Friday, September 14, 2012

14 Months

Josie has been especially fun this month, except for a period in the middle when she was quite moody for a few days. I think she was cutting a tooth at the time though, so any moodiness was quite understandable. She now has five teeth, and another tooth on the top about to come through (although anytime I think she's "about" to cut a tooth, it still seems to take several weeks before it actually happens!).

Josie now crawls almost exclusively "like a normal" - she still scoots on occasion, but I think she finally realized that it's much quicker (and less labor-intensive) to crawl on her hands and knees now. She has gotten very quick with going up the stairs, although she's not too great about coming back down again... granted, that's probably because she doesn't really want to come back down. She knows the main floor well enough by now, and would much rather explore the upstairs, which has the office (which is filled with awesomeness (i.e., electronics), so we usually immediately pull her out of there), the bathroom (that has a toilet to play with! ugh), her nursery (that she has never slept in, but has plenty of books!), and our bedroom (which has an super fun air filter that she can turn on and off!). Clearly, far more exciting than the main floor :)


[Breaking free from the living room]

Although Josie is normally pretty entertained by her toys, she rather suddenly got markedly more into them. She seems to want to play more, harder, and with a purpose.... which only seems to make sense to her, but has been fascinating for us to watch :) Lately, she has been loving her ball popper, puzzles, books (well, usually just two of them), and her blocks. After barely touching her blocks for weeks, she picked them up the other day and immediately stacked them three high. I'm not sure when/where she picked that up, but we were excited about that development :) 
[Dancing to her ball popper]
[Stacking some blocks]

Along with her regular baby toys, Josie also continues to enjoy her more unconventional toys: credit cards (since we have a bunch of inactive cards lying around due to all of the fraud we've had the last few months), remotes, paint swatches, and band-aids.... all of which she helpfully puts away so that we find the oddest things behind the couch cushions or in bags now.  She also loves my water bottle, especially since we play a game with it called "Baby Hand No!" where she puts the top on and off the bottle while we both say "off" and "on" (or at least something resembling those words, for Josie) as appropriate, and then she'll change things up every once in a while by trying to put her hand in the bottle. I swat it away and say "baby hand no!" which she inexplicably finds hilarious.
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[Josie with her always-present credit card and remote]
[Putting the credit card away behind the couch cushion]
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[Band-aid boxes make good rattles]

She also started using walkers, and has gotten remarkably adept at them within just a day or two. Although she couldn't figure out how to steer them at first (leading to her yelling at us as soon as she neared any walls), she now can get around corners and get herself turned around when she gets boxed in. Josie has been quite funny about pillows and other miscellaneous soft objects that can stand in as pillows (she's not too picky). I've been putting her in her playard with some toys while I get ready for work in the mornings, and one day I went into the nursery to see that Josie had arranged her stuffed turtle just so, and then laid down on it so she could kick her toy drum more comfortably. I can only imagine the amount of baby concentration and contortions that went into that arrangement, and I'm seriously amused by just the thought :)
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[Just lounging around on her giant bird pillow]
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[Before she learned how to focus / steer]

Josie has been doing more on her own lately, which is really cool to see her trying to do things for herself, but also a pain since she doesn't exactly appreciate it when we take her away from whatever activity she's currently doing. So now instead of being super excited for me to pick her up at daycare, she's now mainly excited since she gets to show off her walking. But then she cries and gets very upset with me when I pick her up to take her to the car (since it's not too convenient to hold her hand/try to keep her from falling and carry all her other stuff at the same time, in heels), so that's not too fun. While she has helped feed herself with utensils before (with her holding onto the spoon as we guide it around), she's been able to scoop up some of her food and feed herself a few times now. She also very helpfully tried to plug my laptop power cord back in when she tripped over it and pulled it out of the wall - it's amazing how quickly I can move when properly motivated ;)

We're finally routinely putting shoes on her now, which she loooves. Oh my, she loves her little shoes. I think she really likes feeling like a big girl with getting to wear shoes, and she gets to participate now when we're all putting our shoes on in the mornings...  but she gets so upset in the evenings when I take them off - despite me showing her that I take my shoes off too :) She's not convinced that's necessary, and tries to give me back her shoes to put them back on. In other amusing behavior, she mimicked Ryan the other day when he was doing push-ups. She laid down on the floor right next to him, but baby push-ups apparently only involve pushing her chest off the floor and then kicking. Oh, and lots of cuteness.

