The Eighteenth Month

The eighteenth month arrived so quickly,  I've hardly had a chance to sit and collect my thoughts to turn them into something to post.

Lucy had a doctor appointment a week ago with Dr. K and it went great. She continues to follow the same growth curves for her head, height, and weight, which is good. She scored very well on the development test. I think she remembered the doctor a little better this time because she wasn't too shy for her and even opened her mouth to show off her new teeth that are coming in. She has nine teeth all the way in and soon will have 13. She only cried for a minute when getting her shots and let Chinda hold her for a little after she administered them. We actually had a bit of trouble getting her to leave when it was all over because they had so many cool books there. Here are her 18 month stats:

Weight: 18lbs 2oz

 

Height: 30.5 inches

She is a tiny little thing! She is wearing 12 month tops, 18 month pants, and size 4 shoes.

We've experienced the language explosion over the past few months. So we have a chatty baby now and she is starting to put little sentences together. The doctor was impressed with her vocabulary. :)

Lucy loves to eat and make a big mess with her food. :) We try our best to keep her eating real organic foods and she does well even though Grandma and papa are constantly trying to derail our efforts with animal crackers.  Her favorite foods right now are yogurt, any fruit, cheese, spinach frittatas, spaghetti, salmon, whole wheat pasta, and peas. Her least favorite is the same... potatoes.

We sing lots of songs throughout the day here. Lucy knows most of them by heart and if you stop at certain words she sings it. Her favorite songs are: The Kids in the Pool, Five Little Monkeys, Row Row Row Your Boat, and Head Shoulders Knees and Toes. She asks for them by name. She does all the hand movements for Five Little Monkeys and I die of cuteness overload when she shakes her finger for "No more monkeys jumping on the bed".

She loves animals. Dogs are still a favorite, but she is kind of on a owl and turtle kick right now.

She has developed car sickness over the past couple months, which hasn't been an issue until we drove home for Thanksgiving. Poor thing. We just hate to see her feel ill. I'm thankful that she can handle our usual short car rides to the grocery store or park.

We are constantly in awe of how clever Lucille has become and how much she has changed. She is a great problem solver and picks up new things so quickly. Children just learn so fast and it is such a blessing to be able to watch first hand. This is such a fun age to teach her new things because all you have to do is play with them or set up an activity and watch them play. I'm so intrigued by Maria Montessori's methods and I'm always excited to implement what I can in our home.

I'm excited that winter is going to be in full swing soon, but our outdoor adventures are going to be a bit more of a task once we're buried in the snow!

What does eighteen month old Lucille enjoy?

Singing songs

Listening to music and dancing

Reading books

Making towers by stacking things (Legos, books, nesting cups, shoes)

Feeding Annabelle and Jedd

Looking at photos with Papa

Playing in the ball pit with Grandma

Going down the slide on her tummy

Blowing bubbles in the water during bath time

Imitating me killing spider (I must be entertaining!)

Brushing her teeth and hair

A Plethora of Pumpkins

We finally carved our pumpkins tonight. It was really really messy, but fun for all three of us.

I had originally put down a tablecloth to (hopefully) contain the mess, but decided to just mop afterwards instead. I'm still not sure if that was a good idea.

 

We ended up with more pumpkins than we planned on having this year, but that's okay. We only paid for two of them. One of the big pumpkins we got for free because we entered the community pumpkin carving contest. It is the pumpkin Lucy is sitting on in the above picture. It is a quirky pumpkin and has to lay on its side. We loved it.

 

She is dressed well for pumpkin carving. Jack-o-lantern shirt, coverless snappied prefold diaper, and purple socks.



Lucy got to play with this little pumpkin that the organic farm gave us for free. She loves it, but it is so ugly. It isn't even dirty in the picture. It just has a lovely rough, gray-brown quality to it that won't rinse off.

She didn't like touching the guts with her hands. I had to keep on helping her get it off because it was sticky and freaked her out a bit.

