Well the crib thing seems to be working so far. It’s not painless, there are definitely some tears when I lower her in even if she’s almost asleep, but either she’ll play for a little bit before getting tired and laying down (and crying) or if she’s really tired just a touch from me and she’ll fall asleep. For a kid who is normally nursed and cuddled and held tight while falling asleep just needing me to touch her on the head is a pretty big deal. I also did remove the mirror and piano from her crib, because during her nap today as she was falling asleep she caught sight of herself and started laughing. While hysterical to watch, it also woke her up and took me longer. So now just the little stuffed animal and blanket, in the hopes that she will (please, please) like one of them enough to become attached to it.

I’ve actually realized that her problem isn’t that she needs me as in I need mama nearby. No. She needs me in the same way my husband needs his pillow. Today in addition to removing crib toys I put in the crib bumper, since she likes scooting against the rails and kept hitting her head. Since I’m no longer worried about her suffocating (dude, she can walk, she’s not going to roll against the bumper and be unable to roll away), the bumper seems like a good idea for now. Well with the bumper up when I lay down on the futon mattress she can’t see me at all while she’s laying down in the crib. It didn’t matter. The past few nights I stuck my hand through the slats, under the bumper, and lightly touched her head as she fell asleep. That was all she needed, just that warmth and touch. She couldn’t see me, I didn’t say a word, and she didn’t come looking for me. Just needed my hand.

Like I said, it is not a tears-free zone. At her age I’m getting used to the little crying and whining, especially the I’m-tired cry. Even cosleeping there were many nights when she didn’t want to sleep and I’d have to hold her tight to get her body to shut off so she could sleep… much crying. So the little protesting cries, those don’t really bother me. It’s just the hysterical crying that I can’t handle. So, like always, I’m just going to feel my way through this. I pick her up when she gets hysterical, I shush her and rub her head when she’s crying, but I’m trying to let her figure it out.

Last night she only woke twice in 12 hours. That’s pretty damn amazing.

::

Does anyone have any articles or links pertaining to getting your child attached to a lovie/transitional object? Everything I’m finding at first glance is about why not to be worried when they are attached to something, blah blah blah. That’s fine. That’s great. I know all of that. What I can’t seem to figure out is how to convince Kate to find one. I have a couple of objects in her crib that are safe, acceptable lovies. She plays with them, then tosses them to the side. In months past I have tried holding the stuffed animal between us while she’s nursing, cuddling together with it…. she reacted by getting steadily more irritated and finally flinging the object away from her. WTF. There are no websites that cover this. I’m at a loss here.

So I am still stuck going in there every time she wakes up to touch her gently so she can go back to sleep. In the middle of the night often all it takes is a light touch on the top of her head. Other times I have to stick my hand in the crib so she can lay her head on my hand. (Yes, I lay there at a very awkward angle for a few minutes until she’s asleep). To get her to initially fall asleep she typically requires gripping my fingers. I am well aware that this is why she requires my attention multiple times a night, when she’s not hungry. But short of full CIO for several days (which I just don’t want to do) I just don’t know how to get her to accept anything but me!

Though, okay, I have to take a step back here. The past few days she has been doing remarkably well with this, needing my touch for a few seconds/minutes and then being fine without it as she falls all the way asleep. Tonight when I put her down she was very clingy. I just have to remind myself that progress is not a straight line, that there will be some back and forth. She also could have something (teeth) bothering her today… and her naps were crappy so she was really tired. Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

::

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here, but in the past few months since hitting my pre-pregnancy weight I have continued to lose. I’m probably around 125lbs now, which is a weight I haven’t seen since approximately 2003. It’s also about as low as I want to get, and with nursing I have to keep reminding myself to eat. I have had an issue with being underweight in the past… I started college at around 105lbs. I’m 5’6″. That is not a good weight for me.

Today I finally decided that I’ve had enough of my baggy jeans, it was time to replace them with something that actually fits me. Shopping with a 10 month walker is… interesting. Thankfully Kohls has changing rooms with no large gaps under the doors, so my little explorer could not escape. She had a fun time pushing the stroller around the limited space and giggling at herself in the mirror. Walking around the store while I picked out pants, however, not so much fun. She was irritated with sitting in the stroller and kept trying to grab clothes – to chew on, not try on. Out of the stroller she was much more happy but of course kept trying to wander off. And eat clothes. (What is it with clothes?!) Finally she settled for “helping” me push the stroller around. It took us approximately 10 minutes to go from one end of the store to the middle, but her giggles were well worth the delay.

