It's been a wild ride in mommy land lately. E's development comes in leaps and bounds followed by pleateaus, and we've been in the midst of a giant leap. As many others will attest, these developmental charges lead to lots of sleepless nights. I'm tired. A few weeks ago she slept through the night 4 nights in a row. Last night I was up for hours. It's so interesting to see how she's changed, though. Right now she's incredibly into cause and effect. She likes switches, buttons, etc. She likes to turn things on and off and see what they do. The first thing she does in her room now is turn her music on and then go about her business playing. She doesn't need me to show her. She knows. You can see the little wheels turning in her head when she's trying to figure something out. She's "talking" constantly to herself, and making new sounds. Her vocabulary has stalled at mama, dada, hi, no, and kitty, but I feel some more are on the horizon.
Hubs and I have been doing a good job of splitting duties. He's not working right now, so he takes care of the baby all day 2 days a week, and the other three he has her half the day, and my mom has her the other half while he looks for jobs and goes on interviews. He's ready to hand her over when I get home from work, but that's OK. She's a handful, and I am ready to cuddle when I get home! He's doing most of the house work, and wakes up with her most weekend days. I get up with her in the middle of the night, watch her most of the day on the weekends, and have her when I get home from work. But he's ready and willing if my kidneys have tired me out and I need a nap, and yesterday I got to go see The Hobbit! We have family playtime before bed sometimes, and he insists on wrapping her up in her towel after I bathe her. It's a nice system. It's great that he's so involved and that he wants to be there. I don't think he needs to be around her quite the same way I do, but he wants to be, and that's pretty awesome. We fought the other day over who got to comfort her when she was crying. He picked her up and I was mad because he'd been with her all day, but really my mom had had her and he'd been looking for jobs, so he won that battle. Little miss is lucky - we fight over who gets to hold her when she cries!
It's been a while, but we're finally settling into life with a baby. It's harder but more amazing than I could have imagined. Andy's getting more and more confident in his skills, and I'm getting more confident in him. I can't wait until it's warm again and we can take her to the zoo and the aquarium and all of those things we've been looking forward to. I'm very lucky. I don't forget this.
She's pulling herself up every chance she gets. She stands really well. Actually just before I took this, she let go, balanced herself, then grabbed back onto the handle. She's getting better at standing alone. She closed her eyes here expecting a flash. She loves the camera and now she giggles when she sees it!
One of her favorite things to do is pull all the books off her shelf and "read". She likes to turn pages and look at the books and feel them. She picked this one herself. It's from when I was 3!!! Momma's girl.
We went to the mall to buy shoes for her Christmas dress. It was nice out so I decided to take a selfie!
The sun is like a halo. She should probably have one because she's an angel.
She has the most beautiful eyes I've ever seen. They're like.. turquoise. And huge. Note to mothers of baby girls: jumpers are so impractical. I had this on her for like ten minutes and had to take it off. Every time you want to put her in a car seat, stroller, high chair, etc., it bunches up. And her butt is always sticking out because they ride up. Jumpers are for babies who walk!
Hammin' it up for the camera.