I used the Dremel to carve the contest pumpkin and wrote happy Halloween on it. I was covered with sticky pumpkin dust when I was done, but it was worth it. :)

The final product! We had to stick an LED light in it so it was bright enough to show through the pumpkin flesh.

Here are all the pumpkins on our steps! Our neighbors are from Iran and have only been in the US for a couple months now... I wonder what they'll think of them when they see them in the morning.

In the tall pumpkin and Lucy's little pumpkin we just drilled holes in them. Then we stuck clear green marbles in some of the holes. They look cooler in person than they do in the picture. :)

I just typed pumpkin about a hundred times. Sorry about that. Hope you are all enjoying the season!

Discovery Baskets

One of the ways I keep Lucy entertained during the day is presenting her with a discovery basket. These are something you can start with a much younger infant, but Lucy still loves them. I've read that you should make a new basket every few days or so, but since Lucy is a bit older I try to switch the theme every one to two days.

Basically everything in the basket has something in common and while Lucy explores the items we talk about that similarity. I think it is a neat way to expose her to new vocabulary and is a helpful pre-sorting task.

Most importantly, she is always excited to get her hands on a new basket. They're pretty fun to put together as well.

Here are the discovery baskets Lucy had this week:



Green discovery basket



Red discovery basket and cloth discovery basket - we've been working on folding, so this was a fun one for her.

Shiny discovery basket - surprisingly not her favorite. She took everything out, said "All done!" and then put everything back in.



Yellow discovery basket - daddy put this one together for her. It was her favorite of the week.

We've recently started doing tot trays with Lucy, which are also a lot of fun. They're more task oriented than discovery baskets. I'll try to post about them soon. :)

 

 

Seventeen Things

I haven't posted in a while because we've been really busy around here, really busy with things that aren't quite blog worthy. You know, like doing dishes. Three times a day. By hand.



Lucy putting her ring stacker back together.

For all of Lucy's fans, I have a list. Enjoy.

17 Things About My (Almost) 17 Month Old:

1. She recognized the word SNACK at the grocery store the other day and said SNAKE. Okay, so it isn't perfect, but the words are really similar. One of her favorite pages in her animal facts books lately is the snake page, so she's been looking at it a lot. We were crazy impressed when she walked up to the Snack Pack puddings on the self and pointed to it saying snake.

2.  She just cut her first molar. She was drooling like crazy for the past couple weeks; I just knew she had to be teething! I didn't expect it to be a molar though. 

3. She frequently asks for "up and down" and "bubble" which are the new songs she learned in swim lessons. I'm kind of sick of listening to myself sing them, but anything for my baby girl, right? :)

Lucy and Bennett learning how to swim!

4. She LOVES to "help" me do the dishes. I just give her a bottle brush then she splashes around and hits dishes with it. I let her stand on my little step ladder so she can reach the sink. She's pretty good at wiping the water off the floor when she's done, too.

5. She saw an airplane flying above us yesterday and she talked about it for HOURS afterwards. "Up. Airplane. Up. Airplane. Up. Airplane." Yesterday is was about the hawk we saw at the park. "Up. Bird. Up. Bird. Up. Bird." I just talk about it to her and she nods her head yes and laughs. I love it.

Telling mommy about the bird up in the sky.

6. Watching the neighborhood kids zoom by outside on their bikes is one of her favorite things to do. I know she wants to take her little scooting bike outside with them, but they're all so much bigger than her.

7. She colored with chalk for the first time yesterday.

8. If you ask her, she can point to her head, hair, eyes, ears, nose, mouth, teeth, cheek, shoulders, elbows, hands, tummy, belly button, knees, feet, and toes.

Putting cars on top of her book tower.

9. She puts her finger puppets on her fingers all be herself. She makes the frog and the bunny hop. She says "Hop, Hop, Hop". She says meow for the kitty.

10."All done"  is still one of her most favorite things to say.

11. If I'm cooking, she usually sits right outside of the kitchen, in the living room and gathers all her books. She slowly flips through them and I can usually tell which one she is looking at by what she says.



