Blog | Baby
I admit, pink has never been my favorite color - mostly because the world seems to believe that all girls love and must have an excessive amount of pink! As a result of my aversion, I generally do not buy Brianna anything pink, even though she looks pretty good in that color (besides, I know everyone else will take care of that for me!). Further, leopard print is not really my style, and it definitely is not Jason’s. BUT, my friend Jean loaned me several adorable outfits for Brianna to wear, and she loves pink and just about any cat print. Plus, I must admit, my little angel looks pretty good in pink with leopard print trim!
Brianna has really started showing an interest in helping with everything lately…helping put her shoes on, helping put her toys away, helping dispose of her dirty diapers, etc. Well today, after a very nice lunch with Ms. Emmy (my friend Emily, who is pregnant with twins and due any second now!), we headed over to the playground hoping we could get in some playtime in between rain showers. As it has rained a lot lately, some parts of the playground were understandably wet. I brought a towel just for that possibility, but before I could actually wipe anything off, Brianna was exclaiming over the lello (water). I asked her if she wanted to wipe up the water, and she said YES! She then proceeded to wipe up pretty much every wet spot on every slide, tunnel, and seat in the entire playground, even the big tall scary part of the playground.
Parts of the playground that she would never go on before suddenly became part of her mission! She was very thorough - I don’t believe any of the children that frequent the playground need to worry at all about getting their clothes wet…or dirty…after wiping up the water, Brianna proceeded to “clean” the steps with her tummy and knees, and the slides with her bottom. 
This past week, Brianna and I were soooo lucky to have Miss Marty and William come over to visit! It was a miserable, cold, and rainy day outside so we stayed inside and played, and played, and played.
William loved Brianna’s puzzle toy, and I think Brianna learned more watching him play with it than she does watching us. Go figure.
Marty is 9 months pregnant with her second child - I think she looks great! Right now, they call the baby Grulia (a combination of Graham and Julia) because they don’t know what the gender is. Jason and I hope she has a Julia. She already knows how fun boys are, and we want her to know how much fun girls are!
William is two and an adorable, outgoing, friendly little boy. I was so impressed with how good he is at following direction and sharing. It is amazing how big of a difference 5 little months can make, especially on the social front. Brianna is still not very good at sharing, and she would fuss when William would play with a toy she wanted to play with. I think part of it is because she doesn’t see William very often, and part of it is because she is just at that age. We are working on it. Even though I had hoped she would share a little better with William than she did, she did much better than she would have done even one month ago. Progress!
We had a wonderful time visiting and playing with William and Marty. Thank you guys so much for coming!
Like most kids, Brianna has favorite books that she wants us to read over and over again. One favorite is what we call “The Duck Book.” It has pull out sections that complete the sentence, e.g., “bunny likes to hide, but she also likes being…” (pull out) “found!” Today, while reading this book, I said “frog likes to jump, but he always makes a…” and Brianna said “mess!” plain as day, before I could even pull out the section! I think she also does it for the other pages, but “found” and “loud” and the other words aren’t quite as clear and/or sound very similar. She did it multiple times, so I am positive she knew exactly what she was saying; she was very proud of herself! We are very proud as well.
Brianna is 19 months old! To celebrate, we went to watch some horses at a charity horse show held at the fairgrounds. I discovered it while surfing the web looking for something different to do on a beautiful fall day. How did parents find these sorts of fun, out of the way things before the internet? I fully intended to take pictures, but I did not let her walk around much because it was a wide open space where people and horses moved freely. I didn’t want her to spook a horse or get scared by a horse. So, you will just have to take my word for it, she had a great time! All the way home, she kept saying, “more neigh”!
She seems to add new words everyday, and will repeat (or try to anyway) most anything you say to her. Her latest words include bicycle (bitikle), sleepsack (seepsak), noodle (noo-no), chicken, upstairs and apple juice (both sound like apple juice), touchdown, pumpkin (punkin), cauliflower (caudifoder), crab (cra), and helicopter (hedicotter). She LOVES Nemo and stickers and bubbles, and she loves to watch the movies we make of her. Since I don’t want her spending too much time watching videos, I got her a Nemo book and some Nemo bath toys/cups. That pretty much distracts her.
