Tuesday, September 2, 2014

Em-isms at 19 months

She is TALKING.  So ridiculously cute.

I wah pee! - I walk please!

I see? - Can I see?

EAT!! (in a very emphatic way...it's pretty clear what this one means)

BUH!! (ditto - she loves her books)
Her favorite way to read is to point at every object on the page and say, "Sah?" (what's that?) and then listen to me say the answer.  Over, and over, and over.

Diaper time..."I see?"  She likes to see the results of her, um, work?  And then, "I tuh?" Which means "Please hand me a wipe so I can clean myself."
And in other potty news...she peed on the potty!!  TWICE!!!  She says, "Poop!" which obviously means, "I have to pee," and then she DOES it!  I'm so ready to be done with diapers.

She loves to get her hands washed in the sink.  Today, I put foaming hand soap on her precious hands and she rubbed them together then immediately started rubbing them into her hair!  She was shampooing. =)

She says "No, ta-too!" to most things...even things that don't require a polite answer - like, "Time to change your diaper!"  Emerson: "No, ta-too...No ta-too...NO, TA-TOO!!!!"  She yells it.  In a very thoughtful way.

Whenever a song is on that she likes, she listens intently.  Then, when the song is over (or if it's a favorite song that she knows well, when it's approaching the end of the song), she'll say, "Uh-oh!" which is code for "immediately put the song on repeat or risk major Emerson meltdown."

She knows animal noises - cow, dog, cat, sheep...that's it for now.  And body parts - eyes, ears, nose, mouth, teeth, elbows, knees, back, belly button, feet, toes, legs, hair.  She's very good at brushing her hair.

Whenever you say, "Em, you're making me sad!" She makes a sad face and whimpers.  And then grins because she knows she's the cutest thing that ever existed.  Likewise with her "No ta-toos."  She loves to get tickled, that girl.

Whenever I walk in the door after work, she somehow knows it's me.  She jumps down from whatever she's doing and RUNS to the front door, calling the whole way, "Mama, mama, mama!"  It melts me.  It almost makes me like going to work so I can get that welcome when I come home.

Favorite foods: yogurt (that she can eat herSELF! - very messily), Mac-N-Cheese, breaded chicken cutlets, pasta with sauce, grapes, guacamole (she will eat three huge bowls if I let her - even with onions), scrambled eggs, toast.

This girl loves the water.  We take her to the beach and she will walk and walk until she's under water - and then when we pull her up, she smiles, blinks the water out of her eyes, and flails around until we put her back in.  She is a fish.  Also loves playing with the faucet, which keeps her occupied while Sam and Abi are swimming off the dock.

She's so easy to put to bed.  Play in the room for a while ("I pay?"), put on jammies, read 2 books (the same two books, every night), and drink her ba-ba (yes, she still gets a bottle - it's cuddle time and I'm not ready to give it up).  Then, when she's done with her bottle, she'll hand it to me ("heya go!") and I ask "Ready for night night?" and she says "Niy-niy."  Then I tell her I love her and she tells me, "I ya-ya!"  I love this girl.


Friday, April 11, 2014

EEK - 14.5 months!

EEK is so fitting...can it really have been 3 months since I last wrote?  I would be a terrible professional blogger.

I was just reading her 11.5 month post and can't believe how much has changed.  She is a expert walker now, although she still does that baby thing that I love where she looks intently in one direction and then her feet take her on a completely different path.  Amazingly she manages to stay upright most of the time, and even when she does fall, she's pretty tough and doesn't squawk.  She has been known to open the front door on her own and run down the driveway and across the street before I even know she's gone (thankfully Sam and Abi were out there when she went - which is probably why she went - she loves them!).  Don't worry, Mom and Dad, we now keep the front door locked and that hasn't happened again.  She does LOVE to be outside.  "Si" is one of her many words.  Em is my only child that patiently sits in my lap to put shoes and socks on ("tuh-toh" for toe-toes - ugh - what a ridiculous word, which only sounds cute when a 1-year old says it).  And I'm certain the only reason she tolerates shoes and socks is because I won't let her go outside without them.

She is still pretty serious.  When you get her to smile (with those gorgeous dimples!), it is a huge reward because you have to work for it!  I have figured out a surefire way though - I hold out my hand with a Cheerio or similar treat in it and she reaches for it and then I close my hand really quick, grabbing her hand.  This, as you all are aware, is HILARIOUS.  We could literally do this for hours.  The joke never gets old.

Em is also quite opinionated.  Somehow, despite not having many actual adult words, she manages to convey exactly how she feels about pretty much everything.  Food, for example.  While string cheese was absolutely THE. MOST. DELICIOUS. FOOD. a couple of weeks ago, yesterday I apparently gravely insulted her by offering it.  How do I know this?  Well, Em is excellent at waving her hands around her highchair tray so that all undesirable contents go flying through the air and onto the floor.  She has an uncanny ability to selectively choose the pieces she wants and discard the rest.  I know in several years this will strike me as "adorable."  For now, it is "messy" and "aggravating."  A simple "all done" hand gesture would suffice.

Her favorite word right now is still "mo."  As I wrote in my last post, this doesn't mean that she actually wants "more" of anything, just that she wants SOMETHING.  Usually it's her drink.  I am still trying to teach her sign language (the juice sign is pretty easy!), but, have I mentioned that she's fairly stubborn about things?