I learned some valuable lessons about clothes after two babies. Jeans in the juniors section are so low-rise they show your crotch. Also they push the belly muffin up and out. Not attractive. Also the Juniors section size 5/6 is not the same as the Ladies size 6. I could barely get my ass into them, much less zip them up.

I ended up fitting nicely into a size 6 stretchy jeans by Lee. I like the stretchy. Okay, it’s still not quite stretchy enough when I sit down, but I’m not sure how to get around that particular problem. It either digs into the belly when I sit, is too loose when I’m standing, or it’s so low it creates a muffin top. Clearly I need to go back to pregnancy stretchy-waistband jeans. Why aren’t all jeans like that, again?

Last night was horrible. I was so tired and so frustrated and was willing to do anything to get Kate to sleep so I could sleep. I even brought her into bed with me – and it FAILED! She got up and started playing with the window shade. (Since the crib used to be side-carred next to the bed, now that it’s in her room our bed is pushed against a wall under a window.) She crawled over Den and I. She babbled. She fidgeted and wiggled and slapped me in the face. So back to the crib we went, and she was none too pleased. She wouldn’t sleep in my arms, wouldn’t sleep holding my hand, she wouldn’t even stay laying down.

Today she had a runny nose and was drooling, then I put two and two together and realized her teeth are bothering her. Duh. Can’t she just stay gummy forever? I really, really have a huge loathing for teeth.

::

Last night I was having a huge temper tantrum about the door to her room. You see, our house is an older house – not old, but built in the 50’s. It has a lot of cheap construction and creaky floors and doors that don’t quite close well. They close better when you lift the handle, but wood still scrapes wood. We never really thought much about it before we had a baby. It was just how the house was. In fact, when we were doing the floors and baseboards we decided to paint the doors to make them look nicer, seeing how they were an ugly, cheap-looking wood laminate. And they do look nicer, being a crisp white. But we didn’t take into account the effect paint would have on those doors that were already too tight for the door frames. Now not only do they scrape more, but the paint on the door and the paint on the frame stick together and make a lovely “pop” sound when you tug them apart. All of these seems kind of silly in a busy household with dogs and cats and babies running around. But in the dark of night when all is silent suddenly that POP-SCRAAAPPEEEE sounds like you just rung a giant gong right beside Kate’s crib. Even though she has white noise going in her room. At this point I’m fairly sure she has attuned her hearing to that sound of the door because she knows it means mommy is trying to sneak out. She sits bolt-upright and lets out a wail along the lines of someone pulling her arm off.

I wait what seems like an eternity in the dark, trying to ensure she’s asleep before trying to leave. On good nights it works just fine. I am starting to realize that teething makes her either not sleep very deeply or take roughly three hours to reach the “deep sleep” stage. Late last night at 2am I had spent hours trying to get her to fall asleep and for the third time I attempted to go to bed only to have have her wake up freaking out yet again I started to lose my shit just a little. I finally grabbed my droid and settled in for the night. Except she’s also light-sensitive and though there was silence I looked up to see two little fists gripping the crib slats and two tired eyes peering at me over the crib bumper.

This is why, had you walked into my house last night at roughly 3am, you would have found me in Kate’s room beside the crib with the comforter pulled over my head, posting curseword-laden angry posts on facebook from my droid.

This weekend we are taking a chisel and sander to that door because if it continues to wake her up several times a night it will not be pretty.

::

I’ve been ranting a lot about the frustrations of her sleep transition, but in reality when I look at it she’s doing remarkably well. She has three nights in a row of waking only twice at night, which is amazing for her. It’s still hard on me sleeping alone, but I look at her wiggling around and snuggling into her crib and I realize that she needed this. A friend today mentioned that her daughter moved to the crib at the same age for the same reason – they just needed their own space and stopped being cuddly and comfortable next to mom. Tonight when I put Kate down for bedtime she played with my fingers for a minute and then she let go, rolled over, and drifted off to sleep. Just like that. I watched her and felt so proud of her.