Her latest thing seems to be dancing. She will shuffle her feet with the music and laugh and clap! She has yet to do it while the camera is running, but I am trying to film her “dancing” along to “Barnyard Dance” by Sandra Boynton. It is really fun to watch her. She has not started jumping yet, but she does run quite a bit. She will also make her body go up and down in an attempt to copy our jumping motions. I know I am biased, but she is just so darn cute and she makes us laugh every day!
She also seems to have developed a nurturing tendency. While I am holding her, she pats my back. And she regularly gets her sleep sack to cover her baby dolls so they can go night-night (while she pats, well somewhat beats, them on the back to sooth them)! That poor baby doll spends pretty much all day asleep, with an occasional awake period to eat (baby milk only, don’t you know).
She is still a good eater (as you can see by her “beer belly” in the pictures above and below), but seems to do a pretty good job of only eating until she is full. Her latest favorites seem to be applesauce, carrots, noodles (especially with tomato sauce), pizza, and the always popular puffs. We increasingly are feeding her what we are eating, and that seems to be working fairly well so far. She will still try broccoli, but won’t eat much (seems to like it with tomato sauce, though), and when I gave her some cauliflower the other day, she made an awful face…and then proceeded to eat more. Not sure what that means, but I’ll take it. We basically don’t make her eat anything and don’t make a big deal out of it if she won’t eat something. But, we also keep giving her “disliked” foods at future meals. I am also currently reading about how to hide veggies so we will see how that goes.
Today was such a beautiful day, we spent her long awake period outside playing in the leaves. She had to watch some other people go at it first before she would try it herself. She was a bit tentative at first, but we all had a great time in the beautiful weather!
Did we scare you? No? Well then, you must not be UGA fans! The Gators put a can of whoop-a$$ on them this afternoon, and that just about made our Halloween perfect! We started the festivities yesterday afternoon when Brianna participated in a Halloween parade with her friends. I am only including pics of Brianna - I did not think to ask the other parents if they would mind if I posted some pics of them online, and I don’t want to assume it would be o.k. Here she is in her Gator costume (with her Halloween pumpkin socks) during the parade. I am holding the pom-pom we made for her because she wasn’t interested in it while we were taking pictures.
Then today, she got dressed up in her costume again, this time with her Gator socks and pom-pom! I also had some Gator tattoos, but decided there was little to no chance she would sit still while I put them on. Maybe next time. Anyway, here she is getting ready for the game (did I mention that the Gators clobbered UGA??).
Inspecting the pom-pom…
Is this what I am supposed to do???
I get it now!! I look pretty cool in the mirror shaking my pom-pom!
Here she is playing with her pumpkin (one of several she picked out at the pumpkin patch). I tried to get her to sit by the jack-o-lantern for a picture (she has been fascinated with that thing for days), but no go. She apparently did not feel like posing!
She seemed interested in, and even a bit fascinated with the trick-or-treaters that came to the house, at least until a couple of skeletons came by (with masks). She did not like that at all — took about 20 minutes to completely calm her back down. So, Tatie Kat screened all future visitors and had to give the o.k. before we would bring Brianna to the door to see them. Eventually, she asked to go outside, so I took her to a couple of neighbors’ houses for a very brief trick-or-treating stint. She did say trick-or-treat and thank you once, but she would not let go of me to do anything further. She finished the evening trick-or-treating at our house with her buddies Jake (the monkey) and Stella (the princess), and then it was off to dream land (hopefully to NOT dream about skeletons…).
Brianna recently had her 18-month checkup. She is currently 30.75″ tall (25%), weighs 22 lbs. (25%), and has a head circumference of 48.5 cm (90-95%). She got her seasonal flu shot and her final DTaP. Everything checked out just fine!
It is October, and that means it is time for the fair and for Halloween and all kinds of good stuff! You can’t really tell in the picture above, but as you can see in the pictures below, Brianna is taking advantage of the Halloween “season” by wearing her jack-o-lantern hat! I just put the above picture first because she is smiling nice and does not have her bink her her mouth…
Here are a couple of pictures of Brianna in her 2009 festive Halloween outfit (not costume), complete with Halloween socks!
