The Peanut Chronicle

Thursday, October 16, 2014

At daycare

Elizabeth's daycare provider has a new app she uses to keep track of the kids' meals, naps, etc. that sends us the info and as part of it she can tag the kids in pictures she takes on her phone and it automatically sends us the pictures. So we get surprises during the day of pictures of Elizabeth at daycare. Or on a busy day we get them at the end of the day when she has time to tag them. And they make me smile. :)

This was a picture that she took yesterday:

From 2014 October

And it makes me think two things simultaneously. First, omg she is getting big! Secondly, I love her daycare! I love that she is treated like a big kid and is growing into it and exploring and climbing. And I love how happy and clearly comfortable she is. And, of course, I love that I get pictures. :)

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

64 months

From 2014 October

Nicholas was feeling left out the other day when I was doing Elizabeth's 11 month pictures and wanted me to do his month picture too. So here it is. And that gives me a good reason to do an update post on him as well. So a few updates on Nicholas:

He loves kindergarten! He plays school, writes the "morning message" on his dry erase board, "preps" class, and so on.
His reading is amazing. He overheard me saying that he reads at around a third grade level and so now tells people that. I don't actually know what his official reading level is, but he can read books that I remember reading in the middle of elementary school with just a little stumbling. And what really impresses me is how smoothly he reads, with attention to punctuation and voice, rather than just sounding out each word.
He has started taking an interest in writing for the first time. He has always hated writing and we had to force him to do it, but he now is willing to do it. I think a big part of it is that he is now more willing to make up spellings by sounding out a word and not worry about whether it is correct. For example, he is currently working on a Magic Treehouse story and he typed the following sentence this morning: "annie sed Cumon We Hafe to go to the Tree Hows Kuz we Hafe to go on a misn" Translation: "Annie said, "Come on, we have to go to the treehouse because we have to go on a mission."
He is going through a phase where he often needs one of us in his room to fall asleep. He asks for snuggles just about every night and about half of the nights he comes out after 30-45 minutes of trying to go to sleep and says he can't fall asleep and needs us. If I go in he is out in 5 minutes.
He cannot sit still. He literally can't sit in his chair for all of dinner.
He has very little internal monologue and must narrate everything. This drives us insane but is probably why his verbal skills are so good.
His behavior has improved dramatically since he started kindergarten. He still occasionally has a meltdown, especially if he is exhausted or hungry, but they are much more rare. And there are many times each week where we are just in awe of how responsible he is.
He seems to alternate between being 3 and being 10. Sometimes he wants to watch toddler shows on tv and other times he sits down at the computer to write a novel.
He loves baseball and is very disappointed that the Os lost.

We have a conference with his teacher tomorrow (nothing bad, just the regular fall conference) so I'm curious to hear about what he is like at school.

11 Months

From 2014 October

I get more and more behind with these posts each month. But this is the second-to-last of the monthly posts, so I guess at least I won't get any further behind. How is is possible that in less than 4 weeks Elizabeth will be 1?! It has gone so much more quickly this time around. I swear she was just 6 weeks old!

Anyway, here is a picture of Elizabeth at 11 months:

