Sick

No, not R, but me and J. Kind of hit home how hard it is to take care of a toddler who wants to learn to walk when all you want to do is lie down and quell the nausea in your stomach.

J and I have caught some kind of 24-hour (I'm hoping!) bug-- he seems to be getting better but I'm in the worst of it right now. Thank goodness R went down to sleep without too much trouble because she didn't nap at all today, which was really hard.

Now I'm exhausted and off to bed.

She took her first steps!

My brother A and sister-in-law M gave R this Leap Frog table for her birthday, and told us that it helped our nephew G learn to walk because he would move between the table and another toy, and they gradually kept moving the toys further apart (or G just wanted to get between them faster) until he actually took steps to get from one to the other.

The first day R got the table, she spent 15 minutes straight just cruising circles around the thing. Initially, she singlemindedly went only in one direction (counter-clockwise) but she's since learned to move in a clockwise direction too. Lately, she's been reaching for the table from other pieces of furniture, usually the couch or the chair. While she has previously moved one foot while standing to try and maintain her balance, two days ago we saw her for the first time move both feet in a forwards direction. J says he's seen her do something like that before, but I hadn't, so I say it counts as her first steps!


And, because you're thinking this, yes, we were incredibly lucky to get it on video! We were actually trying to get some pictures of her with one of her favorite toys these days, this little telephone she's had since she was born but has only recently gotten really interested in.

We joke about how this toy is going to be so archaic by the time she's bigger because phones just don't look like this anymore, with cordless phones and cell phones being what they are. But anyway, she loves this thing. It rattles and she sits and shakes it. She's also really gotten into putting it on her shoulder and hugging it between her cheek and shoulder, kind of like the move you do when trying to talk on the phone without holding the receiver in your hands. You actually see R doing this in the video. It is so cute.

When she walks around with it, she also likes to hand the phone to us, as if she's answered it and it's for one of us. She hands us the receiver and we talk into it, usually to Grammie and Grampie or Grandma and Grandpa, who are always very excited to hear from her and want to talk to her again, and then we give it back to her. She sometimes says “Hiiii” or babbles a bit, but usually she just cradles the phone for a bit and then gives it back to us to talk again. Too fun.

More Mouthfuls

I was looking through some pictures--trying to remember which videos I'd uploaded to my Picasa web album--and found a couple more photos of R walking around with stuff in her mouth.

This first one is from my parents' house, when we visited them in Ohio back at the end of May. She really liked this bead ring and carried it all over the house.

























This next one is from R's birthday party-- she and two other friends, G and H, all turned 1 within 3 weeks of each other, so the six parents all had a joint party for them on June 14. This is right after we got to the party and set R down in front of H's toy basket. R picked this thing up and cruised around the ottoman with it in her mouth.

A Mouthful of Stuff

One of R's favorite things to do is put things in her mouth and crawl around.

Favorite mouth toy 1: Blue Oval from her Melissa & Doug wooden shape sorter. Whenever we have this toy out, she will specifically look for and dig out the blue oval before stuffing it in her mouth and just hanging out with it jammed in there.

















Favorite mouth toy 2: Noah, from the Little People Noah's Ark. I swear, this isn't what we had in mind when we thought she would like this toy. She plays with the other animals too, but as soon as she sees Noah, he goes right in her mouth.

















Other favorite mouth toys include:

--pieces of fuzz the cats loosen from the cat tree when sharpening their claws (these she will chew on until one of us notices she's chewing on something and digs it out--we really have to be vigilant if she's crawling around the cat tree!)

--various items of clothing or fabric that she picks up while I'm trying to fold laundry.

















--her handmade birthday card from Great-Aunt T and Great-Uncle D.

Playing Dress Up

Undeniably, one of the best things about having a little girl is the clothes you get to dress them in.

Example 1: Shirt with Fake Flowers

















Before R was born, we didn't know if we were having a boy or a girl. This frustrated a number of people who wanted to get us gifts before the baby's arrival. One of my aunts who lives in Texas got around this problem by sending us a huge box of miscellaneous baby clothes, with a mix of boy and girl items. I sorted through them and sent a lot of the boy things to my brother and sister-in-law, figuring that even if we had a boy, G, our nephew, would fit into the clothes before our little one would. When we went through the box, this shirt (that finally fits R!) was one of the items that made me hope I would have a little girl, just so I could put it on her.

When she wore it the other day, R was a little too interested in the flowers for my taste so I'm a little nervous about her wearing it too often, even though I love it!

Example 2: Princess

















One of the best reasons, in my opinion, for keeping the gender of your baby a surprise until the baby is born is that you aren't inundated with baby clothes before the baby arrives. Baby clothes are impossible to resist, and I admit that every time I'm invited to a shower or buy a gift for a baby where I know the gender, I can't help but purchase some item of baby clothing. I even sometimes buy cute baby clothes when I don't have a baby in mind, because J and I are at the point in our lives where tons of our friends and family are having babies and we know that eventually we will have a teeny tiny baby to give this irresistibly cute item to.