Of all the baby blankets we got in my two pregnancies (why do you always end with ten million baby blankets?) there were actually very few good ones for using in her crib. I have light flannel receiving blankets, which were well-used last summer when she was a newborn and just needed small something to keep the sun off; cotton thermal stretch receiving blankets, which were my favorites for wrapping her up (NOT swaddling, which she hated, but tucking around her for sleep); a couple fuzzy warm blankets which weren’t so much as touched until this winter when I was running around looking for something to keep her warm amidst all the snow and ice; and a couple of knit blankets which are excellent at being fur collectors. Her crib bedding did come with a pretty quilt, but it’s not exactly a soft snuggly kind of blanket. So I hopped on Etsy and found her a lovely pink and brown minky blanket. It arrived two days ago and I love it! It’s so soft and snuggly, and just the right size for her. I immediately wrapped her up in it and danced through the house with her. I’m using it throughout the bedtime routine, to keep her snuggled while we read her books and sway and sing a lullaby. She seems to like it. In fact the first night I saw her laying in her crib, touching it with her hands. Dare I have hope? (And if she ends up not wanting the blanket, I will steal it. I like it that much.)

It occurred to me that I have a little over a month until Kate’s birthday. This means I have a little over a month until I need to have her scrapbook done and printed out, as I really want to have it on display at her birthday party. Needless to say I’ve been spending all my spare time scrapping!

The crib sleeping has been going just fine, she’s actually really impressing me with how well she’s adapted. Unfortunately the teething is really rough right now – waking frequently, short naps, and today she had red cheeks and a 101 degree fever. She’s just miserable. She really doesn’t want to play with any of her toys right now, just walks straight to wherever I am, clings to my arm or leg, and whines until I pick her up. Then she tries nursing but isn’t hungry so she ends up gnawing on my nipple. I am less than pleased with that. No outright bites, but she’s testing the waters. And of course because of how sad she feels when I put the boob away she just bursts into snotty-nosed tears. :(

Holy shit. Kate got really tired, time for her nap, so I took her into her room with the lights off, nursed her, gave her the paci, then gently lowered her into her crib. She gave one little whimper, rubbed her eyes, rolled over, patted her crib bumper, and fell asleep. Just like that, without a word or a touch from me, I just stood there beside the crib and watched. That is SO full of awesome. She is totally getting it!

She also seems to be feeling better today, much less whining. I’m sure that won’t last, however.

Today found me sitting on the toilet, empty toilet paper roll beside me, scouting the room for a spare. I saw one on the far side of the bathroom. I almost always have a little bathroom spotter with me at all times now – I’ll say that I don’t mind the audience while I use the potty, it’s more the ice cold toddler hands gripping my thigh as I sit on the toilet that is unwelcome. So today as I surveyed the situation I looked at my little tagalong and figured I’d try teaching her a little fetch.

I pulled her close and stretched out my hand, “Look Kate! See the toilet paper! See it? Go get it!”

My some miracle she actually saw it and walked right over to it, the first time she’s ever seemed to understand the concept of pointing. I thought to myself, this is actually going to work!

But before I could start cackling Kate sat down before the toilet paper roll and started ripping little chunks off it. “Kate, come here! Kaatttteeee! Come to mommy! Bring it!” She looked at me with tired eyes and resumed poking the toilet paper roll.

Oh well, we’re halfway there.

::

Back when I bought my car I was pregnant with Devin and preparing to take care of a baby. We realized we needed a second vehicle; up until that point we were a one-vehicle family (now that I look back, I have no idea how we did that… though I didn’t leave the house much). It was only a year younger than our SUV, but had been driven a lot harder before we got it, had 101k miles on it. It wasn’t in bad shape, but it was well-used. I spent only $3500 on it. I picked it out myself with little to no input from Den, not because he didn’t care but because it was to be my car, the first vehicle I would ever have gone and bought by myself – in college I had a very old car that was given to me (an ’83 Plymouth Reliant k-car), and the SUV was purchased by Den with input from me before we got married. It wasn’t a perfect car, but it was mine.

2 1/2 years later I was pregnant with Kate, it was almost paid off, and we were realizing that logistically I ought to have the SUV, Denis the car for commuting. We swapped vehicles. I resisted the idea at first, mostly because I simply hate change and am very possessive of things, but the SUV works great for me. Mostly I felt bad for Den because he never really liked my car to start with and now it’s his vehicle! But it gets good mileage and it’s good enough.

