at five months, sigh) and my back is noticing, and picking up a thirty-pound toddler is not helping. I've started coming down to her level and letting her climb in my lap, or sitting down and lifting her up that shorter distance, but we're going to have to work on weaning her off of Mama's arms as well as bottles. The bottle-weaning is going fine; we're doing sippy cups in the morning with no trouble. When we gave her milk at dinner the other night she commented "babul," and went right on. Naptime bottles will probably be the next to go.
Potty training, on the other hand, is at a standstill. Most of the time she refuses to sit on the potty seat. Sometimes when Eric or I am on the toilet, she'll come in and sit, but once her pants and diaper are off she sits for about two seconds and then rockets upward again. Though this morning while I was taking a shower she decided to try it, and removed her pants and diaper herself and sat for a while. The diaper thing is new. Oh boy.
She's a one-nap girl now. It's still usually before lunchtime, which we're probably going to have to work on, but her schedule seems to be working out for her. She often wakes around seven, and if it's earlier she's usually happy to get a bottle and a change and go back to bed, so that works out for me, too.
She loves, loves, loves her bath. We get her undressed in the bathroom while the water's warming up; then we plug up the tub, set her inside, and let her play in the running water until the tub is full enough. If she hasn't stood up too much (this doesn't happen much anymore), she also gets to play with running water afterward, while we're giving her a final rinse and putting away her toys. She tolerates the scrubbing; when I've finished one foot she'll hold up the other. She still hates having her face cleaned, but she's learned to tilt her head back when we wash her hair, which has seriously cut down on the stress of that part of the bath. She stands up while we wash her bits, and then again when she's ready to get out; Eric lifts her out and puts her into the towel I've got waiting, and as I wrap her in it and sit down to begin the process of drying her off (a process that must happen quickly or it doesn't happen at all), I say "Say 'bye-bye, bath,'" and she says, "Bah-bah."
She's very good at tooth-brushing time now, too. She says "ahh" and opens her mouth wide, even for flossing. She has eleven teeth now--four incisors top and bottom in the front, one first molar on the bottom, and two first molars peeking in on the top. Afterwards I hold her up to the mirror and say "Say 'night-night, Chloë.'" She waves at her reflection and says, "Bah-bah."
She can climb both up and down stairs unaided now, though we insist on accompanying her, especially when she's going down, and anyway she prefers to hold onto one of our hands as well as to the wall or balustrade. She can tell when she's got socks without traction dots on and is more likely to ask to be carried when she's wearing them. She's gotten better about keeping her socks on, especially downstairs (where we insist), though she's now growing keener on taking off her pants and occasionally shirt. We're not sure whether it's a good thing it's winter or not.
We've spent this month mostly saying "What a big girl!" and "What a good helper!" She loves to help, she loves to talk, she loves to show off, she loves her life. And we love her.
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Status report: Month 11
As year one of Project L.E.O.: Phase 2 nears its end, I'm reflecting on how different my life was before Chloë was born. When the house was quieter, cleaner, less full of baby laughter. When the kitchen and living room weren't littered with toys and books and random kitchen implements. When we could put small things within three feet of the floor. And when someone wasn't always watching me.
Eleven months is pretty awesome. She laughs a lot, especially on the Daddycoaster and when she's upside down. She also laughs when things simply strike her as funny, which is new and charming. She's so communicative, especially for someone who can't actually talk yet--though I haven't yet felt that she needs to. She's observant and curious, looking and moving everywhere--not quite walking yet, but she's starting to think about it. She's let go and supported herself on her own two legs and nothing else for a few seconds at a time. Then she eases down into a squat, or falls over, and doesn't seem to think much of it. But Eric and I always catch our breath, wondering if this will be the time she decides this new way of moving is for keeps.
Separation anxiety is still in full swing, though it's not crippling. There are still times when she cries in mingled rage and grief when I put her down, but from all reports she gets over it very quickly when I leave for work in the morning (including today, when she stayed with Grandpa Snyder and Nana because Eric is in Columbus) and she's happy to wrestle with her daddy even when I'm there sometimes.
She loves her music; Eric's been playing it for her when they're home together and she sways and bounces along. She's got a Baby Einstein video (the astronomy one) and is mainly interested in it for the faces, but she listens to the music as she's playing with her toys. She's getting a lot of mileage out of her toys with buttons...as well as anything around the house with buttons. She's also getting a big kick out of the concept of "in." I finally understand the purpose of the toy aquarium Holly gave her. And she likes her books--especially turning the pages.
