2 months until 2 years old!

Kaylee has learned to skip and now skips all around the house, and yesterday she skipped down the hall when we were leaving daycare. It is so fun to watch her acquire new, small skills that are just so fun for her, and even more fun for us to watch & laugh at.

Kaylee ate ice cream at her Grandma's birthday party and she loved it, and it stayed down! I am so happy for her sake, because a life without ice cream just isn't good! :) Her allergies are improving so much, she's had peanut butter now. She loved it so much she sucked the peanut butter off the graham cracker! And with no redness or anything on her face. We've noticed they still limit Kaylee quite a bit at daycare with her diet, like instead of giving her a chocolate chip muffin for snack like the other kids, she got a graham cracker. So we've been telling them, give her the muffin, the cookie, whatever - it's fine! She is already benefitting! The daycare is requiring us to go into the dr. again, and have the allergy form re-filled out.

Kaylee has not breastfed for about 2 weeks now and still continues to ask. I wonder when she will just forget about it, because it's been a while now! I've explained to her "You're a big girl now. You can play games, and skip, and dance - being a big girl means you don't have to nurse anymore." But my little angel just really loves it and seems to miss it. Hopefully her memory will fade soon...

Kaylee loves to wrestle, she does with her Daddy and now I have learned how to do it too. It's so cute the way she wrestles and gets so excited. She continues to try to do a somersault on her own - she is close, but goes off to the side when she tries.

Kaylee can now say detailed and long sentences like, "I want to make a tower now, Mommy." and "I like to see the fish eating dinner." She does a pretty good job with "I" and "You" and still tries to use conjunctions... in the most part, correctly. She's amazing. But she still resorts at times to jargoning when she wants to just babble. I like listening for clues on what she's saying. Sometimes there are real words mixed in, and I love her enthusiasm during her stories! We encourage her to continue her stories, with a "really" or "is that right?" even though we have no idea what she's talking about. She is very good at asking for what she wants, "Daddy, pick me up!" or "That's my toy." Short, directive sentences are not a problem at all.

Kaylee's sleep seems to directly relate to how much food she eats for dinner. 3-4 nights in a row when she had the ear infection, she didn't eat much and woke up at least once in the night. The last 3 nights, she ate a good dinner and slept through the night.

Kaylee seems suddenly to dislike taking a bath. She used to go in no problem but now cries and insists she wants to get out. Usually after a few minutes, she calms down, plays & enjoys it like her usual self.

I don't want to stop here, because I know there's something cute I'm missing that has to do with her new interactions with her Daddy. It's bugging me I can't remember. Hopefully will post more about it later.

Take care all.

Oh my goodness I see her Daddy posted finally! As you can see, she’s on the road to recovery! She weighed 23 lbs 7 oz at the doctor.

I just noticed that Kaylee’s memory is getting longer. She asked for a toy that she hadn’t seen or played with for a month that was in the car, and had been out of her sight. That’s amazing to me.

Kaylee likes to interact with the infants at daycare. She sits down near them and pats their little hands. She thought Eric’s friend’s 5 mo old was hilarious in her Jenny Jump-up. It was so cute to see her so excited and interested by them.

Kaylee can count to ten but always skips 8, and when she starts to re-count she starts at 3 for some reason. She starts it by saying “Count-down” something she must have picked up from daycare. She’s picked up a few other things from daycare, when I bring her to the changing table and she’s in the process of a change. She says, “Eww, Icky, Poopy, Yucky!”, always in the same order as if she’s heard it over and over again.

The other day when I picked her up from daycare she was playing with a girl who was probably about a year older, and much taller. The girl and her were doing tug-of-war for some play food and dishes. I just stood back and let Kaylee fend for herself. I did remind both girls gently to share, but they were in their own little world. She is quite feisty when she wants to maintain her toys, and put up a good fight. But the other girl did eventually win out, and took the little toy pizza away and as soon as Kaylee found another toy, the girl was on top of her again. I just let Kaylee fight it out for herself, figuring this was a life skill to learn. How to fight for what you want and to learn that sometimes it’s just too bad and the bigger kid may win out. Helga came over after a while to break it up, telling the older girl to share and be nice.

Kaylee is doing pretty well at sleeping through the night. She does it about 4 days a week, maybe more. She is now (I think, and hope) totally weaned from breastfeeding. She does still ask for it but will accept a bottle instead.

I’ve been working at a children’s hospital for my architectural work. It puts things into perspective for me on how lucky we really are, seeing all the kids with disabilities, in wheelchairs, burned…I feel for those families and see how strong they are, and what they’ve had to endure…and I appreciate how fortunate we are. Yesterday when I was at a meeting, someone had a seizure right outside the door of the room. It was shocking, unsettling and again, eye-opening…it’s nice to be relatively healthy and worry-free. The woman was a family member of a patient and was just visiting…she is going to be okay, the hospital was a good location for it to happen. Thank goodness for doctors and medical professionals. I am glad I am not one of them, my response is more of the “flee” response, thank goodness for those “fighters.”

Take care everybody and stay healthy in this cold weather! Yay for the weekend!

First one ear, then the other.

We found out the other day that Kaylee now has an ear infection in her other ear. The doctor told us that we'd need to switch antibiotics as she picked up this second ear infection while taking the first.

The good news in all of that is two fold.

1. The new stuff she only has to take for 5 days, and we're stopping the old stuff, so she won't have to be taking antibiotics for any longer stretch of time.

