My little girl is 15 months today and she really is becoming a little girl (as opposed to a baby).
The Part That’s About Maeve:
I guess the biggest event that’s happened since September 18th was that Grandma & Grandad visited from the UK. It felt like she developed a lot during their visit. I was very happy that she showed no signs of shyness or uncertainty with my parents when she saw them for the first time (okay, I know they met her when she was born, but she didn’t really meet them). I guess seeing them on Skype every week or so really helped form a bond between them. Within a day or 2 she had sussed out which grandparent to go to for which kind of entertainment etc :)Hint: Grandma for reading stories and Grandad for playing ball and making silly faces.
Communication
She says “hi” now (as of about the 27th Sept), and sometimes “hey doh” (hello). She’ll say “hi!” and wave at people and animals and pictures of people. Sometimes she says “bye” too, but that’s less frequent (and often to a closed door after the person has left :P). She says “buh” for ball or book, or brushing teeth but with signing she’s good at helping you understand the context. She doesn’t say “menumenumenu” or “takeabite” so much these days. She says “bookie/bucky/b’key” a lot. She will point to a monkey/bunny/ dog and say it so I just say “yes, that *is* a monkey/bunny/dog.”.
She will sign ‘bath’ when I read certain lines in books about bath time (and mime brushing her teeth at those points). She signs ‘milk’, ‘more’, ‘book’. I am working on teaching her ‘cat’, ‘bunny’, ‘poop’ and a few other little words. We’ve started signing ‘no’ to tell her not to do certain things and she understands enough to stop and cry/sulk about not being allowed to do said thing (like climb on the coffee table).
Books & Toys & Playing
She can pick out certain books. If I say “That’s not my penguin”, “I love you stinky face” or tell her to get a Llama Llama book etc., she’ll go over to the pile and study the covers and get the right book (most of the time).
She play eats food/ drinks from her picnic basket. She enjoys taking things out of and putting them back in her picnic basket.
She started sitting in boxes recently. She emptied my box of ribbons and sat in it and she emptied her basket of blankets and climbed in. The other day she climbed into a box not much bigger than a shoebox <3
She just started playing with her puzzles. Normally when I pull them out to play with she looks at them, pulls out the pieces and that’s it. This week she has started placing the pieces near their appropriate hole! So I have moved her stuffed toys to a different area and set up the coffee table as a puzzle station.
When I sing ‘if you’re happy and you know it’ she will clap her hands or kick her feet appropriately :)
The other day she ‘booped’ her friend Christiana’s nose <3 She touched her nose and kind of went “bmp”, like she knows that’s a game you play with babies. And she hugged Christiana and Elena a few weeks ago too!
I bought her some crayons and we’re going to try and work on some drawing at some point.
She just started playing with cars and making a “brmm” sound :) By cars I mean her lego car and one of our back massage things.
We go to the library once a week for Story Time. The other day at the library everyone had left except the teacher who was tidying up, and me, N and E rounding up our girls. The teacher put on some music while she tidied and Maeve started dancing :) The teacher was so impressed and said she was “the Ginger Rogers of the toddler world” :) She just loves to dance to music. I’ll be watching tv and there’ll be music in the background of a scene and she’ll register it and start dancing :)
I’m thinking of skipping the next swim class session and doing a music class instead. I don’t want to fill our week with too many activities, but I do want to do something social with other mums and tots once or twice a week.
Eating
She makes this cute little licking her lips kind of face when she wants food :) She still isn’t much of a meat eater, but she’ll eat shepherds pie or cuban chicken/pork or hot dog on occasion. I try to feed her whatever I’m having for lunch or dinner but she still doesn’t have chewing teeth so it can be tricky. She has tried mexican, thai, and cuban.
Usually her breakfast is a handful of cheerios and a banana and maybe some other fruit (strawberries, rasberries or blueberries) if I have them. sometimes I’ll do oatmeal and raisins for her, but that can leave a cement like sticky mess to clean up.
Lunch will be either scrambled egg & cheese, peanut butter on toast, cream cheese on toast or steamed veggies or pasta and sauce.
She gets half of a graham cracker around 5pm.
Dinner will be one or two of the above that she didn’t have at lunch or some of what we’re having for dinner.