She is trying to tell me to sit back down in the swing next to them!

12. If we sing to her she eats really well. We don't understand it, but we sing at the table often.

13. She loves cheese, chicken, celery, beef, rice, salmon, spinach, eggs, tortillas, edamame, raisins, Ak-mak crackers, and any fruit. She isn't really picky, but doesn't seem to care for the texture of russet potatoes. Weird, right? I gave her some new potatoes the other day and she enjoyed them. She acts like she has a mouth full of dirt when she has russets though. 

Mommy let her help clean up after making some whipped cream.

14. She loves hats and shoes. She could live without socks and coats.

15. She gets a kick out of talking on the phone. She is just so chatty. I think she talked to her Grandma for like half an hour the other day. And when she isn't actually talking on the phone, there is a good possibility that she is pretending to do so with one of her toy cars or the remote control.

16. She usually sleeps from 9 pm to 9 am, but Michael usually gets her early in the morning for me and the last few hours of that are spent in bed with me cuddling. I love it. 



Sleepy girl fell asleep on the couch.





17. When her diapers are clean and need to be hung on the drying rack, she can put all of her Flip covers nicely on the bottom two racks all by herself. This definitely saves me some time. :)

Autumn has Arrived

Autumn has finally arrived on the Palouse and the weather has, thankfully, followed suit. We are definitely enjoying the cooler temperatures. It is perfect walking weather, so I've been throwing on the Ergo and strolling around campus whenever I get a chance. Lucy loves to feel the leaves and the pine needles and I love getting some fresh air.

Michael just returned from an last minute trip to Missouri, to attend a funeral. A group that Michael deployed with, 4th Platoon, suffered an unexpected and immensely sad loss last week. There is a widow with a sweet baby boy in Missouri right now who could use your thoughts and prayers.

Michael's first month of school has been so extremely busy. He has quite the course load and started working with a research team in August. Which is enough to fill his schedule, when you consider studying and family time, but he has even more on his plate right now. He recently was accepted into a nuclear reactor operator course on campus. It was very competitive and only a handful of students were accepted. While the course is a blessing, I'm a little sad that he'll be away from Lucy and I even more during the week. I know he is too. His Monday class for the course starts at the exact same time as swimming lessons end, so that should be interesting.

Lucy has been enjoying swimming lessons, but she is so skinny and the "heated" pool is so cold that she is always left shivering and a lovely shade a purple by the end of class. She loves the water, so we didn't want to remove her from the class  (although we've had to take her out of the pool a bit early a few times), we did the only logical thing and purchased a wetsuit for her. Okay, we're crazy about that baby girl and we made an impulsive purchase to keep her warmer in the water. Today will be her first class with her new getup.

Somehow, among all the busyness in our life right now, we were able to make it home to experience the Washington State Fair (or as I will always call it The Puyallup fair). We went the weekend before last, and I'm so sorry that we didn't really get to visit with anyone, it was a really short trip.

We're excited to continue this tradition of going to the fair with Lucy. Sort of an end of the summer and beginning of fall celebration.

She LOVED all the animals.

Llamas and cows and sheep, oh my!

All I wanted to see were the piglets and they were precious.

 

 Michael had some fun playing the games, trying to win prizes for his girls.

The Fifteenth Month

I'm going to continue Lucy's "monthly posts" at less frequent intervals. Also she starts swimming lessons in a couple weeks, check back for pictures :)

Beego, as we often call her, is fifteen months old now. 

Lucy looking sweet as ever in the adorable outfit that her grandma handmade for her!

 

She is so different than she was three months ago. Her imagination has really bloomed. She loves cars and things with wheels. She'll lay on the floor and roll a car around while saying "Vvvroom vroom". She drinks pretend tea and eats pretend food.

She loves hats and shoes. Today she placed a recieving blanket on her head and declared "Hat!" then continued to play with her toys with that blanket on her head. Shoes are probably one of her favorite things . She gets excited to put her shoes on and is fascinated by everyone elses shoes as well. She nearly stole another little girl's shoes at the park today. Mable's broken-in pink and white velcro sneakers. She really thought she needed them guys.