2. She actually likes the flavor of this one, no throwing up, no fighting or screaming, so it's a lot easier to get her to take her medicine. (and it's only once a day instead of twice)

She's acting a lot better now and slept fairly well last night, so hopefully she'll be back to her old self soon.

-E

I DO IT!

There has been so much going on...work has been busier after the holidays! Anyways, Kaylee's been up to a lot of things:

She has been having a lot of interest in dressing herself. She takes off all her clothes, even the diaper (yikes!) and wants to sit on the potty. But when she starts to go she is too surprised, she jumps up and begs for her diaper to be back on. Not sure maybe one of these days soon she'll just go in the potty. We have to put a limit on how long she tries because she would sit in there forever if we let her - she does want Mom and Dad in there for company. So we've had to hide the potty a few times too after some tantrums resulting in telling her potty time is over. Like I said, she wants to dress herself. This is not so fun. She can't do it, and won't let me help or teach her how. She pushes me away and says, "No Mama! I DO IT!" There've been a lot of tantrums when we have to draw the line and say, "You've tried for 10 minutes now it's time for Mommy or Daddy to help you. It's cold - we need to wear clothes!" The morning routine has been lengthened again by about 1/2 hour to deal with this desire of hers to try to dress herself.

Kaylee got sick and was sent home from daycare day before yesterday. I took her to the doctor and she does have an ear infection, and is on antibiotics to clear it up. The doctor visit was a nightmare, she cried constantly and then when we picked up the meds at Target she cried so hard all the customers turned to see what was happening. She weighed 23 lbs 12 ounces. After being treated for about 48 hours, we've seen an improvement. The stuff makes her sick to her stomach, so there's been vomiting. But yesterday was better than the day before, 10 days still seems like a long time to think we've got to do the medicine. She seems to get slightly ramped up from the medication too, and has been up in the middle of the night chattering away stories to us for over an hour. Today I think it's okay for her to go back to daycare. Her nose is running like a faucet and her cough is pretty bad, so I feel guilty doing it...we'll see...My mom had tons of fun watching Kaylee yesterday while I went to work. She played watercolors with Kaylee, read her stories and let her watch a bit of Sesame Street which Kaylee had never seen before. She was very excited to see Elmo in action. Oh no, the debut of TV in her world? Even before exposure, it's amazing - she can recognize Elmo, Ernie, Minnie and Mickie Mouse.

Kaylee can almost do a somersault! I've been helping her do it on the floor, an activity she really loves. She also loves when I make her stand on her hands - she giggles a lot. She can almost do it herself, but ends up tipping and rolling to one side, more of an over-the-shoulder roll.

Kaylee loves to sing her own songs. She likes to sing a long song that she makes up, jumping from Jingle Bells, Twinkle Twinkle, and the ABCs all jumbled up together. Her singing voice is the sweetest thing I've ever heard other than her laughter.

Kaylee has been more aware of the time lately, and knows when it's time for us to pick her up at daycare. Each day about 1/2 hour before we're due to get there, she starts asking for us.

Another Mom in daycare asked me if I wanted to join her in parent-child swim classes with her and her daughter. We will be doing that in February. We bought her a cute new swimsuit. I'm worried Kaylee will be scared of the water, like she has been in the past. But that's what it's about...exposure. And with us having a pool, we really need to teach her to swim so we can use the thing once in a while!

Kaylee is continuing to eat pretty well. We are down to giving her half bottles when we give them, sometimes this comes with a protest from our sweetie. We're trying to cut out the night-feedings though. We went out for pizza last night, got 1/4 with no cheese, and she loved the pizza. She was taking huge bites and a pace like ours!

Take care everyone. Keep healthy if you can in this cold. (MN has so much snow that the mailboxes barely peep out from the mound at the sides of the road, and a person walking on a sidewalk looks like a floating head!)

I know some moms are checking my site to see how Kaylee has been sleeping after the efforts adding crying-it-out to our routine. My report is that I haven't been a stickler and done this in a purist way, but she is now sleeping through the night about 3-4 nights out of the week. We consider this a huge improvement. Now we are going to ramp down the amount in her bottles to wean her from night-time bottles. Eric is very actively involved now in helping put her down and if I've had it, I leave the room and he helps stay with her, talking to her and helping her to fall asleep without picking her up. This is very nice for me and I end up getting a little more rest or time to myself - either one is much needed...

Kaylee has been able to jump with two feet off the floor for about a month now. She can also walk on her knees - which she thinks is a really cool trick. She also likes to play hairstylist or manucurist with us. She takes a paper clip and pretends to cut our fingernails. We have to keep telling her to be gentle. She also likes to think she can put a ponytail in mommy's hair and likes to try that out.

Kaylee has lately been eating foods in combination with each other. If you follow Kaylee's story, we all know how she's a bit slow on the whole eating thing. She now has eaten chili, eggrolls and cereal with soymilk. Each one I am just completely rejoicing in her ability to experiment and be more open to foods. It's very very encouraging and is opening a lot of doors. She has also started to enjoy drinking naked juices which is a nice way to get fruits into her. She continues to love to sit on her Daddy's lap for the most part of her meals. Before he sits down, she sits happily on her booster seat and then when he arrives, she wants promptly to move and sit with him. I asked Eric if he wants us to work on this and he said he's enjoying that special time with Kaylee. She eats more with him as a good role model. Seems to be working for everyone...

Kaylee has really enjoyed playdoh. I've found it's an excellent thing to do right before naptime since it seems to really wear her out. She goes down quickly and happily.