Bath time has suddenly become a bit of a trial. She screams and protests when we put her in the water now, for no good reason we can tell. She can still be soothed by her rubber duck and her Sandra Boynton bath book, but bathtime isn't as fun as it used to be. I'm hoping this phase passes quickly.
Food is still exciting and awesome. She loves fruit, particularly the raspberries from our patch outside the back door, and now when we go back and forth from the house to the car she says "Na da?" and gestures toward them. But she also eats her veggies.
(Hey, anything that keeps her occupied when we're making dinner is good.)
She's ahead of her age--or at least ahead of the advice we've been reading for her age--on food. She's got six teeth, which we brush every night, but we don't think it's the teeth doing it. She's decidedly lukewarm about baby food these days, but she loves anything she can feed herself: fruit, soft veggies, scrambled egg, tofu, pasta, beans, bread, crackers, rice, cheese. She loves getting food from one of our plates...and has started feeding herself, a little. We started letting her use a spoon a couple of weeks ago, gingerly, cringing at the mess. There was a mess.
But, quickly, she got the idea, and if we load up her spoon she can now get it in her mouth with no trouble. She attempts to get the food onto the spoon, too, but her idea of doing that is to stick it in the container of food, which doesn't usually get her much, especially if she's holding the spoon upside down. Which she usually is. She holds her sippy cup upside down most of the time, too.
She's showing signs of being a lefty. I'm thrilled.
"Da" is no longer the only syllable in her vocabulary, which also pleases me. "Ma ma ma" has shown up, as have "Na na" and "Ba" and, one evening when I said it first, "Eh." She doesn't have any actual words yet, but sometimes she releases the R.I.N.D.S. and looks up at me and says "Da?" and I know she's asking something, but I haven't figured it out yet. She does know what "no" means, especially "no shoes" and "no biting." And she's got intonations when she babbles. Eric and I will both babble back to her, and we'll have a whole conversation that way as if she's really asking questions and we're really answering: "Da da da." "Da da da?" "Da!" "Da da da da..." She'll gesture to things she wants, like her sippy when we've removed it, or to the other container of food when she's tired of the one we're currently feeding her. She pushes her food tray away when she's done eating. She reaches up to be held and squirms away to be put down. Who needs words?
She's still very chubby, though not quite as much as before, we think. Her feet are starting to show some hints of arches, and her hands are plump and strong. Her hair has grown out enough that it's seriously starting to get in her eyes. Eric bought some cute little hairclips, and her Nana gave her a hairband today for a little Pebbles-style ponytail. I can't decide whether she's more adorable with her hair up or down.
She is into EVERYTHING. No drawer or cabinet is safe. No DVD or book goes unmolested. Her instinct to put everything in her mouth has abated a little, which is a relief, especially since I often find her with a bit of plastic or tissue in her hand. If I ask her, most of the time she deposits it in my hand, which is nicer than prying it out from between her teeth. The house is mostly babyproofed, though we're not militant about it, and we have baby gates up, but she still finds things to explore. She's our little adventurer, ready to take on the world.
Eleven months is pretty awesome. She laughs a lot, especially on the Daddycoaster and when she's upside down. She also laughs when things simply strike her as funny, which is new and charming. She's so communicative, especially for someone who can't actually talk yet--though I haven't yet felt that she needs to. She's observant and curious, looking and moving everywhere--not quite walking yet, but she's starting to think about it. She's let go and supported herself on her own two legs and nothing else for a few seconds at a time. Then she eases down into a squat, or falls over, and doesn't seem to think much of it. But Eric and I always catch our breath, wondering if this will be the time she decides this new way of moving is for keeps.
Separation anxiety is still in full swing, though it's not crippling. There are still times when she cries in mingled rage and grief when I put her down, but from all reports she gets over it very quickly when I leave for work in the morning (including today, when she stayed with Grandpa Snyder and Nana because Eric is in Columbus) and she's happy to wrestle with her daddy even when I'm there sometimes.
She loves her music; Eric's been playing it for her when they're home together and she sways and bounces along. She's got a Baby Einstein video (the astronomy one) and is mainly interested in it for the faces, but she listens to the music as she's playing with her toys. She's getting a lot of mileage out of her toys with buttons...as well as anything around the house with buttons. She's also getting a big kick out of the concept of "in." I finally understand the purpose of the toy aquarium Holly gave her. And she likes her books--especially turning the pages.
