Of Forks and Bottles, Both Full and Empty

Hi friends. This week has been a fun one. Emily and I went out lots, but we also spent lots of indoor, quiet time together. This is when we see the big leaps. Here's what's been going on this week... It'll be a long one, and quite video-heavy! Consider yourself warned!

Goodnight

Lately, we've been trying to push bedtime a little bit later, and we were beginning bathtime around 6.20pm. As a possible result of this, over time, I realised she was getting more and more cranky over bedtime. It eventually got to the point where she'd wail through it, sometimes making me skip her bath. So I decided it was time to go back to basics. Bedtime now begins at 5.45pm, meaning she is asleep around 6.30pm - apparently, the way she wants it!

Most nights, I get a little wave as I slowly leave her room. She snuggles excitedly into her comfy position (face down in the corner, surrounded by not one, but two, muslin cloths), turns around to give me a little wave, then snuggles back in.

It is my very favourite part of bedtime but it's so sweet, it hurts. Part of me is hugely proud of the fact that she is confident enough to be able to go to sleep without me beside her, and another part of me just wants to go back in and snuggle her. But I restrain myself and keep walking out, watching her on the monitor as the snuggling into her muslins continues until she falls asleep.



Mealtimes

After a recent blip, her eating has settled to a more mature pattern which I am thoroughly enjoying. She now has breakfast & milk at around 8am, then lunch around 11:30am, then her nap (yes it seems to have thankfully readjusted), sometimes a snack at around 3pm (only if she asks for one), then dinner at about 5pm.

She is eating lots of different things. She loved my pasta with a spinach, ham and mushroom sauce. She also loved my gingered beef casserole.

(This is what her typical dinner plate looks like, portion-wise.)




And my tuna bake.

It makes me so proud watching her eat. Sometimes with her hands, sometimes off a fork. Depends on what the food is really.

At the start of the week, she began showing signs of wanting to feed herself with a fork. Inevitably it ended in food all over the floor and her in tears of frustration. But, on Thursday, I'd made a mushroom and courgette frittata which was easily cut into little mouthful-sized cubes. So I figured it wouldn't be too much trouble to let her try. Sure enough, she ate her entire meal herself with only the slightest bit of help from me. Impressive doesn't begin to cover it!

She's kind of insisting she eat everything with a fork herself now, which can be a problem, but we're managing it so far!

I did hand her a spoon with some yoghurt on it the other day, which she managed to eat. The spoon went into her mouth upside down (I hadn't put much on it, knowing this would probably be the case) but it did get there!


In other news, little madam has FINALLY worked out how to hold her own drink cup!!

She'll usually work out when she needs to tilt it further to get any water out of it, but if I see that she's forgotten, I'll just say, "hold it up!" and up it goes :)

You may also have noticed that since I last bought her new cup, she's moved on to a new one. This one is an 18 month cup! Big girl!

At a push, she'll even hold her milk bottle now. She only has milk in the morning and at bedtime but they are both very important to her and therefore are met with much enthusiasm. If either one of them is not ready when she decides she wants it, there will be trouble.

So I make her morning bottle while she waits (moans) in the highchair and when it's done, instead of feeding it to her, I now place it on her tray.

After that urgency, you'd think she'd at least try to pick it up, wouldn't you?

No. She looks at it, then looks at me with this very cheeky little grin so as to say, "well? aren't you going to feed it to me?"

So I help her wrap her hands around the bottle and recline the seat and off she goes, guzzling the entire 9oz no problems. She's getting better at that too.



New Words/Signs

She is now saying "up" and I think she signed "home" a few times today!

Other than that, it's been a majorly chatty week. None of it has made much sense, but I'm sure she thinks she's saying something meaningful!



How's that walking going?

See for yourself!



Not 5 minutes earlier, she'd walked all the way from the living room, along the corridor, and into the kitchen. When I ran back to get my phone to capture it, she started crashing into everything and in this above clip, she decided it was time for a water break.

I'll keep trying!





Everything Else

43736 toys and what does she play with.....!

She is, however, loving her new activity table

(especially the cable tie that I chose not to remove so as not to lose the stupidly separate toy!)

