17 months

Anya is 17 months today. It is a lovely Sunday here at the Lodwig house. The sun is actually out (this has been an awful, wet, cold few months we've had), Anya is spending the day with Grandma and Grandpa Lodwig, and Chris and I are working on the basement den. I'm just taking a little break to update Anya's blog and run some errands.

Locomotion

Not much has changed this way over the last month. The only thing I can think of is that Anya really loves doing somersaults (props to her friend Luca for the idea). She can't do them on her own, but she gets herself in downward dog position (which she calls "upside down") and yells somersault! (which comes out as somesawwt) for me to help her flip over. Clapping ensues and we do it again. She also likes to "flip" on the bar at the playground, like she sees the big kids doing. I don't let her actually flip over. I more teeter her over the bar and she doesn't know the difference right now.

I think instead of doing the co-op preschool summer program, I'll sign her up for the Little Gym or see what's going on at Seattle Gymnastics Academy. She really seems to enjoy this sort of thing (like most kids, I'm sure) and it'll be a nice change of pace for a few months until "school" starts back up in the fall.

Speech

Many more words. The last week or two, Anya has started occasionally speaking in complete thoughts and once in awhile complete sentences. Some are "Grandpa, work. Airplanes and helicopters." (grandpa Lodwig works with helicopters, and there are also airplanes there). "Grandma at home," "I want peanut butter cracker" (this one I was most surprised by), "I want that", "I running!", "petting kitty"...

And once, when the stars were perfectly aligned and Anya was focused just right, she counted to 10 all by herself! She of course has no real concept of counting and doesn't know the difference between 5 and 10 of something, but she memorized those numbers pretty well. I'm a proud mama.

She also knows about 2/3 of the alphabet and can tell you the sounds many of those letters make, thanks to this electronic fridge magnet letter toy she has. It's pretty cool.

Other Development

I don't remember how long I thought it would take to transition from 2 naps to one, maybe a few days or a week. I was way off. It took about a month and parts of it sucked. I think that's partly why she was having so many temper tantrums. She's solidly down to one nap a day and it's finally working well for us, splits the day up nicely and we get out of the house more for fun stuff.

Anya has 13 teeth now, and the 14th is just starting to pop through.

Tantrums are a daily occurrence, mostly when nap time looms near or dinner isn't fast enough. It's not quite like it was a few weeks ago and is more or less tolerable. I hate the public ones, but whaddya do (besides hand her off to Chris or pretend you don't know who that poorly behaved child is).

Anya appears to be a leftie. She has slowly begun to show a preference for that hand, eats and draws with it. Not very surprising, since Chris writes with his left hand and I used to do some things with my left hand as a kid, but eventually started just using my right, and I'm goofy-footed.

Food

Not exactly by choice, we ended up having pizza 3 days in a row, and Anya had some too. No diaper rash. Woohoo! I'm still hesitant to give her tomato soup or a plain tomato, but this is good. I also shared a little nibble of chocolate cupcake with her and there was no reaction (I was allergic to chocolate as a kid). Strawberries seem to be OK too, at least the dehydrated ones she's tried. I still haven't tried mango with her and shellfish. That's it, though, for allergy fears.

And this is it for this month's developmental post.

Book Review: Burt and Ernie

I know most of you stay up at nights wondering about two very important things:
1. What is up with Burt and Ernie? Are they "a thing"?
2. If they were "a thing" they wouldn't be proselytizing to our children would they?

Well the answer is finally clear.

Here we see Burt talking his buddy...

Out of the closet!

Yes, Ernie you're finally free of the stigmas society has unjustly foisted upon you. As we can see, you are much happier now, and we're all happy for you...

Well most of us any way. If you look very close at Oscar's trash can, you can see he has his mind all made up about this matter.

Makin' Daddy Proud: Affection

I've been waiting my whole life (or at least the last 15 or so years) for tonight. My kid walked up to me while I was on the computer, kissed my hand and said, "Daddy. Kisses."
My life is officially complete.
Oh. And when Amy says, "can I get a kiss?" Anya says, "No," in her soft yet staccato way, and marches off.
He-he.

Culture out the wazoo

Yesterday, we took Anya to the Seattle Symphony (Tiny Tots performance) for her first cultural experience. It was a fun excuse to put her in a dress, something we never do since she climbs and runs around so much; it's impractical.