Well that poor car has been slowly falling apart. We got the tires replaced last year, which we knew we needed to do and kept putting off. The antenna has never worked quite right so all music is at least a little fuzzy. I forget what else, but there have been many little things. Last week the check engine line came on and we stared at it with a sinking feeling. It’s never a good sign in a good car; in that car it could very likely be signaling the end. We have yet to take it in to get checked out, but Den reported that it was accelerating without help the other day. That’s, uhh, bad. We’ve had the, “How much money are we willing to put into this car?” discussion. We still don’t know an exact figure, but whatever the repair estimate is will hopefully tell us one way or another.

It’s clear that sooner rather than later we will be purchasing a new car. This time we’ll be getting a new or almost-new vehicle, the thought of which makes me excited, even though it won’t be a vehicle that I drive very often, if at all.

Not so excited about the payments, though.

::

Kate is teething hard and now has a yucky sounding cough…. since Den is sick I’m betting she’s getting what he has. Which means I’ll have it shortly. Bugger! Last night she just wouldn’t stay asleep for more than half an hour… we tried bringing her into our bed but again that was a massive FAIL. :( Apparently once she moved out that’s it, she can’t move back in. I did finally get her settled and asleep in her crib for a few hours, with me staying beside her on the futon. When she woke up in the middle of the night I brought her onto the futon with me. She’s just so sad. She’s been nursing constantly the last few days, and all last night too. If she’s getting sick then she needs the fluids.

I really can’t wait for her to feel better so we can get back on track. She’s been making such strides but I don’t push the envelope while she’s not feeling well (actually we tend to backslide a bit), but I’m okay with it since when she feels better she tends to pick up where she left off. The crib has clearly become the “sleep space” to her, she’s getting so very good at shutting off and falling asleep soon as I put her in it. Some days she’s even a little wound up still but after a few brief minutes of walking around her crib whining she lays down and goes to sleep. Yesterday’s morning nap I was right there waiting for her to get tired and I ended up falling asleep. I would have woken up if she had started crying, which is what I was expecting… instead I woke up half an hour later to find her fast asleep in the far corner from me, all I can figure is that she got tired, layed down, and fell asleep.

I have to say, though… for all the good progress we’ve made and how we’ll she’s taken to the crib, I am freaking exhausted. I love my bed, I’m even getting used to sleeping by myself again. But I hate having to drag my ass out of bed several times a night. It blows. Kate settles down very quickly when I go in there and lightly touch her (on normal nights, not last night), but it still takes her a few minutes to fall soundly asleep so that I can leave again, meanwhile I’m either falling asleep on the futon or getting a back ache from leaning over the top of the crib. Then my heart pounds as I creep out, terrified she’s going to sit up and cry. Cosleeping is SO much easier. Maybe I should have moved Kate to her crib a month or two earlier when she started having troubles sleeping, but I certainly wouldn’t have done it before then. I look forward to cosleeping again with my next one. (Hopefully Kate will be sleeping mostly through the night by then. But at that point Kate will be Den’s problem at night!)

Last week I spent some time with a friend of mine who has several children. We were talking about sleep – or the lack thereof – and commiserating about the frequent trips into the nursery to calm the crying baby back to sleep. Being that this is the third child she has raised she was very zen about it. The topic of sleep training and CIO came up and in our short discussion she said very simply with a smile, “The thing about sleep training is that it works.”

That one thought and her whole attitude has really stuck with me. Almost everyone I have talked to has had one of two opinions: either that crying it out and sleep training works and is the only efficient, successful method at raising a good sleeper; or, on the flip side, that letting a child cry is harmful, dangerous, and unnecessary. Not everyone is judgmental or condescending about it, of course. But people can get very passionate about this subject and tend to fall in one camp or the other.

Then here was this experienced mother who was neither. She’d done it before, and clearly her child was just fine. It worked great. At the same time, for whatever reasons, she is choosing to not do it for this child. Maybe she felt it didn’t mesh with the child’s personality, maybe her parenting style has changed, maybe a lot of things. She didn’t seem to have any mixed feelings or regret or conflicted perspective about it. She gets up often, but that’s okay.

She is one of those mothers that look up to, about whom I say to myself, Yes, that. That’s how I want to be. And it’s things like this that I am clearly a first time mother, when everything feels just so damn important.

I’ve been keeping her words and attitude in mind and I’ve been feeling a lot less stressed over the situation. Bad nights can be really overwhelming – the lack of sleep crankies make the immediate present feel far more important than anything else. But really there are going to be hard nights and hard days. There is sickness, there is teething, there are parties that mess up naps and travel that doesn’t work out as planned. But there are also good days. There is progress. Every day that Kate falls asleep peacefully in her crib I remind myself how amazing it is to even be at this point, just having her sleep in her crib felt like such a pipe dream a month ago. Even if sleeping through the night is still a long ways away, even if I’m still spending half the night on the mattress on her floor. One day this will all be past and it really won’t matter how we got there.