See also: Games with Aliens



We went to the swings on Friday. Emily had a quick upside-down read en route.

On our way back, a lady and her son were feeding the seagulls. Emily loves birds. So we stopped to watch.

I think I caught an argument between Gabriella and Emily here!

But all was well in the end :)

Until next weekend! xoxo










Ps

Of One, Two and Even Three

Hello dear friends, I hope you had a great weekend! Ours was - strange, I think is the only way to put it. Emily's daytime routine - the routine we can more or less rely on to base our plans around - completely changed and has not yet settled. Her naps reduced to nothing, she'd then fall asleep in the car at a time we completely weren't expecting, to then have to wake her up after a few minutes and find that she's full of energy and nowhere close to going back to sleep. Confusing all round. I am planning a quiet day tomorrow in an attempt to get a clearer idea of what she needs at the moment.

To start off with, here's a random family photo:

Our week began with her first snow. It was lovely watching her take it all in. I wish I'd captured it on video, but sometimes life just needs to happen. There are times I think I'm too busy taking pictures and video of her doing things and I end up missing the good stuff that I was attempting to capture. I do this because I know that in years to come, I'll want to relive it all, to try and feel the wonder again. But other times I find I just need to accept that some things just need to be enjoyed now. No picture can capture that wonder, but in my head it can live on forever.

'Emily in the Snow' pictures here.



Her hair is finally long enough! Isn't this the most adorable pigtail you've ever seen?!!

Emily has learnt quite a few new signs this week. She now signs "sleep" to tell me she wants to sleep (not that we've seen much of this lately lol), she can also sign "dirty nappy", "carefully" and "clean" (these last three we use within a song while we're changing her nappy and she LOVES it). She also tries to say "carefully" as she makes the sign. Why she'd choose the longest word of the lot to try and say is beyond me, but I'm not complaining, it's adorable!

We are getting somewhere with numbers!! This was entirely unexpected. It started when my mum reminded me of the way I used to count to three when I was little - "two, tee, two, tee" - and we began telling Emily "one, two, three"

On the first day, she'd say "tee" after I've said "one, two, three"

The next day, if I said "one, two", she'd then say "tee"

And the day after that, if she was in the mood, she'd even say "two" (but not "tee" as well!)

We haven't had any attempts at "one" yet!


Here she is saying "hello". It's far clearer now, this was taken on the 5th...





She's begun singing. She's always been very aware of music and now it is becoming so clear. She has certain favourite songs (Jar of Hearts and Move Like Jagger to name two) that she'll stop doing whatever she's doing to listen to. Even drinking her milk!

I don't remember what song it was, it may have been one of her toys, that she was clearly trying to sing along to a few days ago. We realised she was singing because there were a couple of notes that she hit perfectly. David and I looked at each other in utter disbelief.

The other day, she was playing quietly and singing "happy, happy, happy" to herself. It was the most precious thing.



It was the last of the NCT first birthday parties last weekend!

That's Robin, the birthday boy, and Emily playing with (fighting over?) a balloon.

The babies are all 1 now!

These babies:

!!!!!
(that was Feb 2011)



Playing with her blocks...





Do any of you remember me putting Emily down for her naps on our leather beanbag pouffe? She was tiny enough (& swaddled enough!) to fit on it with no risk of rolling off back then.

Well this is her terrorising the pouffe now!

She loves her cheerios for breakfast.

But sometimes we have toast. She's on a huge bread binge at the moment. She's become really good with little sandwiches. She has them with cream cheese, or smooth peanut butter, or pear & apple spread. In the morning we have toast with coconut oil. We're healthy, us.



Hats really suit her. I love this one she has at the moment, so trendy.

Even Daddy's beanie looks good on her!

(Have you noticed my thing about dungarees yet?)



I had to share some more self-portraits of the little madam that I found on my phone. I knew she had taken the first one - but the second, pink one... I had no clue about until I was looking through my phone for pictures I wanted to use in this post!

I *think* that's her muslin cloth she got a close-up of.

She can make me smile even long after I've put her to sleep :) xoxo

Of Turning One and Mysterious Midnight Outings

We're back after an unscheduled break. Simply put, last week - with visitors from Malta and two parties coming up - I had no time to sit and write. I do hope you'll forgive me!