Other words in her vocabulary include: hi!, buh-bye, dog, mama, dada, boat, "tuh" (stuck - as in, "my leg is stuck between the bars of my crib"), "sie" (outside), "ri" (ride - she LOVES car rides), and "ba-ba" (bottle)...there are many more but those are the most reliable ones.
She blows kisses like a champ, only not on command.
We recently started a game where I balance something on my head and pretend to sneeze ("ah....ah....choo!") - which is, as I'm sure you already know, funny beyond measure.  Then she'll put something on her head and say, "ahhhh..." with a huge smile on her face. =)
At her 1 year checkup, her head circumference was 92nd percentile, height was 50-something, and weight was 30-something.  Picture a toothpick with a marshmallow at the top.  Actually, she looks very proportionate, but you have to admit that the numbers are funny.

She is not my best sleeper.  She was doing well for a while, but over the last few months she has decided that she likes company (and milk - switched from formula a month or two ago) at 3:30 EVERY SINGLE MORNING.  If she weren't so heartbreakingly adorable it would be a lot more annoying, but as it is, it's getting old.  She'll cry for a few minutes, and as soon as I walk in, she's silent.  I pick her up from her crib and she remains silent. I put her on the ground to get ready to change her diaper, and she says, in the cutest way possible, and in a wide-awake voice, says, "ba-ba!"  Who can resist that?

Saturday, January 4, 2014

Emerson...11.5 months!!!

Precious baby girl.  Smart.  Strong.  Independent, yet loves to be held.  A charmer.  Serious.  Gorgeous.

20 lbs on the nose!  She is walking everywhere, although very unsteadily (my favorite kind of walk).  When she's about to fall, she gently bends her knees and plops down on her bottom.  She took her first real steps over Christmas.  Today Sam said, "Aw, she's walking!  She might never crawl again!" making me, obviously, ridiculously sad and sentimental.  Hence the blog entry tonight.

She knows some sign language!  She is really good at "more" (putting her little fingertips together in front of her chest) although it's usually the absence of this sign that really means anything to me - she signs "more" when she hasn't had anything yet, or when she wants me to pick her up, or really when she wants anything at all.  It's when she's not signing "more" that I know she's done with whatever she's eating.  She also says "mo" while she's signing it, which exponentially increases the cuteness factor.  We're working on "all done" (waving hands in the air by her face), and she sort of gets it, but definitely doesn't understand what it means.

Her first words were "more" (see above) and "dog" (which she pronounces "da").  She's also really good at mama (obviously my favorite in her current repertoire).  She's been saying all these for a few weeks.  She first started saying "dog" over Christmas at Mike and Meg's - every time Bailey would come down the stairs or enter the room, her eyes became fixed on him and she would follow him around saying, "da! da!"

She has 2 full teeth on the bottom and 2 more poking through on the top.  She has two of the most adorable dimples I've ever seen.  She has a gorgeous silly face, where she crinkles up her nose and eyes and gives a huge grin.  She sometimes gives me this face and simultaneously tips her head backwars onto the chair/ couch/ etc.  It is hilarious.  She loves to be chased and tickled.  She can wave bye-bye and give high-five.  Working on blowing kisses.  She starts dancing every time the alphabet song comes on, or when Gramma sings the "dancin'" song.

She eats everything that mom and big siblings eat.  She is particularly fond of ham, pork, prime rib, blueberries, wagon wheels, apples, and marshmallows.  When she first discovered Cheerios, all you had to do was bring out the box and she got a huge smile on her face!  Now they're old hat.  She's onto the real foods.  Much to my dismay, since my next order from Amazon just automatically placed itself, and we're about to get 12 x 10 more containers of smushed-up baby veggies.  Thankfully, she hasn't wanted to feed herself with a fork or spoon yet.  Finger foods are messy enough.

She loves to hang out in my bathroom, standing on the edge of the tub and putting her fingers in the water dripping out of the faucet.  She loves baths too.  She's a splasher!  She recently has come to enjoy destroying everything in her path - pulling every shoe from my shoe shelf and throwing each one vigorously onto the floor, doing the same with her clothes and diapers in her changing station, pulling every wet wipe one by one out of the container and onto the floor, pulling all the books off the bookshelf...shall I go on?  She does NOT enjoy getting her diaper changed but she is definitely getting better.  This has been an ongoing issue for several months so maybe I'm just getting used to it, but I actually think it's not as hard to change her as it was before.  Although Papa recently changed her and it's a miracle the diaper stayed on...and her knees were well-coated with diaper rash cream. :-)

On a different note, Abi got her first stitches today - a door opened into her forehead and left a gash right over her left eyebrow.  Only needed 2 stitches and she was SUCH a trooper.  Squeezed my hand a little bit when the lidocaine went in, and then said, "Ow" when the needle entered the skin, but otherwise not a peep or a tear.  My brave little soldier.

Sam is noticeably more mature over the last month or so.  His thought patterns and ideas are follow-able and make actual sense, and his behavior is impressively better too.  He will (usually) calmly say to Abi, "You are pushing my buttons, Abi!" rather than exploding as he used to do.  My kids are amazing.  I am so lucky.