Kate is just so amazing. She’s growing into quite the little girl, I must say. I love watching her, studying her, taking her in.

I love how she sits on the floor flipping through her board books, touching the pictures and babbling english-sounding toddler nonsense at them. She does not eat her books at all anymore, and she deftly flips pages one by one using her thumbs. I remain very excited that books are among her favorite toys in the house. Three series I really recommend are the Priddy Books Bright Baby, the Usborne Books That’s Not My… series, and Scholastic’s Baby Faces.

The skill she is currently working on quite a bit is the in-and-out. She loves her bucket of blocks – a simple toy, nothing fancy, but she plays with those blocks every day. A toy we have that I didn’t intend to get but have found very high on her list of favorites is this gumball machine. She loves putting the balls in the top and watching them come out the bottom! She just got some nesting cups for the pool (bath toys) and she was fascinated with those. Just today I saw her trying to stack some blocks for the first time! So exciting watching her figure new things out.

Music toys are, as usual, some of the best shit ever. I am going to use some of her birthday money to get this set of musical instruments. We have electronic music things, like a little “guitar” and a small piano, but she really likes the small instruments she plays with at our local playgroup… egg shakers and tambourines and the like. I’m pretty sure she’ll have a blast with a drum.

Kate is a very sturdy walker now, bordering on running at times. Her absolute favorite pasttime is pushing things. Toys, chairs, boxes – whatever is in her way will get pushed. My living room gets rearranged on a daily basis. For her birthday she got a shopping cart and she’s been pushing that around, as well as her musical push walker. She’s always so proud of herself too, giving me her big wrinkly-nose grin as she walks past pushing something.

Our kitties are still her best friends – at least in her mind. A couple of weeks ago, upon waking in the morning, she walked out of her room right up to one of the cat, put her finger out, and said clearly, “KIH-GEE!” She was so thrilled. She doesn’t say it all the time still, but it was certainly her first word.

She has developed “Mumumum!” when she’s hungry and wants to nurse. Which is frequently. It is also accompanied by shirt-pulling so there is really no confusing that one. At first I thought of course she was saying “mama,” but it’s clear to me that the times she says “mama” meaning me is completely separate from her saying “mumumum” meaning my boobs. Yesterday we took a bath together and she played with her toys happily for quite some time. About 15 minutes in she turned around, saw my boobs, and said, “Mumum!!” and her face lit up light a christmas tree. And then of course she had to play with them for a few minutes until I told her to please stop poking my nipples, thanks.

She doesn’t say “dada” very often, though she has in the past, but she defintely knows what it means. I can ask her “Where’s dada?” or “Go find dada!” and she will look around for him and grin at him (and me) when she finds him. She walks over to the door when she hears him come home from work, or when I say, “Is that dada?!?” It is so special watching her play with Den. She adores her daddy. She has to go over to give him hugs and be carried around for a few minutes when he first gets home, then she follows him into our bedroom while he gets changed. If he closes the door she’ll stand outside and yell “AHHH!” and he echos back, “AHHH!” It will go on for however long he’s in the bedroom for.

She makes a lot of noises right now. She loves to be jiggled in your arms or on your knee, she makes an “ahhhh” sound so that it comes out all vibrate-y “Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah.” Den would also lightly pat her mouth as she made noises so it made funny sounds, and now she’s learned to do that for herself! She puts her finger in her mouth and wiggles it back and forth to make funny noises. I now often hear that from the back seat of the car. Hilarious. Motorboat sounds, too now. “Bbbbbbbb!”

She flaps her arms a lot in excitement. And when she’s super excited she holds them up over her head as she walks around, usually with some prize gripped in her fists. Like pinecones.

While eating in the highchair she will put her arms over her head, shake her arms, and shout “Eeeehhhhh!” with displeasure as she arches her back and throws herself backward. This has two meanings: either “I want more food,” or “I’m done please remove the food.” They sound exactly the same. (A friend today translated it as, “I am displeased with the state of my food tray!” which seems pretty damn accurate!)