…playing with her toys…
…watching Nemo…
…chasing Mommy…
This past weekend, her Grandma and Grandpa came to visit. We went to a farm (took a hay ride and checked out all of the animals before eating some fabulous home made ice cream). We also went to the State Fair (people watched, ran all over the place, ate more ice cream, rode the merry-go-round…twice…). Strangely, she was fascinated by the grates on all the storm drains, which seriously looked big enough for her to get caught in. Needless to say, we did not let her play around them, but she kept us on our toes trying to sneak past our defenses!
Will try to post some merry-go-round pictures later. Until then, here are some pictures of her from today, where she is wearing her “scottie” dress and her patent leather shoes. Too cute!
…after filling her belly with yummy Zpizza…
…anybody know how to make this thing work?? Trying to put on Nemo…
With the Grandparents and Curly (try to ignore me in this picture. I am not supposed to be in there anyway!)
I mentioned to a friend of mine that Brianna has apparently been spending a lot of time with the baby dolls at school. So, my friend’s daughter graciously semi-indefinitely loaned Brianna her baby doll stroller and several baby dolls to play with. Brianna loves them! She just loves pushing around the dolls in the stroller. I have not given her all the dolls to play with - I figure I’ll bring them out over time. Who needs to have them all? She is having a blast with the two I have given her so far (along with a clown and a kitty or two)!
Our little munchkin is getting bigger and bigger - clearly all our attempts to slow her down are not working! I have no idea how big she actually is, but will find out in a couple of weeks when we go to her 18-month checkup. I’ll post that info then.
I took the above picture today when we ventured out to get a smoothie. We are all recovering from the flu (Brianna was the last to get it) so we haven’t been out hardly at all since we returned from vacation. So far, I would say Brianna got the lightest version of it out of the three of us, with Jason getting the worst. While she has had a high fever for a couple of days, she has still been her usual cheerful self, and she is eating well (as long as the food we give her consists of applesauce and/or smoothies). She has also eaten other things, but those are her favorite “sick” foods. It was a miserable flu (oink, oink), but all things considered, I think we fared o.k.
Brianna is a chatterbox! I can’t imagine where she gets that from… She is putting 3 and 4 word phrases together all the time. More milk please. More up Mommy please. No chocolate Mommy (I kid you not - she actually said that to me when I offered her my chocolate shake in place of her Daddy’s vanilla). She will attempt to repeat pretty much anything you ask her to repeat, and is really good at saying please and thank you (this last one is a fairly recent development). Some words are crystal clear - milk, mommy, daddy, apple, baby, nose, hat, night-night, etc. Other words require a translator - water (sounds like lellow), thank you (sounds like ga-gu), chocolate (sounds like chakit), gators (sounds like goo-goo), etc. We are also officially in the watch what you say phase. I dropped something the other day and said “crap,” which was cheerfully and clearly repeated by my darling daughter - smile and everything!
She is getting more adventurous as she becomes more comfortable with things around her. She loves the slides and swings and general playground equipment, but prefers the stuff at the playgrounds she is familiar with. She also has a few “space” issues - she does not like to be crowded and she does not like it when people (adults, kids, and anything in between) approach her too quickly. For the most part, however, she now just stands very still when this happens, instead of getting very fidgety and fussy. She loves her school buddies (bubbies) and can even say some of their names (Hawk, Max). Biting incidents aside (one where she was the bitee and one where she was the biter), they seem to really like her too. Jason has even heard Hawk try to say her name when she arrives (pretty impressive for an 18-month old if you ask me). So, while she is still very shy with playground kids, grandparents, and family friends, she loves her school “bubbies” and teachers.
We are beginning to transition her to a “real” food schedule. Meaning, we are beginning to feed her what we eat. I suspect this will take several months to fully put in place, but our goal is to teach her to try new things and that we will all be eating the same thing as a family (no member-specific menus).
She is entering the “help” phase as well - it is adorable to see. She wants to help load the dishwasher and put things away. I hope this phase lasts for, oh, 18+ years!!
