Thursday, August 9, 2012

14 Months Old & Florida Vacation



Our sweet angel is 14 months old!  I love watching her grow and learn new things each day.  She certainly keeps everyone entertained with her silly faces and laughs.  She amazes Rian and I daily with all the things she can do and her ability to communicate her needs.  Here is a quick run down of Miss H at 14 Months Old.
  • She can locate her belly and her head, and sometimes her nose.  Most of the time when I say "where is your nose?" she points to mine instead, but I think that's pretty smart, too!
  • She loves to give hugs and kisses, even when we don't ask for them (which is the best time to receive them!).  She is even starting to pucker up to give her kisses instead of giving the open-mouth variety :)
  • She can still wear size 12m dresses, but is in 18m for everything else.  Size 3 or 4 for shoes.
  • She has started to pay more attention when I read books to her.  It seems like her overall attention span is getting better.  She will sit and play with one toy for a good amount of time before moving on to the next.
  • She has the most adorable laugh in the world.  Just ask my aunts and cousin who spent a week with us on vacation :) 
  • She hasn't gotten any new teeth in a while.  Still just the 4 on bottom and 2 up top.
  • She still takes 2 naps per day (each about 1 hr long) and sleeps 10-11 hours through the night.
  • Whenever there is a pillow or blanket on the ground she will drop to the ground and lay on it for like 10 seconds then get up and continue on with what she was doing.  It is so funny!
  • New words she started saying this month:
    • Stop
    • More
    • Uh Oh
    • Wawa (water)
    • No
    • Up
    • Ball
    • Hi
    • Nana (banana)
    • Her favorite word is still, without a doubt, "Daddy". Sometimes it's "Da-Da", sometimes its "Daddy", and sometimes it my favorite, "Da-Da-Yeeeeeeeee". She has said "Ma" probably twice. Sad Face for me, but I'm glad Rian is gettin' some love! It is so apparent how much she loves her daddy.

Rian, Hailey and I took our first family vacation last week!  Along with two of my aunts and my cousin, we all headed to Perdido Key in Pensacola, Florida.  It was such a great week!!!  We decided that the best way to get there was to drive through the night so that Hailey would be asleep for the majority of the 12+ hour drive.  It was a fun adventure for Rian and I to drive all night long - and by the time the sun came up we were pretty loopy!  Lots of caffeine and no sleep can really mess with your brain.  We were pretty slap happy by the morning but so excited to finally be in Florida! 

Hailey did so well on the beach.  Just give her a bucket and a scooper and she is good to go for hours!  She didn't try to eat the sand and it only got it in her mouth by mistake a couple times (and she did not care for it!).  She liked the ocean, too.  She would giggle each time a wave would come up and hit her back.  Such special memories created on this trip :)  Here are some of my fave pics from vacation. (For a full library of vay-cay pics, head to my fb page).



 




Now, driving home was a whole different story!  Hailey was not happy one bit.  We divided up the trip home into a two-day adventure, and so I'm sure it was boring for her to be strapped to a chair for 9+ hours on one day and 4 hours the next!  Poor girl just wanted to get up and run around.  We tried putting a movie in to capture her attention, but seeing as how she's never watched TV before, she could care less about adorable Nemo on that screen.  She didn't want to play with toys either, at least not for longer than about 3 mintues!  Books worked for maybe 5 minutes at a time, but the thing that held her attention the most was letting her go to town on a roll of paper towels.  Sounds crazy (and was a huge mess) but when you are desperate, you are desperate!  Turns out she's really good at tearing up paper towels into teeny tiny pieces.  Who knew!?  :)



I think I'm ready for fall.  Anyone else??

Monday, July 9, 2012

13 Months Old


Greetings Happy Readers!

The first month of Hailey's second year is already under our belts and she is certainly keeping us on our toes!  She has had her first second holiday (does that make sense?) which was the 4th of July.  Here is a fun comparison for you:

2011
2012
I hope everyone had a safe and fun 4th!  Hailey wasn't scared one bit by the noisy fireworks.  She actually slept through most of them! 

We also took a fun trip to the Lake of the Ozarks a couple of weeks ago.  We had a great time in the condo pool and out on the pontoon boat!