::

Kate is 11 months old. She’s walking – almost running, at times. She’s climbing, she’s figuring things out, she’s eating finger food and doing nursing gymnastics. She has an opinion, she has a personality, she is this whole person emerging from within. It’s amazing and wonderful and yet, yes, a little sad too. She’s still the same person who slept on my chest, small and squished and sighing contentedly. It’s so strange seeing her change day by day, without you really being aware of it until suddenly you realize you’re a long way from where you started.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about this idea of a future sibling. That’s always been the plan. Not three months ago I was panicking at the thought of having another child and was telling Den that maybe we should push the idea back another year. Now suddenly my baby is in her own room, my baby isn’t so much a baby anymore. I’ve been looking at newborns feeling that twinge of “I want.” Not right now, mind you, but… someday. Someday sooner rather than later.

My cycle still hasn’t returned yet – for which I am thankful. Others online in Kate’s playgroup are actively trying and getting pregnant and I feel that familiar wistfulness. Wouldn’t be nice if we could just do it like that? It be so much simpler. It would be so normal. I am thankful I don’t have my cycle back for two reasons. I know that even though I know by all the logic and statistics in this world that my chance of getting pregnant naturally is .00001% it’s still not zero. I know that no matter how much I try to ignore timing and cycles and expected periods that I cannot let it go. I will once again be watching, wondering what if. If I were actually cycling that would be different. But the waiting to do IVF, the natural cycles when I will not get pregnant, I will still feel the sting of disappointment every month. It’s been so very lovely to not have to deal with that for the past 20 months. And the other reason? Because everyone else will be hoping for a surprize. Right now whenever anyone says the dreaded, “You never know!” I can quickly point out that my cycles have not returned so there is zero chance, and the topic is over. It’s nice not feeling the need to go into the explanation about one tube, immature eggs, and many, many cycles when nature has been very clear that I do not get pregnant easily – even with IVF.

It’s not that I don’t believe I will get pregnant again – I actually am very sure that I will. I just am very sure it will require IVF, and I don’t know how many transfers it will take.

Our plan right now is to do a transfer around January – we have one frozen embryo left. But there’s a lot of ducks we need to get in a row in order to accomplish that, namely getting insurance coverage (Den’s insurance no longer covers IVF at all). If I were convinced the FET would work I’d just pay out of pocket for it… but I’m not. Here in MA I think most insurance companies will cover 6 retrieval cycles, lifetime… at least, that is what my last insurance policy said. I’ve done 5 to date. It will cost us several thousand dollars to get the insurance, and then another 2 or 3 thousand deductable, but then if the FET doesn’t work we’ll have a retrieval covered, along with any subsequent FETs. It’s a bit of a gamble. I need to go over the numbers and figure out what my options are for insurance and confirm what they really do cover, then figure out if they have specific open season and when coverage would start. We’d only be doing this for one year, so we’d have to make it all count.

Give me another year, then I think I’ll be ready to have another to care for.

Well you guys gave me a lot of excitement when you told me that most insurance in MA covers 6 cycles of IVF *per live birth*. Here I’ve been running on the assumption that I had 6 total per lifetime, and we’ve done 5 retrievals so far. Another whole 6 cycles is crazy! That actually guarantees us another child when we decide to push forward (as much as there is any guarantee from these things, but given my track record I should be able to have a sticky pregnancy after 2 or 3 cycles).

However I ran across another glitch in the plan. I was planning on buying my own insurance, since I’m not working and Den has only the options that the military offers him (none of them include IVF, I diligently check every year). I had hoped that I could get insurance through the non-profit I was working for, but they can only offer insurance to full time employees; I was part time, and they can’t afford to hire me full time. I ended up dropping the few hours a week I was working, as trying to either coordinate with Den to watch Kate so I could go in for 5 hours or taking her in with me was more stress than the few hours of pay were worth.

Individual insurance is expensive, but we’ve been saving to pay for a year. I checked out options that I know include IVF – BCBS of MA, which is actually who I was insured through when I had a job. Their rates are doable, everything looked good. Except at the end they mentioned something about requiring prior medical records. And now I’m freaking out just a little. If they consider infertility a pre-existing condition they could simply deny me, especially since I already have insurance available through my husband (which is also BSBS, but federal). If I were an insurance company weighing cost/benefit I’d look at all my IVF cycles and realize this girl is probably going to cost me a lot of money.