Yesterday she walked back and forth in the living room with a pair of my heels on. I helped her put them on, but I had no idea that she would actually be able walk in them. She was beaming. "SHHHoes!"

Watching the ducks in the pond.

She enjoys words that contain an SH right now. SHoes, fiSH, BruSH, waSH, SHut. You get the idea.

"Sit" is her all time favorite word right now though. It applies to so many things in her life. She sits on a lot of things. The highchair, the potty, the carseat, swings, slides, the couch, her bike, the stroller, the shopping cart. All those things have been renamed "sit" for us. Seriously folks, all day I hear "SIT SIT SIT!" and sometimes it sounds like a certain bad word. :)

If you walk past us in the grocery store Lucille is probaby going to say hi to you. If you ignore her, she'll shout "HI!" even louder, in case you couldn't hear it before. Then she acts super shy when people actually respond.

She grabs her purse or throws on the strap of Michaels messenger bag on and walks to the front door. "Bye!" she says. She can also reach the handle to our front door and unlock it. Which is scary. I've been keeping it the chain latched.

Dogs are her number one favorite thing right now. Real dogs, dogs in books, stuffed animal dogs, puzzle piece dogs. She LOVES them. She has two favorite stuffed animal dogs that get taken almost everywhere these days.



Waving at a dog nearby....

She knows what the bear says: Grrrrr. She knows what the dog says: Arf arf arf.  She knows what the cat says: Mew mew mew. If you ask her what the fish says she makes little quite popping noises with her lips.

She makes the funniest noise with her tongue for water. Try saying ladle repeatedly with your tongue out of your mouth. Kind of like that.

She is an amazing, beautiful, and smart little thing that makes our days brighter! I can't get over how much I love that baby girl.  I have so much fun with her.

What does fifteen month old Lucille enjoy?

Being outside 

Watching other kids at the park

Grooving to music

Eating bananas, peanutbutter sandwiches, smoothies, and cheese

Giving kisses and squeezes (hugs)

Playing with ice cubes

Sliding down slides

Climbing EVERYTHING

Singing Itsy Bitsy Spider

 Digging through the kitchen drawers and cabinets
Playing in sand

Cannon Beach Fun!

Our family was able to spend the first half of this week at Cannon beach and it was lovely. It was Lucille first real trip to the beach and she had a great time!

Family pictures at the caves!

When is was too chilly or windy (or when the little lady was too sleepy), she happily hung out in the ergo zipped up underneath daddy's jacket. She even napped like that a couple times!

Celebrating 52 years of marriage!

When we were there my grandparents celebrated their 52nd Anniversary! They are the best great grandparents to Lucille, we're so blessed to have them in our lives!

Maria and Alyssa!

Aunt Maria and Cousin Alyssa were up visiting from Arizona, so we were lucky to spend some beach time with them too!

Lucy playing in the sand with some of her favorite people!

Lucille LOVED the sand. She dug in it with her shovel and then would try to put it in her bucket.... or she would just toss it. We all got a little sandy. :)

Jumping some waves with daddy!

She might have loved the water more than the sand.... maybe. :) She would have walked right into the ocean if we would have let her! She didn't want to stop even though she was getting really chilly.

Warming up a bit!

 Lucille wanted to joins us for game time every night and was very reluctant to go to sleep. Bless her sweet heart. I think her favorite game was charades... we got a few giggles while she watched us be silly! My favorite game was Bananagrams -- where has this game been all my life???? Fun! Michael says his favorite was golf because everyone played. :)

Lucille collecting shells and being the center of attention. She is already good at multitasking.

Michael and I can't wait to go back to the beach next year!

The Twelfth Month

Did you know that my baby is one now? She is!  Since Lucy has turned one she has been to the zoo, gone hiking with her godmother, been camping, splashed her feet in an icy cold river, and tried out her Hello Kitty pool.