Bath time has suddenly become a bit of a trial. She screams and protests when we put her in the water now, for no good reason we can tell. She can still be soothed by her rubber duck and her Sandra Boynton bath book, but bathtime isn't as fun as it used to be. I'm hoping this phase passes quickly.
Food is still exciting and awesome. She loves fruit, particularly the raspberries from our patch outside the back door, and now when we go back and forth from the house to the car she says "Na da?" and gestures toward them. But she also eats her veggies.
(Hey, anything that keeps her occupied when we're making dinner is good.)
She's ahead of her age--or at least ahead of the advice we've been reading for her age--on food. She's got six teeth, which we brush every night, but we don't think it's the teeth doing it. She's decidedly lukewarm about baby food these days, but she loves anything she can feed herself: fruit, soft veggies, scrambled egg, tofu, pasta, beans, bread, crackers, rice, cheese. She loves getting food from one of our plates...and has started feeding herself, a little. We started letting her use a spoon a couple of weeks ago, gingerly, cringing at the mess. There was a mess.
But, quickly, she got the idea, and if we load up her spoon she can now get it in her mouth with no trouble. She attempts to get the food onto the spoon, too, but her idea of doing that is to stick it in the container of food, which doesn't usually get her much, especially if she's holding the spoon upside down. Which she usually is. She holds her sippy cup upside down most of the time, too.
She's showing signs of being a lefty. I'm thrilled.
"Da" is no longer the only syllable in her vocabulary, which also pleases me. "Ma ma ma" has shown up, as have "Na na" and "Ba" and, one evening when I said it first, "Eh." She doesn't have any actual words yet, but sometimes she releases the R.I.N.D.S. and looks up at me and says "Da?" and I know she's asking something, but I haven't figured it out yet. She does know what "no" means, especially "no shoes" and "no biting." And she's got intonations when she babbles. Eric and I will both babble back to her, and we'll have a whole conversation that way as if she's really asking questions and we're really answering: "Da da da." "Da da da?" "Da!" "Da da da da..." She'll gesture to things she wants, like her sippy when we've removed it, or to the other container of food when she's tired of the one we're currently feeding her. She pushes her food tray away when she's done eating. She reaches up to be held and squirms away to be put down. Who needs words?
She's still very chubby, though not quite as much as before, we think. Her feet are starting to show some hints of arches, and her hands are plump and strong. Her hair has grown out enough that it's seriously starting to get in her eyes. Eric bought some cute little hairclips, and her Nana gave her a hairband today for a little Pebbles-style ponytail. I can't decide whether she's more adorable with her hair up or down.
She is into EVERYTHING. No drawer or cabinet is safe. No DVD or book goes unmolested. Her instinct to put everything in her mouth has abated a little, which is a relief, especially since I often find her with a bit of plastic or tissue in her hand. If I ask her, most of the time she deposits it in my hand, which is nicer than prying it out from between her teeth. The house is mostly babyproofed, though we're not militant about it, and we have baby gates up, but she still finds things to explore. She's our little adventurer, ready to take on the world.
Monday, February 22, 2010
Status report: Month 7
(Technically a day early, but I won't have time tomorrow.)
Poor Chloë is coughing and sneezing in her sleep. We've had about six weeks free of sickness, but they're at an end now. She was a little whiny this evening, but not bad--certainly not as whiny as Eric or I get when we're sick. We'll see what the morning brings, not to mention the night.
Other than the cold, she's doing very well these days. She's big and chubby and still very smiley. She hasn't figured out how to crawl yet, but she's getting close. Very close. She gets up on her hands and knees and pushes, which makes her go backward; she gets up on her hands and toes and wails because she can't figure out where to go from there. She loves to sit, and has started rocking back and forth sometimes when she does, as if she's listening to internal music. Or if somebody got her a baby iPod...or weed...and she isn't sharing.
Nighttime sleep has gotten better and better. She now goes to sleep at eight-thirty or nine, usually without an argument, and sleeps until six or seven unless she didn't eat enough before bed, or probably unless she's sick (I'm going to bed early tonight in anticipation). Naps have become much more of a struggle than they used to be, though. She mostly takes one in the morning and one in the afternoon, but only after much protest and not for very long. Saturday she had just one and it was for an hour and a half. I think she's making up for all that napping she did in her first weeks. Really, we wouldn't have minded if she didn't. She sleeps better in our arms, but only if she stays there, which can be inconvenient.