I know there are new laws going into effect about pre-existing conditions, but I don’t know what that encompasses or when they go into effect.

If that’s the case we’re pretty much screwed. We can afford to do a FET with our remaining frozen embryo out of pocket, but after that… Last time I got a job to get the insurance coverage, but now that I have Kate I’m not willing to do that.

Den just keeps saying, “We’ll figure it out when we get there.” I hate it when he says that.

::

Now that Kate’s teeth aren’t bothering her for the moment she’s back to her happy, active, and funny self. She was hilarious all weekend, Den and I were laughing so hard!

She just figured out that she can put objects inside other objects. One of the toys we have really encouraged her with that concept: it’s a gumball machine. I got it for free when I bought her push-walker, it looked interesting enough. She’s always loved hitting the lever so the balls can roll out the bottom, but I always had to sit there putting them back in. Last week I noticed her reaching up with a ball clenched in her hand and dropping it haphazardly into the top. She pushed the lever, retrieved, the ball, and did it again. It’s kind of silly how excited I got when I saw her do that. Well since then she’s been experimenting, dropping balls, blocks, socks and the remote control in the gumball machine. The others don’t work so well. She is also now dropping things into laundry baskets and waste baskets, so we’re going to have to be careful… we’re going to start losing more objects than we already do.

Her balance and stability or her feet have improved tremendously, though she still does walk kind of monkey-like with her arms up most of the time. But she’s getting faster; I daresay she’s almost running (well, a toddler-run). One day I was down on the floor and I banged my hands on the floor and said, “Rawr!” and she walked away from me giggling. Now it’s her favorite game, she’ll walk over to me trying to tempt me into chasing her. She now puts her hands in the air and runs away, shrieking and laughing as I stomp after her. Her laughter is the best sound in the world.

This weekend she has been loud. She likes to experiment with her voice, sure, and she babbles often, but it was like she combined the two this weekend by babbling really really loudly all the time. Just a lot of gibberish, but all kinds of sounds. Still no words yet, but I feel like she’s getting close to making that mental leap.

I’ve always been big into cuddling, and it’s become a major point of reconnection for Kate and I. She’ll be playing with her toys while I sit on the floor watching a show on the TV and she’ll walk over to me, climb onto my lap, and lay her head on my chest. I kiss her cheeks and rub her back and give her snuggles and then she wiggles down to go play with toys again. I love it.

From the outside it sounds so boring when parents are excited about these minor details that their children have done. Identified colors. Drew a picture. Said a word. What’s the big deal? But when it’s your own kid and you’ve seen them turn from a tiny helpless creature to a crazy, able-bodied human being with thought processes and a mind of their own it’s just… amazing. It’s so crazy watching their brains learn all of these new things, becoming little people.

Having a child is forcing me to not only eat healthier but to consider eating foods I never would have thought to before.

To back up a bit, let me tell you a little about Kate’s transition to solids. I didn’t follow true “baby-led solids” (which avoids all purees), but I also didn’t follow the traditional progression of purees either. I find the purees easy for those fruits and veggies that are annoying to cook or simply not available – having a baby starting solids in the middle of winter kind of limits you to the crap selection in the grocery store. I love using fresh ingredients but the stuff bought in winter in the grocery store goes bad within days in my fridge. So, yes, we did purees, but I tried to always have finger foods available at every meal and opted for fresh if possible.

With food, as with everything else, I really followed Kate’s lead. I offered things, let her taste if she wanted to (which she always did), and put it away if she was done. At first a meal was only tastes of finger foods and maybe 1/3 of a jar of pureed food. At around 8 months old she started getting excited about food and wanting more. She’s tried a large variety of foods and liked most of them. (The exceptions being the jars of carrots, peas and green beans. She HATED peas!) For the first few months she insisted on grabbing the spoon to feed herself. It was messy, and very slow. But she really got a kick out of it and I’m all for enjoying the experience of food. Curiously she stopped doing that at around 9.5 months, as apparently she was too slow for her own liking.