She is in constant motion. It is possible that she stops moving when she sleeps, but I wouldn't put money on it. Even while nursing she is doing gymnastics, pulling on her legs, playing with her hair, putting my hand over her ear . . .
Probably not unrelated to the previous point, she is always hungry and eats ridiculous servings. On a couple occasions we have even bought her her own kid's meal at restaurants because we knew we couldn't satisfy her with scraps from our plates. And she acts like you haven't fed her in days, vocally demanding more food and shoveling it in her mouth by the fistful. She also sometimes forgets to chew in her eagerness, leading to some gagging.
She will eat a wide range of things and there have only been a few things she hasn't been willing to eat. Neither mushrooms or salmon was a big hit, although she ate both. She tends to throw Cheerios off her tray, although she'll eat them on occasion. She adores bananas. Tonight at dinner we were having tacos and she had the same meal the rest of us did, minus the tortilla. Taco meat, cheese, corn, and tomatoes. Seriously, what 11-month old shovels taco meat in and demands more?
She is still refusing more than an ounce or two of liquid at daycare so we've been supplementing nursing with a bottle of pumped milk at bedtime many nights. Elizabeth has discovered a sudden love of bottles and prefers that to nursing (I assume because it is faster). She will look up at the shelf where we keep the bottles, point, and say "ba ba ba." And if I sit down in her rocking chair to nurse her, she keeps coming off and looking to the shelf where I set the bottle if I have one, clearly looking for a better offer.
She has a lot of sounds that are clearly trying to be words. For the most part what it is is that she repeats the first sound of the intended word over and over again. It is very clear that she is trying to say the word and it is intentional because the first sound is right, but it sounds like babbling because it is just one syllable over and over. The "words" she says are: Mama, Dada, cat, bottle, banana, yay, and hi. Yay and hi actually sound like real words since they are only one syllable, although she doesn't really say the first letter of either. Those also seem more like real words because they are attached to motions and so clearly have meaning. She says "yay" when she claps and "hi" when she waves.
She still gets up twice a night on average to eat. Every once in awhile she will go two nights in a row only getting up once but it has yet to become routine.
She adores books. She is interested in having them read to her, but what she really loves is flipping through them herself to look at the pictures. Left to her own devices in the living room she tends to crawl over to the bookshelf and start taking off her books. But she takes them off one or two at a time and flips through them before going back for more. And she carefully points at things in the books as she goes, studying them. Her favorite books, not surprisingly, have pictures of animals.
She can stand on her own for 10 seconds or so, but only if she isn't paying attention.
She is now steady enough that she can walk only holding one adult hand, although she still thinks she needs 2 and tries to grab the other one.
She knows that socks and shoes go on her feet and pants go on her legs. When she sees these, she holds up her foot/leg and tries to put them on. By tries to put them on I mean sets the sock on top of her foot. The idea of how to get it ON a foot is way beyond her.
She knows the things that she is not supposed to do. It only sometimes stops her, but she does look up at me and shake her head no before she does them. It would be aggravating if it wasn't so stinking cute.
She has started playing with toys in a more sophisticated way. As I was cleaning up the toys this evening I was actually realizing that it is time to put the baby toys away because she has no use for toys you just chew on. She has even figured out how to get the rings on the post of that classic toy!

I feel like most of this is pretty similar to what I've been writing for months. She is stubborn and insistent and gets mad when she doesn't get what she wants but is also smiley and giggly and fun. She is incredibly engaged with the world and people around her and curious. While Nicholas was studious she is adventurous. Nicholas wanted to explore a new place before being willing to play with anything while Elizabeth just dives headfirst (sometimes literally) into whatever she sees. He was just as strong-willed, however.

And here are some literal pictures of her at 11 months. There was absolutely no getting her to sit still and pose, so instead we have action shots that have the blocks in the foreground. But it is an accurate picture of the little girl she is at this moment.

From 2014 October

Monday, September 29, 2014

Beautiful Weekend

It is the last weekend of September and the trees are starting to turn but this weekend the weather felt more like mid-August and we pulled shorts and t-shirts back out and spent a lot of the weekend outside. Or at least the kids and I did because Joe had a lot of work commitments.

Saturday we met up with a bunch of the families from Elizabeth's daycare at an apple orchard. We hung out with them at the playground eating apple cider doughnuts and playing for about an hour and then took a hayride to the orchard together, where we then split up to do our own picking. What that looked like for our family was that Nicholas picked all our apples . . .

From 2014 September

Elizabeth "picked" apples by crawling around on the ground and grabbing them . . .

From 2014 September

. . . and I took pictures.

From 2014 September

We then made applesauce when we got home, because that is what we do with freshly picked Macintosh apples. And this year Nicholas was able to explain the whole reason why this is important to me. I don't know if he actually gets it or is just repeating what I have said in the past, but he knows that making the applesauce reminds me of the applesauce we always had at my grandparents' house when I was a kid and is a way to remember my grandma. My grandpa would say (teasingly) that it isn't the same because these aren't Vermont Macs, but I think the fact that the Vermont border is all of 50 miles north of where we were picking means that they were close enough. And this year I finally got close to replicating what Grandma's tasted like. It still wasn't perfect, but close enough that every bite transported me back.

