19 Feb 2012 No Comments

Going To Sleep

Amelia has consistently napped 60-90 minutes a day for quite a while now, but suddenly in the past couple of weeks, she’s been waking up after only 40-50 minutes. I’m not sure if this is the beginning of the end of naps, but I am sure that it’s really, really annoying. Especially when you take into account the 10 minutes I spend in her bed after she falls asleep before I’m confident I won’t wake her when I get up. That leaves me with approximately half an hour to get some work done. Not good.

One day I tried getting her to go back to sleep. It worked. She was snoring! But as soon as I tried to get up, she woke up. Three times I tried to escape and failed, so eventually I gave up and said naptime was over.

Today was sort of a repeat of that very scenario, except when I was halfway to the door and she opened her eyes, I said, “Mama’s going downstairs. You go back to sleep, okay?”

Guess what she said!

She said, “Okay!”

So I left. Stood outside the door for a while, expecting to hear crying or the doorknob turning. Neither happened. So I went downstairs. About 15-20 minutes later, she wakes up again. Sigh.

It was a small victory but a step in the right direction. Eventually this kid will go to sleep on her own, in her own room, and she’ll stay there all night. Hopefully it’ll happen before she goes to college…

by Bekke

12 Feb 2012 No Comments

Valentine’s cards

Last year we went to a Valentine Exchange for the first time, and I had my mom send me some cute Norwegian troll postcards that I glued to the front of the cards, and then Amelia (16 months old at the time) put stickers on the cards, which she loved.

This year I wanted to make the cards from scratch, and I had a really hard time finding anything I liked, until I stumbled across this idea. So cute! So perfect!

So much work!!!

I had to make 40 of these, half for today’s Exchange and half for Amelia’s school friends on Tuesday. I thought I was being so brilliant by designing the three different parts on my computer and then printing it all out on cardstock. Well, turns out that I could easily cut 2-3 sheets at once, so it would have been helpful if only the top sheet had a pattern on it. Because the other 1-2 sheets had patterns, too, and they didn’t always align correctly, or I wasn’t able to be precise enough to cut along the lines I couldn’t see. So I guess I’ve learned something for the next time I do a project like this.

Amelia enjoyed “helping” with the different stages of making the cards. I had extra cardstock, so she was able to use her little safety scissors and cut them up to her heart’s content. She’s pretty good with those scissors for a 2-year-old, meaning she hasn’t hurt herself. Yet.

Next stage, gluing the pieces together, she got her own glue stick and was having fun with that. Then I did all the writing on them, and she played with the markers. Finally, I glued on the hearts and eyes, and this was the part where she actually (kind of sort of) helped. She was very liberal with the glue on about half the pieces, getting glue on the front and the back, so I couldn’t always use what she’d done, but at least I can say that she helped a little bit. And she definitely enjoyed herself.

All in all, it took me 6-7 hours (over 3 days) to make all the cards. Next year Amelia will be almost 3 1/2, so hopefully by then her motor skills will have improved enough and she’ll have a bit more understanding and interest in following patterns to take a bigger part in making the cards. It is, in my opinion, the only fun part of an otherwise pretty worthless and blatantly commercial holiday. Yes, I’m a Valentine’s Day grinch. So sue me.

by Bekke

05 Feb 2012 No Comments

The Inevitable Incident

So, a pool safety fence is not in our budget right now, meaning Amelia can’t be out back by herself. Justin has been cleaning the pool on the weekends, and I’m out there making sure Amelia doesn’t bug him or end up in the pool. This week I got her a small skimmer net so that she could “help” clean the pool, which was a big hit.

After the pool was clean it was time to use the other purchase of the week: a solar cover, to heat up the pool and reduce how often it needs to be cleaned. While we were wrestling with the cover, we took our eyes off the kiddo, and because she’s been pretty careful around the pool so far, we were surprised to suddenly hear screaming.

Yup, she fell in the pool. We think she might have thought she could stand on the cover. Luckily, she fell in right above the steps, so she didn’t even get her hair wet, but she did get scared and cold.

Hopefully this will make her even more cautious around the pool. I don’t think she really “got it” before when we told her the water was really cold. What’s cool is that when Justin ran over and fished her out, she had already grabbed the wall. This is something she learns in the safety part of her swim class: if you fall in, turn around and grab the wall. She did the same thing last summer at the public pool when she ran ahead of me and jumped in. I’m glad that the swim classes aren’t a waste of money!

by Bekke

01 Feb 2012 No Comments

Secrets

Amelia just helped me hide Justin’s Valentine’s Day present. When we were done, the following conversation took place.

A: “I hide Papa present.”

Me: “Yes, thank you.”

A: “He can’t find it.”

M: “That’s right. And you can’t tell him about it, okay? You have to keep it a secret.”

A: [puts her hand on my cheek and looks seriously into my eyes] “I promise.”

I guess we’ll find out if a 2-year-old really can keep a secret…

by Bekke

28 Jan 2012 2 Comments

Peter Rabbit Pop-Up

I requested this book at the library, because I remember loving the Peter Rabbit stories when I was little, not realizing that this was the pop-up version. But I’m so glad I got it, because this book is simply wonderful. There are tons of pictures that pop up, can be moved, and there’s even a real net for a paper Peter to be caught in.