I'm pretty sure she has a few words now that she's using on her own, not just parroting us when we say them. So Josie says "hi" or (adorably) "hiya!" now, mainly when she's in her car seat and trying to look back at me over the seat. She also likes to say "no"... a lot. She apparently yelled "no, no, no!" and shook her finger at the other babies at daycare. Oy. She's still not as mobile as most of the other babies, so I guess that's her best defense at the moment for when the other kids take her toys. She also yelled "na na na" towards the door and what sounded suspiciously like an attempt at "daddy" when Ryan came home last week and I asked her where daddy was.
 
[Na na na - high five!]

For food-related changes, she is now fully weaned and we all survived. After refusing to drink her cow's milk bottles last month, Josie has since gotten over that and seems to be fine with it now. I'm still mixing frozen milk in with her bottles for probably the next month or two (until we run through my frozen stash) so she can continue getting some of the benefits of my milk for a little while longer, but I am done nursing and pumping as of the end of August. I have been working through my short list of things I had been looking forward to having for the last couple of years, and while Mountain Dew was a bit of a disappointment (it just made me feel crappy although that may have been because I was taking advantage of free refills at the time), it is nice to have a beer again on occasion, and chai lattes taste just as delicious as I remember them being :)  I'm just drinking them in much smaller quantities than I used to.

Ryan had his work picnic a couple of weeks ago, and Ryan pulled Josie out of daycare for a couple of hours and they had a lot of fun together. I attempted to go, but due to a Google maps snafu, I ended up at an apartment parking deck half an hour away from the picnic location, so I had to give up and head back to work :( But Josie was very excited to see the animals they had there, and rode a pony, got a super cute caricature done, and then ate three pieces of watermelon all on her own (and refused to eat anything other than watermelon). She also got her leg painted with a watermelon, naturally. So perhaps needless to say, she still is a huge fan of watermelon. She has also been on a mushroom kick lately, so I think if she had her way, she would only eat mushrooms and watermelon for every meal.

Miscellaneous cuteness:
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Wednesday, September 5, 2012

We Have a House!

...actually, we've had a house for almost two weeks now - I'm just behind!  The house has been remarkably time-consuming, especially given that our main responsibilities right now are buying stuff... next week we should be painting and laying floors though.  And I haven't taken any new pictures of the house in the last week, so we may as well pretend that I posted this a week ago since this is already out-dated ;)

So, where we last left off with the house stuff, we had the foundation in place and were waiting on the rest of the house to be manufactured at the factory.  The house delivery date was August 23rd, and set date was the next day.  So on the 23rd, the house made it just fine on its trip from Pennsylvania (on five trucks, each with an escort of two vehicles - we roll deep, apparently!)... but then it took four hours to maneuver all of the trucks down our road and into the driveway.  For good reason - the trucks were long (the longest truck/trailer was over 90 feet!) and our driveway and the roads back by our house are pretty narrow.


My first view of our (shrink-wrapped) house:

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[It was a tight fit!]

August 24, 2012: our house set date.  Ryan and I had both taken the day off work, so we sent Josie off to daycare (other kids are more fun to her than watching a giant house puzzle getting put together) and then went to see how our house was doing.  Ryan got there a bit before me, but by time I got there, they had already set the first box.
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[Checking out part of our closet, the kitchen and dining room] 
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[A rather unusual view of our dining room and hallway (and a doorway to nowhere, but what will be to Josie's room) and our basement/garage, all at the same time :)]
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[Dropping the bonus room into place]
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[The first item in our pantry ;)]


 

[Setting the third box in place] P1080984 
[The upper floor prepped to be lifted into place]
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[Just missing the top floor now!]
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[Lifting half of the upstairs into place]
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[Ryan keeping an eye on the box being spun around]
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[Spinning around the last box]
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[About to drop the final box into place]


I'm only posting a couple of inside shots, because as I went through the pictures, I realized pictures of many empty, unfinished rooms probably aren't that exciting.  But if you're interested in seeing said pictures, feel free to click through the Pictures link to the right :)

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[The room of many names: bonus room / sun room / family room / our likely soon-to-be favorite room]
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[Kitchen (with the holes/doorways for the laundry and pantry on the left]
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[The state of the house as of August 25th - bolted together, the roof mostly done, and plenty of work still to go :)]