As expected, she ran around and played with all the cool music-related toys/activities before the start of the show, often weaving through the crowds and being rather difficult to catch up with.

And as predicted by Grandma L., she tried to rush the stage a little after we were seated in the auditorium. Fortunately, that idea was quickly thwarted by dad. Once the show started, Anya was quiet and took it all in: the performance, the clapping, all the parents/grandparents and kids in the audience, lights, etc. We're pretty sure she didn't quite know what to make of it all. And then after about 20 minutes, she was ready to run around some more and did so with Chris and other willing child participants.

All in all, a pretty good time and something we'll do again for sure. I think she'll get the most out of it in about a year or two, though, when she'll (hopefully) focus more on the performance than running. It'll be really cool when we can take her to the Nutcracker for the first time in a few (or more) years too. Fun stuff.

Anya in her pretty new sweater from her friend Max

Temper temper

I've been hoping she would somehow magically avoid it, but it looks like Anya is now entering the dreaded "terrible two's" stage. For any parents reading this with older children, you know it doesn't start when the clock strikes midnight on their second birthday.

She throws a tantrum at the drop of a hat these days; almost always when she doesn't get her way (or get it quickly enough). I ignore her for the most part when that happens, or try distraction techniques that only sometimes work. To date, she's only had one MAJOR meltdown. That was yesterday afternoon. We were at the park and she wanted to swing. Unfortunately the bucket swings were in use by other toddlers. I asked if she wanted to sit on my lap on a regular swing until it was her turn. Ooooh no. She flipped out, started screaming, got all rigid and then sat on the ground in the throes of a major fit. I tried to ignore, and then took her to the slide across the playground, where the meltdown continued when I wouldn't let her go down a "fire pole". So I carried her kicking and screaming to the car and we went home. Meanwhile, other park goes were starting at us. I'd like to assume the moms were thinking "oh, yeah, I know how that goes" instead of "what a terrible mom". Either way, it was kind of embarrassing.

I talked to my friend Tracey (mom of a just-turned 3 year old) and she laughed, saying that behavior will become a daily occurrence and I'll quickly learn to tune it out. I really hope so. Because at the moment, returning to work (ANY work!) is mighty tempting, as the seemingly near-constant "WAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH!" is getting a bit old. I guess if we're going to look on the bright side, I've become really good at controlling my own temper and becoming a much more patient person....with regards to children anyway.

Makin' Daddy Proud: Making connections!

Just a brief note since I'm at work:

1. Anya says "Bless you" when we sneeze, which in and of itself is pretty cool, but yesterday she was fake coughing and saying bless you to herself. That was funny.
2. This morning Amy and I were talking in the kitchen, and I heard her yell "Anya!" from the other room. When I went to look for her she was hiding behind the door. She just wanted me to say "Where's Anya!?" and chase her. She giggled when I found her and ran away.
3. We were at the dog park last night and I kept hearing her say, "gotcha". Then I realized she was saying it when ever a dog caught the ball, or caught up to another dog they were chasing.
4. She's started playing with the dog. She'll chase Laika around and tag her and/or kiss her when she catches her. Laika, of course, reciprocates. They're becoming fast friends those two.
5. Yesterday she was holding a bit of cracker over her head and moving it along and saying "Airplane".
6. She took the Hungry Caterpillar from me the other day, flipped to the page with 4 oranges and counted the first 3 of them.

On the other hand she's started having melt-down tantrums. At least last night she was yelling "Sausage!" which at least was funny to hear a 16 month old scream.

clothes & stuff

Lately bug has been attempting to put on her clothes. This picture was snapped this morning. It was the only thing she "wore" long enough for me to get the camera and make it back to her room before she changed into something else. By the looks of it, she wasn't in a picture taking mood.

She's also getting pretty good at putting on/taking off some some pairs of her shoes. Other pairs are too tough still and she gets pretty frustrated, throwing them across the room. Boy, I have no idea where she gets this behavior :-/

random pics from this evening

Anya has been plagued by a stomach bug since Saturday. She hasn't appeared to feel awful, but it's been bothering her just enough that she hasn't been quite as gregarious. Since this afternoon, she seems like she's coming out of it and behaving more like her usual self. We busted out the camera for fun.