From 2014 September

And, just for fun, a few pictures from the playground:

From 2014 September

Then this afternoon I took the kids to the park. Nicholas played with 2 friends from his old preschool who randomly were there, Elizabeth went on the swing and then just hung out watching the big kids, and I took pictures. Are you sensing a theme? But we were all happy!

From 2014 September

Sunday, September 21, 2014

Our Book

Nicholas and I wrote a book today and I am pretty proud of us, so I figured I'd share it here. The scanner cut off some of the edges, but you can still read it and see all of Nicholas' pictures.

From 2014 September

Our sequel? Even Superheroes Don't Always Get What They Want. That was entirely Nicholas' idea. Oh, and it turns out there is a whole line of wall art for bathrooms and bedrooms that is "Even Superheroes Must Wash Their Hands." I just googled the phrase to see if a book with the title already existed.

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Weekend Photos

From 2014 September

10 Months

I know it is late, but things have been busy. As in I was working until 3am last night and only got 3 hours of sleep busy. So, without further ado, Elizabeth at 10 months:

She waves if you wave or say hi or bye. Sometimes it is a full arm wave and sometimes just the hand. She seems to have skipped over the waving to themselves phase, though.
She loves her new daycare and is loving being a big kid. All the other kids are between 1 1/2 and 3 and she goes along for the ride. When I pick her up she insists on walking me over to the slide to help her go down or to specific toys. She plays in the sandbox and with sidewalk chalk and the whole 9 yards. And I'm apparently focusing all my anxiety on the house and so not worried about how much of those things she is eating.
She is on a bottle strike at daycare. She won't take them and drinks only the tiniest bit of milk from a sippy cup. The first week when the temps were in the 90s we were all concerned about dehydration, but now that it has cooled off I'm okay if she mostly just eats real food with some sips from a sippy and then nurses and takes an additional bottle at home in the evening.
The stubborn streak she has had all along is starting to manifest itself in more toddler ways. If you try to set her down and she doesn't want you to, she throws herself backwards on the floor in an early temper tantrum. Because banging her head on the floor will show me, right? She also shakes her head no a lot!
She loves to dance and make her stuffed animals dance. Super cute.
She adores animals. Live ones, pictures of them, animals on tv. One day a couple weeks ago she and I were doing a mega errand trip and after about the 6th or 7th stop we were next to a Petsmart so I took her in and we spent 15 minutes just watching the dogs in their doggy daycare. Elizabeth heaven!
She eats a wide range of foods but if she doesn't want it, she makes that very clear. It isn't a consistent set of foods that she rejects, however. It may be her mood or that she sees something better, but she will throw things she doesn't want off her tray. She pretty much uniformly rejects those food pouches she loved so much a month ago.
She loves books, especially if they have dogs in them.
She will watch about 5 minutes of tv in rapt attention and then gets bored.
She likes to make sounds and will shake things or bang things to see what sound they make.
She is still getting up twice a night to eat, but given the current bottle strike at daycare I'm not willing to try to break that habit because she needs the milk.
She will go to bed or down for a nap for Joe but will not accept him in the middle of the night. If he goes in to give her a pacifier because she shouldn't need to eat yet, she gets MAD and it then takes me over an hour and multiple attempts to get her back to sleep. Normally I have her back asleep in less than 10 minutes. My best theory is that she loses her faith that she can have Mommy and so doesn't trust that I'll be back.
She has started pulling her bows out all the time. It used to be that I could keep them in most of the time except when she was unsupervised and bored (carseat, crib). Now it is rare to keep one in for an hour. This makes me sad because her hair is so scraggly and it is long enough to be in her face but not long enough to just be down.
As of the day after she turned 10 months she was just under 28 inches tall/long and weighed 18 1/2 pounds, still right on the 50th for everything.
She still just has 4 teeth.

Our Lizzie-boo:

From 2014 September