She gets through 3 or 4 bottles of milk and one of watered down juice a day and then maybe half a bottle of water.
I have been lazy about teaching her to use a spoon. If I fill it with food and place it on the tray she’ll pick it up and eat from it, but she won’t fill it up herself. She’ll just reach in with her hands.
Straight after dinner she will often head to the bathroom (signing ‘bath’ as she goes). She’s not subtle :P
Then it’s snuggle time in the towel, get dressed into pjs, brush teeth (we switched to a kiddie tooth brush this month) while reading books and then to bed.
She can help get her clothes off for bath/bed time, and attempts to put clothes on (mostly dresses, as she can reach that drawer, and mostly they just get put on her head). Her favourite ‘hat’ is a pair of shorts that she wears beret style ;)
She will get her shoes when she sees me getting my shoes. Sometimes she’ll carry her sling/moby wrap/shoes over to me and I swear she’s saying she wants to go out :)
Other stuff
She’s started biting. She still only has 6 teeth but boy do they hurt! She will go to blow a raspberry on my tummy, but about 50% of the time she will nip at my tummy with her teeth! Ouch. I’m never entirely certain what she’s going to do.
She can be gentle though. She will pet and kiss the pictures of cats and dogs in her books.
She was scared of a picture of a cat in one particular book (Scarface claw from ‘hairy maclary’) but over a few days we slowly got her to a place where she now says hi to the cat and pets him! Seriously the first time I read this book to her I turned the page and there was a scary picture of a cat and she clung to me and started crying. We read the book a few times a day just skipping over that page (she knew when it was coming up) and then we’d just look at that page and pet it and say meow quietly. And now she almost skips over the rest of the book to say hi to the cat :)
As I mentioned above, she kind of kisses. Sometimes she purses her lips and moves her head in for a kiss, sometimes she makes kissing sounds but doesn’t move her head in and sometimes she shoves her forehead against your face and goes “aaaaaa”?! Mostly she kisses her stuffed animals and pictures in books, but occasionally we can get her to kiss one of us. It’s not like we don’t kiss her enough to set an example?!
Oh! We swapped out her infant car seat for the next size up. And Christina found us an umbrella stroller for $5 at a garage sale :)
She has her 15 month doctors visit in 2 weeks.
The Part About Me:
I am being better about getting out and being social with my new friends. Most of the time I only see them when the kids are in tow, but I’m thinking it might be nice to go out for a girls night sometime (even if it’s an early evening thing) and leave the boys with bedtime duty. It’s hard to hold a proper conversation with 3 little ones getting into trouble. And I’m working on a post swim class lunch date with a couple of the mums from class too.
I have decided to push myself on from the 5k races and start training for a 10k. I have done a couple of races with Maeve in her stroller and have started going on training runs with Maeve. I am managing to get out once a week which is much better than once a month or so. This morning was day 3 of my training program, I ran 3.9miles in 44minutes. I also ran my fastest 5k ever last weekend :) Lewis took Maeve in the stroller and I ran without her for the first time in a few weeks.
This week I started new ‘business hours’ for myself. I do Maeve activities/errands in the morning (skype, swim class, library, etc) and in the afternoon while she naps I work on paintings/crafts for Etsy and gift projects. I’m able to get a solid 2 hours of work done before she wakes up and sometimes I can get a few things done once she’s awake and again after she’s gone down for the night (depending on energy levels).
I’m trying to build my collection of work for entering art shows next year. I’m tweaking some paintings that haven’t been getting much attention on Etsy and work on some crafts for Christmas gifts.
The turn of the season has made me want to go through my closet again. I want new pants (slim fit, maybe some cords), maybe a nice sweater, some soft plaid flannel shirts. This year is a new winter boots year (last year I got a new winter coat).
We’re still house hunting. We have a viewing tomorrow. Not getting too excited as it’s only the 6th house we’ll have seen in 7+months of looking. But it would be super awesome if we could move in the new year… sigh.
I’m thinking about baby #2. This is partly due to period hormonal stuff but yeah. I look at videos from a year ago and can’t believe how much she’s grown. We’re still hoping to do house first, then puppy, then baby so I doubt we’ll even start trying for another year, but it’s in my thoughts.
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