I have a huge thank you to say though - over 1150 page views for 5 blogposts about a little girl! That's not too shabby if you ask me. Thank you for coming back to read. When I thought to myself tonight that maybe I took on too much when I thought up The Pretty Walrus, it was the fantastic following (alongside the fact that this will be a brilliant place to look back on in a few years) that made me sit down and write again.

So we now have two weeks to write about. But the most important thing is Emily's Birthday! Last Saturday, 28th Jan, she turned one. My baby... is one. *shakes head*



Her parties were a success. In the morning there was the little people party (that we tried out in our first post)...

followed by a family get-together at home in the afternoon where we had Emily's quccija (more about that here).

The downside to everything was that she was sick. The night before her birthday, Emily got up late at night with a fever. We wrote it off as teething issues and tried to get on with things.

But on Sunday evening, no amount of Calpol or Nurofen seemed to make any difference so at midnight we arranged for her to be seen by the out of hours doctor and off we went. (that's the short version anyway, more here).

She really wasn't well, poor pudding.

She had a double ear infection, so was put on antibiotics and was very cranky and clingy and generally unhappy for a few days but seems to be herself again now. Hooray!



The weekend earlier, we went to little James' birthday party.

That is James there charming Emily with his brilliant smile.

You may also notice that Emily is wearing SHOES!

That morning we went to Clarks to buy her first pair. This was after she slipped the week before and I thought it might be wise to help her along a little bit (ok, I just wanted the girl to have pretty shoes!) She had her picture taken at Clarks and everything, and that's safely in her keepsake box which I'm slowly building :)

At the party she spent some quiet time playing with my phone (not much really new there, she loves it), but she has now worked out how to activate certain functions. Like the camera.

Talking about quiet time, when we spend time with our NCT friends - keeping in mind all the other babies are boys - we often notice the difference in playing style between Emily, as a girl, and the rest of them, as boys. The boys are boisterous, love throwing things and chasing each other. Emily will sit and observe and then perhaps quietly pick up a toy (that will no doubt be snatched away by one of the boys within minutes lol) and inspect it.

So it was interesting to see, when we were at a new playgroup we've started going to, that she went over to another little girl and gently interacted.

This is the sociology nerd in me talking now, but it's fascinating to watch. Even at such a young age (and I'm sure we've seen it happen at a younger age but didn't quite register it), they know the difference between boys and girls. They interact entirely differently. Thinking only of babies she's met for the first time, she'll hit a boy but be timid with a girl. I'm sure this changes as time passes, they all - boys & girls - need to learn to stand up for themselves, but for now it just struck me as really interesting.

/nerdy observation

This is her again at the playgroup, practising her cruising...

This week I have decided to try and have her focus on individual toys at a time. I want to try and encourage a focus point. She already has a really great attention span so I want to nurture it. So we play with noise and light toys. Or books. Or toy eggs. Or puppets. Or megabloks.

In the case of the latter I build magnificent structures and she destroys them as I watch.

Here she is strutting her stuff. Little missy is now able to stand alone for up to about 5 seconds. The first few times she did it, she scared herself silly. She was so terrified she'd fall, that she fell every time. After a few days, the confidence grew until 2 days ago, she even clapped for herself while standing. NO HANDS!

Then it really was a case for her supersmile!

Our signing classes - although we haven't yet been to any this term - are really paying off now. It's amazing to know that she is able to make me aware of certain things she wants. She has recently begun signing "eat" and "finished" - which have come in HUGELY handy. She'll need to be very hungry to initiate a "conversation" herself but if I think she's getting hungry, I'll ask her and she'll reply with the sign. And when she wants no more, she'll tell me she's finished :)

I'll try and record her doing them this week.

Older ones that she signs are "milk", her first sign, and more recently "duck"

I'm not sure there have been any new words lately but she's come very far with hello. There's no mistaking it now!



But for now, here's a video of her playing her new drum:



Other new videos:
+ Reading her books
+ Playing catch the ball



We are off to another birthday party this weekend and I'll be back with more news - hopefully none of it involving sickness! - next weekend! Have a good one :) xoxo