Speaking of food, the girl is all about eating now. At about 11 and a half months she went from “I like to nibble on a bunch of different foods, k I’m done now,” to a voracious, “MORE FOOD!!! FEED MEE!!” She started shoveling food in her mouth handfuls at a time and loudly yelling when she needed more. Den and I would just look at each other in surprize, all WTF is this? Growth spurt, I figure – and probably eating less milk, though she’s nursing more frequently it’s for little sips all day long, I don’t feel like she’s really taking in many good nursing sessions during the day. She still is not very picky, eating almost anything we give her. There are a few things she doesn’t seem too enthralled with (blueberries for some reason – she squishes them and drops them overboard), but she’s great at restaurants, I can give her pretty much anything off my plate. Her favorite foods are banana, strawberries, grapes, and cheese. For veggies squash and sweet potato remain her favorites. She loves meat: chicken, turkey, pork, steak… she’ll eat it and demand more, even if there are other things on her tray. It’s amazing to me watching how she’s learned to chew things. We’re all done with the baby food – for a couple months I was just using them when I was lazy, but she’s gotten to the point of grabbing the spoon and making a mess, and she prefers real food anyways.

We’ve been spending more time outside now, which is fun for her and me, except for the goddamn bugs. I hate bugs. The mosquitoes really like her and I. But we have that small toddler pool for her to splash in – which she only found moderately entertaining, for some reason – and the fresh air is great. Also an unexpected benefit of the outdoors: our dogs don’t have issues with her outside. We’ve been keeping them separated, which is a huge PITA, but the small space isn’t good. Outside the dogs run around like mad and Kate shrieks with joy.

Kate is nursing all the time again, which I’m moderately okay with (it’s irritating, but it’s a phase and it helps her calm down), but she’s not really DRINKING much. She’s doing it for comfort because either her teeth bother her or she’s feeling insecure, not sure which.

And I’ve discovered she LOVES the sippy cup. She gets all excited when she sees it – I actually have to hide it from view or she’ll cry when I don’t give it to her, lol. I was giving her water in it with meals, but she’s started really actually drinking from it so I decided to switch to whole milk so she gets the extra calories. She drank 3oz today! After nursing!

On one hand I’m kind of happy about that, she’s making the transition very seamless, she’s happy as a clam about it, and I like milk, lol. But on the other hand I’m very sad too. I’m not ready to wean her, I hadn’t really planned on giving her cow’s milk yet to drink daily. Ideally I’d give her breastmilk in a sippy cup, but the pump is not working well for me anymore – I just am not very full and the pump only works if I’m full. So it now takes me a long time to pump maybe an ounce or two. And then with the sippy cup she has a habit of drinking half and then I have to toss the other half. I am simply not going to work that hard to throw it out!! So cow’s milk it is. But gah. My supply will go down if she continues to drink more cow’s milk. I wish she’d just settle down and actually nurse well! Silly child.

But then it occurs to me…. if she’s transitioning well maybe that means I could wean her earlier and start IVF sooner. I have to admit, that is tempting. Now that she’s a year old I feel more and more desire to get pregnant again. And by “sooner” I mean this fall rather than January. But right now I’m just not ready to wean her… I guess I’ll just take it as it comes. Things have a habit of changing month to month.

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I don’t think I ever mentioned that I got my period back last month. I felt something was “off” for a few days and couldn’t quite put my finger on it until I felt a familiar achy feeling in my ovaries. After over 2 years since I’ve had a natural cycle I knew that I was ovulating. Sure enough AF was along shortly. This month was the same thing, I could feel ovulation without a doubt. I marked it in my notes where I wouldn’t see it unless I was really looking, but so that I could find it when I needed to. It seems I just can’t let go of some things…. I have to take notes and track dates. It’s just how I function now.

Getting my period back has been excellent for my hair – after 12 months of crappy-ass oily, flat hair finally I feel like it’s getting back to normal. I was breaking out all over the place for a month, though… that part might be settling down. I wonder how it has affected my milk supply, but at this point it doesn’t really matter all too much, I definitely still have milk.

Along with the cycling has come the reminders, though – the reminders that I’m not normal and this is never going to be normal for us. At least when I wasn’t cycling I was in a different mental space. I wasn’t ready for another baby, I wasn’t thinking about it, and it just didn’t bother me much. But now I see people around me getting pregnant, or even trying to get pregnant, and I feel jealous. I hate that jealousy. And even when I try to completely ignore the ovulation it’s like my body won’t let me, I’m too aware of it now. I have nothing written on the calendar, I intentionally avoid counting days or anything. And yet I know. My body puts on flashing lights when I ovulate and I can’t help but think that we should cover our bases… just in case.

I am irritated that I’m back in this mental space before I wanted to be. We’re not going to be doing IVF for a while, not going to be purchasing insurance or going to see a doctor. We’re not going to be “trying” for another 6 months. I was really hoping my period would hold off until then, until Kate weaned and I decided to get back to that. But instead I’ve been dumped here prematurely. For other people having sex and ovulating and not using contraception would equal getting pregnant. For us it’s just another phase of waiting for IVF… just a big mindtrick one.