Away

Little Lady and I have been away since last Sunday. We have been visiting Nana and enjoying relaxing and playing away from home.

Stud Muffin has been away doing some training for work so I decided it was a good opportunity to come stay with Nana before The Sequel is born and we aren't traveling.

We've had lazy days, lunch dates with Nana, and play dates with friends. We even had the opportunity to spend a day with my grandparents, Little Lady's great-grandparents! Before then they had never met. But we had a wonderful time with them, visiting, having breakfast for lunch and taking lots of pictures!

{I love this little sweetheart!}

13 Months

{and a few days!}

You are 'growing up' so fast these days! More and more copy and imitate mama and dada. It's cute most of the time but there are those moments when I'd rather not see you repeat me...

Most days you just take a late morning nap and then go to bed a little earlier. Depending on our activities for the day you may take an afternoon nap too. Most days we start your bedtime routine around 6:30 and you're in bed by 7:30. Usually you sleep til 6:30 or 7:00 am. Although a few days last week you surprised mama with a late morning, sleeping til 8:00 am!! Most of the time you can put yourself to sleep now, actually you prefer it, and it often times involves you sitting or lying in your crib talking or singing. It's pretty adorable actually. :D There are a few occasions where you let mama put you to sleep still. I'll take 'em as long as I can get them!

You have started showing pickiness with different foods. Mostly I think it's a texture thing because food I know you like and have eaten pureed, you don't like raw. But you like enough things that I know you have a balanced diet. In the mean time, your favorite foods are* bananas, strawberries {which I am pretty sure we identified as such on our recent trip to the farm!} and goldfish. Lately we have been practicing using plates, bowls and utensils with our meals so you can start to get a feel for them, and at the very least have fun with your meal!
*These are not the only things that I feed her, just what she would eat all day long if she could!


We've also started to try and wean you from your bottles of milk during the day buy giving it to you in your sippy cups. You still have a bottle first thing in the morning and right before you go to bed. I'm having a hard time imagining those going away, although I know eventually they will, but it seems to be the transition we need at those times of day.

You are becoming quite the little sponge! You are wanting to learn so much and just recently started bringing me books and motioning to sit in my lap so I can read it to you. Before now you wouldn't really sit through a book, even though I would read it to you anyway. You have always been to busy to sit for much of anything! You like to go!! But it's been nice to actually go through a book with you and point to things as I read about them. And you do so well through the whole book, as long as you get to turn the page that is!

You've learned where your nose is and can point to others noses too. You say "no" when you point to it! And recently you have moved on to eyes, which is interesting when you point to identify everything... but you are learning and mama is teaching you how to point to them with out touching them. :)

As of right now, you do pretty well with listening to mama when she tells you "no no" or to stop doing something, especially something that could really hurt you. I know this probably won't last long but it's nice for now. My stratgey at the moment is to tell you "no no" if you are doing something I don't want you to do. And if you don't stop after that then I remove the object or I remove you from what you are doing. The key is immediate response. I don't plan on counting or giving you time to "think" about it. Immediate obedience is what we want to teach you, just as I know God continues to teach mama and dada the same thing!

I don't think it will be long before you are talking with real and full words. You can say parts of words and I can sometimes figure out what you are saying. Actually you communicate pretty well! I know your a smarty pants, you take after your dada! :)

This stage of life you are in has been so much fun for you and me. I'm looking forward to teaching you and witnessing you learn more and more as we go along.

Here you were one year ago:

Pickin Berries

Little Lady and I visited a berry pickin' farm last week.

Tractor towed us out to the fields of strawberries.

We walked the rows and found the ones that were bright red and ready for the pickin'!

As you might notice Little Lady was enjoying those bright red, ready for the pickin', berries!

This was our bunch. 

After Little Lady was done having a little snack.

And she was thirsty after her little snack!

We had a really good day at the berry pickin' farm!

Mini vacation.

It's been awhile since I've updated on our little {but growing} family.

I guess we've been so busy just living life that I haven't thought much to write about it lately. I don't really mind those times either. It's kind of like when you go on vacation to Disney World and you are so busy taking pictures of everything that you don't actually SEE it until you look through the pictures...

Sometimes it's nice just to experience it first hand.

And that's what we have been doing these past few weeks. Most of, if any, of the pictures we've taken have been with our phones. And that doesn't leave for the greatest quality. Needless to say, this is a post without pics {sorry mom and dad!}

So please excuse my mini vacation from blogging and stay tuned for much more interesting posts in the very near future... ;)