I rather enjoyed the survey format of my 1 Year post, so I think I'll continue that for now.  Enjoy!

Achievements in the past month: 
  • WALKING!
  • Feeding herself with a spoon:
  • Making a tower by stacking a max of 4 of her wooden blocks or chunky legos together
  • Shaking her head "yes"
  • Drinking out of a straw
  • Throwing a ball on command
  • Playing peek-a-boo all day long! :
  • Signing "all done"
  • Scribbling with a crayon:
  • Waving at absolutely everyone.  And I get really mad when people don't wave back - she's a baby people, come on!  Don't break her little heart!
  • She also understands a lot and responds to requests.  For example, if her sippy cup of milk is on the coffee table on the other side of the room and I say "Go get your milk!", she will walk over there and pick it up.  She also responds to "bring it to me" "give it to daddy" "shake it up!" "come over here" "put it down", etc.  And if you say "where is the doggy?" or mommy, daddy, etc, she points to the correct person. 
Things we're working on: 
  • Drinking water from a regular cup without mommy's help (she does well on the first sip, but then she just wants to put her hand in the cup and play with the water!)
  • Locating body parts
New foods we tried this month:
  • Cottage cheese
  • Shrimp
  • Lentils (beans)
  • Mushrooms
  • Mommy's homemade fruit water, and popsicles made from it
  • Applesauce with cinnamon
  • She continues to be a pretty good eater, but she's gotten a little finicky at dinner time.  If there are no black beans or peas on her tray (her faves) it takes a lot of coaxing to get her to eat.  Apparently their taste buds change around this age so its normal for her to prefer certain foods.  But she eats super healthy overall so I'm not worried one bit.
Sleeping Habits:
  • Still taking 2 good naps a day, each about 60-80 minutes long. 
  • Goes to bed around 7:30pm and lately has been waking up earlier than normal (4:30ish....) so we are currently trying to remedy that!  Mama likes to sleep until at least 6!
Vocabulary: 
  • Her fave words this month are definitely Dada and Daddy!  She says them every day, all day!
  • "Mama" is hit or miss... she usually only says it when she is angry! 
  • Started saying "yes" (not at the correct time like in response to a question, but she is saying it nonetheless!)
  • It sounds like she says "doggie" sometimes but I can't be sure...
  • Last night we asked her to say "Hailey" and it came out "Hiiii-eeeee".  So, so cute :)
Favorite toys/activities this month:
  • She loves pushing her Minnie Mouse car all around the house and storing toys in the seat compartment
  • She loves her "scoops" (measuring cups).  She carries little toys and trinkets all over the house in them. 
  • She plays with her chunky legos a lot, stacking them together and pulling them apart
  • She loves standing on her blue beach chair and looking out the window
  • She also loves things that makes a fun noise when she shakes it. I have made her a bunch of shaker toys with empty puff containers filled with rice and/or popcorn kernels!
  • She also loves playing in the backyard with water. This is another fun place for her to use her scoops.
  • She loves transferring our can coozie collection from one bucket to the next and seeing how many coozies she can hold in her hand at one time.  She also likes to drop each coozie one by one thru the slats of the baby gate.  She gets really excited to watch them drop and says "Whooaaaaah!" when they fall. 
She likes to stack them, too!  haha (is it weird that we let our kid play with coozies in an old beer box?...)

Here are some of my favorite pics from Hailey's 13th month!




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Thursday, June 28, 2012

More Cute Vids!

It's addicting putting videos on here... I want to show you guys all the cute things she does!

Video #1:  She is getting so good at walking!  I'd say she walks about 70% of the time now as opposed to crawling.  I'm so proud of her!


 
Video #2:  We tried having her feed herself with a spoon for the first time a couple days ago and she did really well!  I was impressed.  Guess she's a natural born eater :)  Here she is feasting on some delicioso pureed peaches.  She really likes to suck on the spoon for a while after each bite!


Video #3:  More self feeding - the next day we did yogurt, and it was an improvement over day #1.  Made a HUGE mess, but that's ok :)

Video #4:  This one is just cute. She is playing in the new little chair I got her, dancing a little, attempting to get un-stuck from the chair, and just being Hailey :)


Video #5: Here she is having her first popsicle and making some funny faces :)