In addition to following her lead I also always strive to lead by example. I tried to always offer her some version of what I was eating. If I had cereal for breakfast, she got cheerios. If I had a grilled cheese, she got cheese and bread. She started off with just the simple versions of things and now she’s eating pretty much what we eat, just cut or torn into small pieces. I waited a while to introduce meats, but it turns out she LOVES meat. (Not the jarred stuff… I seriously couldn’t handle feeding her that, it made me gag. So I waited long enough until I felt she was ready for shredded chicken). She goes crazy for chicken, loves pork tenderloin, ground beef (in tacos)… pretty much anything we give her she dives into, ignoring everything else on her tray.

I wanted her to eat a lot of fruits and veggies, so I started eating more – which helped encourage her, and helped me use up the fruit! I snack on fruits while I’m cutting hers up, and then we both eat together. Luckily I love fruits. Veggies we’re having issues, since I hate most cooked veggies and she’s not ready for raw veggies yet. We’re eating a lot of squash and sweet potato, favorites to both of us. Dairy was never a problem, cheese quickly became a favorite and she seems to like her yogurt and cottage cheese too. Eggs she seems good with and lets me cook a bunch of different things for breakfast. (The AAP is no longer recommending delaying the introduction of possible allergenic foods such as eggs and peanut butter, at least for children of parents who do not have food allergies)

Talking to other people about foods their babies love I’m realizing there are a lot of foods out there that I have never tried. Pretty much any type of bean (black, garbonzo, navy, etc), lentils? Never tried them. Couscous? Quinoa? Nope. And there’s a large array of veggies and even some fruits. Today I tried kiwi for the first time. (Not sure why, but I’ve never had kiwi before. I guess I don’t trust green fruits.)

I don’t really cook much. I have meals that I make, but they’re pretty limited given my tastes (read: very bland and unadventurous). I really dislike trying new recipes because 9 times out of 10 and I won’t like it, which leaves me feeling like I wasted my time and also have no dinner to eat. But here I am, looking up recipes to try to incorporate these new and interesting (weird) foods, because I want Kate to experience them. Maybe, since I’m finding toddler-approved recipes, I’ll have more luck finding something I will eat.

I’ve noticed Kate’s been making a lot of mental connections lately. She knows several words – doesn’t say anything, but knows what they mean. “Kitty,” “Book,” “Daddy,” “Yay!” (she claps), and most recently, “Eat.” She also knows her name. I’ve started doing some signs again here and there, so when it’s time for a meal or when I think she is hungry I squat down in front of her and say, “Kate, do you want to eat?” and make the sign for eat. She now gets a big grin on her face and today she leaned forward and put her arms up so I could pick her up to put her in her highchair. I don’t yet have a sign for sleep and I need to start something. Right now when she’s tired she lays her head on my chest, and when she wants to nurse she tugs my shirt up. I was doing the sign for “milk” with her months ago, but when she started experimenting with her fingers everyone thought she was waving and I didn’t feel like confusing her or walking around correcting everyone she meets so I just left it for now.

In addition to putting blocks back into buckets she’s now dropping things in everything. Today in our recycling bin I found a paci, easter egg, and two magnets. Her pacis have been going “mysteriously” missing and I’m finding them in garbage bins, laundry bins, buckets, boxes… we’re going to have to start screening the garbage.

She’s started pushing her little train around, which is ridiculously adorable.

In the bath she realized she can lift her ball toy and water sprinkles out the holes. She’s not quite sure how it works yet, sometimes she tries lifting it before submerging it, but she’s trying to figure it out.

We have magnets on our fridge and she loves pulling them all off. Today as I was making my dinner I look over and she’s sitting there pressing the magnets onto the fridge. Suddenly it just clicked that she can put them up there. Of course half the time they fell right off because they were backwards, which puzzled her. I needed to feed her dinner but I didn’t want to interrupt her!

Did I mention the xbox incident? She likes to play with the controller and a couple of weeks ago she inadvertently purchased some game add-on download. We try keeping it away from her, we gave her the second controller with batteries removed, and that worked for a little while. But now she knows that our controller does things to the TV screen. I loaded up Lego Star Wars and let her push buttons the other day. She’s now actually holding the controller properly, using her thumbs to push buttons and move the stick. She was actually moving the character around the screen and jumping. That’s kind of crazy. She had a great time with it…. until she started pushing the xbox button and somehow managed to escape the game and nearly purchase a 19.99 game while I was checking my email. Gah. And the child lock doesn’t lock out purchases, which is assinine. Apparently we have to create an account for her that has no access to billing information!