Amelia is absolutely entranced by it. She’s a little too preoccupied with the interactive stuff to pay that much attention to the story yet, but I’m sure that’ll change.

I’ve decided to buy a copy, because it’s such an awesome book, and the library one is not in that great of a condition. Pop-up books generally don’t do very well at the library. I think this is a classic that Amelia will love for many years to come, so it’s worth owning. Highly recommended!

by Bekke

24 Jan 2012 No Comments

Word progressions

It seems like Amelia’s constantly pronouncing words more correctly these days, which is somewhat bittersweet. It’s great that she’s learning and getting better at communicating. But of course, bad pronunciation is way cuter.

A few word progressions:

GRANDPA

At first she said “Papa” and we had to puzzle out if she meant her grandpa or her dad. Eventually it changed to “pee-pa.” And now she says “gwan-pa” which is as good as it’ll get until she can say Rs.

YELLOW

At first it was “wuh-wuh.” Then “wuh-woh” and “ye-woh.” And now “yeLLow.” As in, she figured out the Ls and hits them comically hard.

CHRISTMAS

We told a lot of people about how she said Christmas. For a couple of months, she was constantly saying “Tippets.” She has already changed it to “Crippets.” We though tippets sounded like a pretty serious disease, but crippets sounds like something that would kill you for sure.

There are a ton more words like this, some of which I wouldn’t even know how to spell phonetically. Like the way she says “Pinocchio.” Is it wrong to ask her to say some things just so we can get a good chuckle?

by Bekke

22 Jan 2012 2 Comments

Baby in there!

Last weekend while we were working on unpacking the boxes that were still sitting in our loft, Justin found Amelia’s ultrasound photos. He explained to her that they were pictures of her from before she was born, and so I dug up the belly pics from Facebook and showed them to her. “You were in there,” I told her. She then tried to shove the ultrasound photos into my belly button.

One week later, this morning as I was changing her diaper, she suddenly pointed at her own belly and said, “Baby in there!”

“No, there’s not!” I said, both horrified and amused.

Lesson: She understands a lot and forgets nothing.

by Bekke

21 Jan 2012 No Comments

New blogging format

Well, here I am, trying something new again. The previous way of blogging obviously wasn’t working for me, since it’d been 3 months since I’d posted. Granted, I had very good reasons for being too busy to blog, but even so, I needed to find a way for blogging not to seem like such a chore. I do want to keep posting these tidbits about Amelia, but I guess it just need to not be so much work for me to do it.

So I’ve set it up so that I can blog by email. Meaning, I send an email and it turns into a blog post. No logging into WordPress, uploading images, writing a post, publishing it, and blah blah blah. Instead I’ll just be sending an email. Easy peasy! So, from now on, I’ll be posting more often, hopefully at least once a day. The posts will usually be very short, and because of that, much more palatable. Ahem.

A summary of the past 3 months! In November, Amelia had a lot of fun when Grandma and Leslie visited for Thanksgiving. In December, we moved to a new house. Amelia transitioned remarkably well, despite the fact that we all kept getting sick. Her grandparents from Norway were here for 3 weeks at Christmas, which she enjoyed immensely. Now we’ve finally settled back into a routine. She’s going to school again twice a week, and we had no problems with that, although now she’s getting more and more reluctant to leave when I come to pick her up.

Her language skills have developed in leaps and bounds. The biggest sentence that we’ve counted was 9 words. She’s become an expert at riding her tricycle, and she can count to 20 (when she wants to). She’s showing signs of being able to differentiate letters, so I’ve been picking up my efforts to teach her ABCs and letters. As with all things, she can seem a little slow in catching on to things, but when she does learn how to do something, she masters it very quickly.

She knows lots of colors and shapes already, so I’m dreading the day that I decide she has to be moved to a different school. From what I understand, her current school won’t allow her to “graduate” to a different classroom until…I don’t really know when, honestly. She’s born late in the year, which causes extra problems. In short, I don’t think I’ll be happy with her school for that much longer, but she’s become attached to her teachers and friends, so moving her will be really difficult. On the other hand, I really don’t want to continue paying a lot of money for a school that’s only going to “teach” her things she already knows.

But before a move can even be considered, she has to be potty trained. No progress there. She has zero interest in the potty, and she still won’t tell us when she needs her diaper changed. They say there’s no point in pushing it before the kid is ready. Well, we’re up to size 6 nighttime diapers now and will probably start buying that size for daytime, too. And that’s the end of the road, folks. It’s the biggest diaper size you can get at the store. So she’d better be ready soon, because I refuse to be the parent that has to order oversize diapers on the Internet because my kid still doesn’t seem like she’s ready for potty training.

So that’s where we’re at. This week’s favorite quote: Amelia accidentally knocked over a glass of water on the coffee table. She gasped, turned to me and said, “Be careful, Mia Anna!”

by Bekke