Happy Birthday Baby!

Eleanor turned one year old yesterday!  We had a party for her on Saturday with about ten people, mostly family.  It was a good party and she got tons of new toys and clothes!  She spent all day yesterday playing with her new push toy (from mommy and daddy).  She loves to walk around behind it.  She is so close to taking her first step on her own, but isn’t there quite yet.  Hopefully soon!  For now she moves much more quickly crawling so she doesn’t have much incentive to walk.

She’s now saying dada and versions of mom (mama, ma, nen, even Jenn recently), as well as “hi” and “up”.  Her little voice is so sweet!  She learned those last two in just the last week or so, so she seems to be learning quickly now.  I’m looking forward to hearing the next word!

She doesn’t have another appt until the end of the month, so I weighed her (on our Wii Fit, haha) and measured her myself.  She’s now about 18.5 lbs (13%) and 29″ tall (59%).  So she’s still  skinny, but not as much as before (she was 16% weight and 87% height at 9mo).  We’ve been feeding her a ton but I guess she might need even more.  Yikes!

We gave her soy milk for the first time the other day and she loved it.  I’m hoping to swap out a couple nursing sessions a day for it, but so far she seems to be treating it as more of a supplement than a meal.  Now that I know her stats, maybe that’s a good thing.  I’m planning on continuing to breastfeed for the foreseeable future, hopefully until she’s about two, which is the WHO recommendation.  We’ll see how it goes.

She popped her first molar on the 12th, which brings her grand total up to nine teeth!  Her sleeping is still all over the board, largely from the constant teething.  Though apparently I was a horrible sleeper as a baby too, so it could just be that.  I am so thankful that I’m able to stay home with her!  Besides the fact that I love being here with her, I would be a zombie at work most days.

I can’t believe my baby is one, but I also look at her and see a one year old.  This year just went too fast.  I hope the next one is a little slower, and I can’t wait to see what it brings!

Just another daddy’s girl!

In the last few days Eleanor has decided that John is her new favorite person, and she’s also saying dada appropriately!  It’s enough to break a mama’s heart, though at the same time I’m so proud of her for saying her first word.  Haha!  Being a mom is quite confusing at times…

I remember my siblings going through phases where they preferred one parent over the other, then switching back, so hopefully this is only temporary.  I’ve also read that babies usually say dada before mama because they understand at an earlier age that daddy is a separate being from them.  They think of mommy as being the same person as them (separation anxiety is a symbol of them starting to understand that mommy is a separate person after all, if I’m remembering this correctly.)  I just keep telling myself all of this so that I don’t get jealous!  It’s working.  Kinda.

I think she might be teething again, since she’s chewing and drooling and sleeping like crap.  Up every 1.5-2 hours all night long, and usually only nursing will console her back to sleep.  Ugh!  This is her typical teething pattern, though she tends to take a long time to pop the teeth.  She’s been doing this for three weeks now and I am running on empty.  John took her yesterday morning and let me sleep in and I slept until 11am!  I usually hate doing that – such a waste of a day – but I obviously needed it.

Nothing else new going on.  I’m already over winter and want spring to get here.  That’s one problem with going down to So Cal for the holidays: you get a taste of lovely weather and it makes winter seem interminable.  We went to the local nursery last week and bought some indoor plants, which helps.  I really want an indoor lime tree, but can’t really justify spending $50 on something that I will very likely kill!  I think I might just go buy a few limes and plant the seeds.  And maybe make maragaritas.  ; )

Dispatch from the road

I have internet access at my aunt and uncle’s, so figured I’d post a quick update on us.

The ride down was fine, though a bit hairy in parts.  We left a day earlier than we had wanted to because of the weather, and I’m glad we did.  The first day on the road was nasty.  I have a pic of the freeway as we were leaving the first hotel, which I’ll post later.  It was basically a pure white road with no lanes!  At least we were one of the only cars on the road.  Our car trucked through it just fine.  Eleanor did wonderfully in the car, sleeping the majority of the way.

At some point on the way down, all three of us and most of my family came down with a cold.  We’re all still fighting it.  Figures, but what can you do?  Just life.

Disneyland was fun, though quite a bit harder with Eleanor than I had hoped it would be.  She had a few major breakdowns on rides, which was not so fun, the worst one being on the Finding Nemo ride!  Ugh.  (For those who don’t know: it’s a submarine.  Yeah, imagine a baby screaming on a submarine!  It was awful.)  For the most part she was a trooper and slept quite a bit in her stroller.  Her favorite rides were Small World – she was enthralled! – and Dumbo.  Riding through Small World with her made my trip.  She was so excited and happy!

We got to my aunt and uncle’s – my uncle is my father’s brother -  in So Cal on the 26th, and had a great first evening here.  However we woke up to the news that my paternal grandfather had passed away in his sleep the night before.  : (  My grandpa successfully fought off lymphoma two years ago – it was Christmas time when he was diagnosed – but never truly recovered.  He’s been pretty ill ever since, and we’ve been worried several times that we were about to lose him.  So his death was not exactly shocking, but still felt a bit out of left field.  He had been doing pretty well lately.  My grandma seems to be coping well.  In a way it was the best possible timing: we would all have come down here for his funeral anyway of course, but this way my grandma also has help making arrangements, etc. and has all of her family around her for support.  One of my uncles lives with her still, so I’m sure he’ll keep her good company in the future.  (She lives about an hour and a half away from my other uncle, so I’m glad she has someone closer.)

Looks like the funeral is going to be this Saturday, and we’ll be staying for that.  We were originally going to leave on Friday.  John’s work is very generous and gives him three days of bereavement leave even for his spouse’s grandparents, so that’s great.  He has enough time saved anyway, but it’s a nice bonus.

We’re hoping for an uneventful conclusion to this trip.  The roads have cleared quite a bit, so at least there’s that.