Anyway, before R was born, we got almost no clothes as gifts, since people didn't know what we were having, and generally don't like picking up gender-neutral items (because they're just not as cute or they're harder to find, or both), and then after she was born, almost everyone who sent a gift sent us clothes (which was exactly what we needed, so it worked out great).

But one other reason I was glad not to get too many clothing items before she was born was because I thought I wasn't going to be "one of those" moms who dresses her little girl "all girly and pink." I was excited that I had plenty of gender-neutral items that weren't super-girly, and when people gave me girl clothes that weren't pink, I was glad, because I thought it would help balance out the pink overload.

BUT... once I actually started dressing R, picking out outfits for her to wear from her closet... I found myself reaching for the pink stuff first! I thought she looked so adorable in pink! I loved it! Far from being sick of pink, I liked it and I wanted more.

So when one of J's aunts went to Disney and came back with this outfit, I could not wait to put her in it. We had to wait about three months but she fits in it now.

Hooray for pink!

















I can't get enough of the tulle and skirt on this--so incredibly princessy, and so awesome.

Swimming Lessons, a.k.a. "Starfish"

R and J finished up their swimming lessons yesterday. She got a picture and a certificate of completion--I guess she's officially a Starfish now.

R seemed to enjoy the lessons quite a lot, even though the time we signed up for ended up not being ideal (she was usually REALLY tired because she didn't always nap *before* the 11 a.m. lessons, and would be exhausted by the time she got home, too tired to even have lunch.) They practiced things like holding on to the side rail, sitting on the side of the pool and "falling" in on the count of 3, and blowing bubbles in the water. J said that R never really got into the bubbles bit but seemed to enjoy just being in the water. The instructors sang songs (like the Grand Old Duke of York and the Wheels on the Bus) while the parents would move around in the pool or do hand movements or whatever with the kids.

Here are a few pictures that I took when visiting the class last week.

Corn!

Growing up, my grandparents would always come visit us with bags and bags and bags full of freshly picked corn on the cob. Then us kids--me and my 4 brothers--would stand outside the front of the house husking a dozen or more ears of corn for dinner. Mmm, sweet corn.

Last night, R had her first corn on the cob. We weren't intending to give her the cob--originally we just cut off some of the kernels and put them on her tray. But she wasn't having any of it and started pointing and yelling for the cob itself when watching us eat our corn. She LOVED it, and ate it every which way, after inspecting it carefully, of course.

Galveston Trip

We took a little trip to Galveston earlier this week--sponsored by a training institute that paid for our hotel (yay!). We stayed at a beautiful hotel right on the beach and spent lots of time swimming in the gulf and in the hotel pool. While I spent most of our two days there at the workshop/conference, J and R spent time walking, swimming, and touring some of the island.

You can see our hotel behind J and R in this photo.

















R's favorite activity was walking on the beach, feeling the sand under her toes. She isn't walking on her own yet but she loves to walk while holding on to our hands!

Summer... again

It's summer again, and lately I've been thinking about how different this summer is from last summer. Last summer I was hugely pregnant. This summer I have a 1-year-old roaming my house.

Since R turned 1, just two weeks ago (although because we had three different birthday parties for her, it felt more like a process of turning 1 rather than a single momentous occasion), I've been reminiscing a lot about what it was like last summer, being pregnant, anticipating labor, and looking forward to having a little baby at home.

This is R just a few moments after she was born and wrapped up in a blanket--June 12, 2007.


After R was born, we had tons of friends and family in town visiting. Some of those same family members--J's parents and my parents, for example--are coming to see us again this year. Last summer, though, they made last-minute flight arrangements to come out and meet R and help with new baby stuff. This summer, they're coming, of course, to see R, but also to help us pack up our house in anticipation of our cross-country move.

Last summer, early in June, we made appointments to meet pediatricians--one of whom, uncannily, predicted I would give birth within two weeks, despite the fact that I was only 35 weeks along. (I gave birth exactly a week after meeting with him). This photo was taken, I think, a day or two before we met with the pediatrician.


















This summer, we took R to get her 1-year shots amidst worries about autism and vaccines.

Last summer, when our families came to visit, we were in a sea of sleep deprivation, adjusting to a newborn, and trying to "follow the baby's cues". This summer, we're wrestling with establishing R's schedule and sticking to it, which is kind of funny since I have never been the most schedule-oriented person (although J definitely is a creature of routine and habit).

What a difference a year makes in terms of sleep. Last summer, I was nursing round-the-clock and J and I were lucky to get 4 straight hours of sleep. This summer, R has started sleeping through the night starting around 6:30 or 7:00 and going until 6:30 or 7:00 the next morning. We're now working on getting her naps to be consistent--we haven't been very successful on that front yet--she naps every day, and usually gets about 2-2.5 hours of nap altogether, but it's not consistently at the same time nor for the same length of time. Sometimes she'll have two naps, sometimes just one really long one, etc.