I waited to post until we visited Dr. K for her check-up so I could share her stats. Here they are:

 

Weight: 16 lbs 10 oz

Height: 28.75 inches







We kicked off her second year of life with a big birthday party. Grandma made the decorations, a good friend made her the most amazing cakes, and Lucy had a great day with friends and family.

Our little baby is growing up fast! She is learning words fast, but for the past few weeks her favorite thing to say is "All done!"

She can practically run now, but she has tiny feet! The doctor said she has the smallest walking feet she has ever seen. She is also quite the climber. :)

She eats everything these days, some of her newest foods are grilled shrimp, tomato soup, french toast, dried apricots, and steak.

Grandma really knows how to make her laugh! Grandma can nearly make her fall over laughing.

What does twelve month old Lucille enjoy?

Playing in the dirt!

Smelling flowers

Playing in the ball pit

Peek-a-boo in her tunnel

Taking naps in the Ergo

Playing with Annabelle

Being cheesy for cameras

Dancing with mommy and daddy

 

The Nursery

I discovered today that Lucille can climb down the stairs without help. I guess that is a good thing because we're about to be spending a lot of time at her grandparents' house and they have more stairs than we do. Also, she been giving me kisses all day. She is sweeter than sugar.

Summer vacation is nearly here and we are really excited to have a few months packed full of family time, beach time, and camping time! I'm sure at some point, hopefully closer to the beginning of fall term, that I'm going to miss our home here. My favorite room in the house is definitely Lucille's nursery.



Heart garland and Mobile- Handmade by Grandma
Dresser - Uptown Market Antiques
Bookshelves - "spice racks" from Ikea
Framed Paintings - Frames from Target, Paintings were a gift

I usually spend mornings in here with Lucy. Rocking in the rocking chair. Reading books to her. Dancing to silly songs that her toys play.

Shelf - Hung in my room when I was a baby :)
Dress - Etsy
 

It  is a good place to just let her play if I need to just, you know, avoid doing the dishes for a while. :)

I never really set up her nursery in North Carolina. We were set to move only two months after her arrival, so I never put much thought into it. It was exciting to finally set it up here.

One of my favorite additions to her room is the little shadowbox containing little mementos of her birthday. We found it at an antique store in Oregon before she was born and I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it. The hospital hat just barely fit in one of those squares though!

The Eleventh Month

Making a mess with her toys!

Lucille is eleven months old now! Do you want to know what Lucille learned to do since I posted last?

She learned how to WALK!

Dragging her blankie around.

 

My sweet girl can walk. She has been taking unassisted steps since she was about nine months old and we've been waiting for the walking to start since then. I guess she needed some time to build up her courage. :)
 

Before Monday she hadn't taken more than five steps in a row and then she just took off! She still crawls, but walking is starting to take over as her main mode of movement!
 

Her new crazy smile!

 

She is really such a joy to spend everyday with. She is becoming quite the little helper. She helps clean up after meals by placing her leftover food on a plate. If she finds something she shouldn't have and I ask her if I can have it, she'll bring it to me!

 

She loves to help mommy do laundry. I'll hand her something from the washing machine and she'll put it in the dryer for me. She'll even unload the dryer into the laundry basket. Well, she can't exactly reach all the way to the back of the dryer yet, but she gets what she can reach! :)

 

 She has been trying out new foods lately. Salmon, spinach and chicken enchiladas, spaghetti, chili, coconut rice. She likes celery, artichokes, and lettuce. She loves strawberries, oranges, and raisins. Evidently if you make "cookies" with mashed bananas and rolled oats, it is the best thing ever. I mean, you should try it. Michael and I ate them too.

Playing with her books :)

What does eleven month old Lucille enjoy?

Dancing to music

Going outside

Laughing at daddy

Being cheesy for cameras

Helping mommy clean the house

Taking naps

WALKING!!!!

Reading her books

Climbing into her wagon with all her toys

Looking out the window