She's had wheat, squash, pineapple, strawberries, and chicken since the last time I posted a list. I feel we must have given her more new foods than that, but maybe not--we've also been trying combining foods, re-exposing her to things (Gerber 1st Foods peas bad, 2nd Foods peas good, Beechnut peas dubious), and working on increasing amounts and lumpier textures. Also, drinking. She treats her sippy cups as bottles, without realizing that she has to tip them up to get the liquid out. I put one on the tray in front of her and she lunges for it with her mouth, but she hasn't quite figured out how her hands are supposed to relate.
She's made an important discovery: she has feet! And they are yummy!
A lot of everything goes in the mouth now: credit cards, spoons, tags, her fingers, our fingers, her doll's fingers (well, hand). And what doesn't still goes in the fist. Power cords are in constant danger when she's around. We've started offering her some puffs, and she can occasionally pick one up and get it to her mouth. Or close to it. Small objects are now completely off-limits. (Not that we left marbles and pennies lying around, trusting that she was safe because she couldn't pick them up. We're not that careless.)
She continues to love the baby in the mirror, and pictures of other babies are vastly entertaining. She's laughing more, and it's often at faces--the one on the front of the baby-food book, the ones of her cousins on the refrigerator, even the author photo in a book of mine. (Books are great, too: they have nice chewable corners and pages that squeak when you rub your hands along them!) She likes people a lot, and she likes play more and more. She's our happy social little girl, and she's wonderful.
Poor Chloë is coughing and sneezing in her sleep. We've had about six weeks free of sickness, but they're at an end now. She was a little whiny this evening, but not bad--certainly not as whiny as Eric or I get when we're sick. We'll see what the morning brings, not to mention the night.
Other than the cold, she's doing very well these days. She's big and chubby and still very smiley. She hasn't figured out how to crawl yet, but she's getting close. Very close. She gets up on her hands and knees and pushes, which makes her go backward; she gets up on her hands and toes and wails because she can't figure out where to go from there. She loves to sit, and has started rocking back and forth sometimes when she does, as if she's listening to internal music. Or if somebody got her a baby iPod...or weed...and she isn't sharing.
Nighttime sleep has gotten better and better. She now goes to sleep at eight-thirty or nine, usually without an argument, and sleeps until six or seven unless she didn't eat enough before bed, or probably unless she's sick (I'm going to bed early tonight in anticipation). Naps have become much more of a struggle than they used to be, though. She mostly takes one in the morning and one in the afternoon, but only after much protest and not for very long. Saturday she had just one and it was for an hour and a half. I think she's making up for all that napping she did in her first weeks. Really, we wouldn't have minded if she didn't. She sleeps better in our arms, but only if she stays there, which can be inconvenient.
She's had wheat, squash, pineapple, strawberries, and chicken since the last time I posted a list. I feel we must have given her more new foods than that, but maybe not--we've also been trying combining foods, re-exposing her to things (Gerber 1st Foods peas bad, 2nd Foods peas good, Beechnut peas dubious), and working on increasing amounts and lumpier textures. Also, drinking. She treats her sippy cups as bottles, without realizing that she has to tip them up to get the liquid out. I put one on the tray in front of her and she lunges for it with her mouth, but she hasn't quite figured out how her hands are supposed to relate.
She's made an important discovery: she has feet! And they are yummy!
A lot of everything goes in the mouth now: credit cards, spoons, tags, her fingers, our fingers, her doll's fingers (well, hand). And what doesn't still goes in the fist. Power cords are in constant danger when she's around. We've started offering her some puffs, and she can occasionally pick one up and get it to her mouth. Or close to it. Small objects are now completely off-limits. (Not that we left marbles and pennies lying around, trusting that she was safe because she couldn't pick them up. We're not that careless.)
She continues to love the baby in the mirror, and pictures of other babies are vastly entertaining. She's laughing more, and it's often at faces--the one on the front of the baby-food book, the ones of her cousins on the refrigerator, even the author photo in a book of mine. (Books are great, too: they have nice chewable corners and pages that squeak when you rub your hands along them!) She likes people a lot, and she likes play more and more. She's our happy social little girl, and she's wonderful.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)