At some point, Anya took several socks out of her dresser drawer and piled them up to throw down the laundry chute (door behind the socks). Now we know she is capable of sorting; maybe it's time to teach her how to do her own laundry.

Taking a minute to roll around on the feather comforter before we put the cover back on.

helping Anya bounce higher on our bed.

Upside-down baby, with mom "biting" stomach and licky dog in background.

Our budding gymnast.

Preschool

We received our co-op preschool notifications on Friday. I had been anxiously awaiting them for the last month or so. What a process. Basically, you tour and register for all of the schools in the co-op system you are interested in. Often (and this year especially) there are way more applicants than spaces available. Because I had Anya enrolled in infant co-op, we got priority registration. This is a bit of a misnomer, since people that had older children enrolled in the school (alumni) in prior years actually get priority/guaranteed enrollment. And then the schools open up x amount of slots for "priority" (my group) via lottery and another amount for open enrollment. My understanding before was that I'd have a guaranteed spot; obviously, not true. Pretty irritating, but what can ya do.

We registered at Wedgwood, Sandhurst, and Victory Heights. We really wanted to go to Wedgwood, since it's 5 blocks from the house, heavy community involvement, and great instructors. Second choice was Victory Heights. It turns out there were so many alumni at Wedgwood that they were only opening 5 spots for priority registration. It looked like about 40 registrants for priority, so our chances of getting in were pretty slim, especially since it was through a lottery. Another wrench was that we were trying to keep Anya and Flynn together for preschool, so even less of a chance of both of us getting one of those 5 spots.

Long story short, we got one of the spots at Wedgwood. And so did Flynn. And so did our PEPS friend Liam! Chris calculated it to be about a .2% chance that we got 3 of the 5 open spots. How cool is that?? I'm hearing from other moms that the Wedgwood waitlist is already insanely long.

So this will be Anya's preschool until she starts Kindergarten, assuming she's happy there. I love the idea of walking to "school", and really love that she'll be with her friends Flynn and Liam, both of whom she's known since she was just a few months old.

16 months

Anya is 16 months old today.

Locomotion

Nothing new here, really. She just consistently improves in climbing and navigating. She can climb a vertical ladder at playgrounds now, uses the wall or railing to climb stairs instead of crawling up them, and is as fearless as ever. One thing I've noticed is that she hasn't tried climbing her dresser lately and doesn't immediately try to get on the dining room table or coffee table anymore. It's almost like the novelty has worn off. Let's hope it stays that way.

Speech

This has been a big month for new words. I think Anya has roughly doubled her vocabulary and is somewhere around 400 words. "Bicycle" and "soccer ball" are still favorites. Another favorite is now "helicopter". She puts together 2 words more and more often as well. She is also starting to recognize more letters of the alphabet as well as more numbers.

It makes life a lot easier for us as parents that she can communicate a lot of her needs/wants. For example, Anya says "help". I ask what she needs help with. And she tells me; usual answers are "stuck" or she names a toy/object that she is trying to reach/move but is having trouble. And she lets us know what she wants for snack time, what book she wants us to read, etc.

Other Development

Ever since I sliced my finger the other week, she's been on a "hurt" kick. She'll lightly bump herself and then say "ouch!"...."hurt" and points to where it supposedly hurts (things that actually hurt she of course cries and doesn't point to). Same goes for dropping her dolls or when she pushes them down the toy slide we've got in the living room. "Doll....Hurt".

Anya likes to mimic me and help. She sweeps and tries to vacuum, etc. She's still very much into her dolls and feeding/caring for them. She also now "reads" to her stuffed animals - she'll put them on her lap, flip pages in a book and jabber & point. It's pretty cute. Chris was also showing his parents our work in the basement, pointing and explaining a few nights ago. Anya was copying him, pointing and babbling. I wish I saw it.

Food

The only thing to note here is that vegetable/bean soup I make that has some tomato in it doesn't seem to bother her. I'm not sure if it's the amount or the way it's cooked.

The only foods we don't give her are now (besides plain citrus) are shellfish (allergy runs in Chris' side of the family, so we're waiting), chocolate (I was allergic, but this one probably isn't a big deal. I'll introduce it soon enough), and mango (since I am allergic and since she has trouble with citrus too, the chances are high that she is allergic to this).