21 Months

Matt and I are blown away every day by how capable
Nora Lee has become. She loves doing things for herself and is quite
helpful. For the last several months she has been helping me with
chores around the house such as unloading the dishwasher and doing the
laundry. But now her skills are even more helpful. She is in charge of
putting the silverware away in the drawer. For the longest time placed
each piece in the drawer randomly. As of the last few days she has
successfully learned to put the right silverware in the right place -
the spoons together, the forks together, etc. She is also understanding
the difference now between clean and dirty. For a while she knew we
would unload the dishes from the dishwasher but would start to unload
them even when they were dirty. Now she understands when they are dirty
and we put them in the dishwasher and when we take them out. She helps
me put the soap in and can close, lock, and start the dishwasher.

She knows how to cook things like oatmeal and can gather the necessary
tools to make it happen. She knows we boil water and then get the
measuring cups out. She loveshard boiled eggs and can peel them and slice them in the egg slicer.

She helps me with the laundry and knows where many of the clothes get put
away. Nora Lee really likes order and likes to put things away in their
proper place. If she ever comes to you saying "Uh, Oh" you know
something has fallen down or gotten out of place somehow.

Nora Lee and I still spend lots of time outdoors digging in the dirt and
playing with bugs. She LOVES bugs (or buggies as she calls them for
some reason). She always wants them to crawl on her foot. We watch the
squirrels and now she alerts me when they are in the yard and may be
eating our vegetables!

The potty is very interesting to Nora Lee and she has pooped twice in her toilet. She tells us when she has pooped and runs to get the changing pad and a fresh diaper.

Her language is exploding and its really exciting. She repeats most things we say and probably has about 60 words that she says and can understand everything we say.
She just started putting a few words together like this morning she
said "mama, egg, one". I always repeat what she said "you want one
egg?" so she can tell me if I understood her correctly.

She is still enjoying dress up and dancing.

Nora Lee is quite sensitive and becomes upset when other people are
emotional. She cries if another child is in distress but can stay calm
when there is emotion that's not intense. I was crying the other day
(happy tears) and she came and sat on my lap and touched my face and
said "tears". She is very affectionate and loves hugging and kissing.
She loves other kids and follows them around to give them hugs.

She has quite a lot of stamina. I go hiking with her several times a week
up a mountain near our house. She rides on my back most of the way but
lately I have been letting her get down and walk some of it. Ive been
amzed at how far she can walk without getting tired!

She is a dream come true and a blessing each day.

Sara

Our Boozer

Nora Lee LOVES food. Its a huge part of every hour of every day. So when the refrigerator opens she is right there waiting to see what delicious things comes out for her to snack on. Recently as I was grabbing food and putting it on the counter I turned around to see her with a beer can up to her mouth. It cracked me up so much that I ran for the camera. Its even more perfect that she is wearing her Johnny Cash Folsom Prison outfit.

Dress Up

Nora Lee is starting to enjoy "dress-up". It first started with her trying on everyone's shoes in the room and attempting to walk around in them. She does much better with only one shoe on at a time.

About a month ago she began asking for us to put her boots and snow cap on.

18 Months

On the 29th of June Nora Lee will be a year and a half old.  She has certainly moved from being a baby to a little girl.  Her personality and likes and dislikes develop more each day and it's such a fun ride!

She continues to show signs of being a dancer.  She has a handful of pretty impressive moves if I do say so myself.  She likes to dance fast to fast music and sloooow to slow music.  It's incredible to watch her shift her movements with the change of music.  She has actually done a demi-plie which we find magical.  We have shown her salsa, contemporary, waltz, and other dances on TV but she is most excited about watching the contemporary dances or waltzes - the slower dances.  We are excited to explore classes with her when the time is right.

As I mentioned in previous posts Nora Lee has been great about using sign language to express her needs.  She signs "food", "nursing", "change me", "sleep", and "more".  Just this week she started saying "more" and I was pretty excited.  Until now she says "dada" and "bye-bye".  Bye-bye she consistently knows what it means but dada means "dad" and has meant many other things in the past.  Mama still is very very rare.  She knows who it is and will bring me something if Matt says "bring this to mama" but she doesn't really say it.  

In this last month we have been more social with other kids and families.  Its been sweet to see her with other kids and their parents.  Im delighted at how gentle and affectionate she is with them.  Lots of unsolicited hugs and kisses.  She is quite tender with babies - stroking their heads and kissing them.

Nora Lee loves the outdoors just like her mom!  We do a lot of gardening and play time in the yard with water and dirt.  She also loves animals and looks at these national geographic books from the seventies again and again and again and again.  I do all the animal sounds for her and she repeats them but I get stuck when we come to platypus and pronghorns.  I just go silent and turn the page.

She is showing signs of enjoying "dress-up".  She asks to put on my hats and scarves and shoes. Yesterday she even managed to get a high heel on and tramp around the house.

Last month we noticed she was giving us the "change me" sign and was dry and then would poop a few minutes later.  Since she was aware her poo was coming we got her a tiny toilet to see if she was wanting to toilet train.  So far she loves spending time on it but hasn't actually used it yet.

She's very interested in what goes on in the kitchen and will scoot anything nearby to stand on to see onto the counter.  We have to be careful that she doesn't choose things with wheels to stand on.

Those are the updates for now!!  We are having a blast :)

Sara Jean

15 Months

Nora Lee is 15 months old now and is 30 inches long and 19 pounds. On Valentines Day she walked across the room for the first time and now is walking everywhere. For a while she did a combination of walking and crawling but now she doesn't even crawl anymore.

When she was six months old we started teaching her sign language but were told that she wouldn't respond until at least 10 months. We gave up around a year because nothing seemed to be happening. Then one day a few weeks ago my mom showed her a sign and she signed back! It was so exciting! We immediately began signing again and she has continued to sign back. For a while she has understood words that we speak to her but has not been able to respond, now she has a way to communicate. She knows the signs for "food, more, nursing, water, and change."

A day or so after we introduced the sign "change" she was in the living room and I could tell she was pooping. When she finished she came over to me and did the sign for "change". I was blown away and immediately went to change her diaper! Since then she only does the change sign when I ask her if she needs a change but I'm excited that she seems to be puting it all together.

Music is still a huge part of her life. She knows the words for music and dancing (when we say them) and she gets a huge smile on her face when they are said, and usually starts to dance right away.

Wild Animal Park

On Easter weekend Clay, Colleen, Nora Lee and I went to the Wild Animal Park in San Diego. I love the Wild Animal Park because the animals have so much room to run around as opposed to some zoos where the cages seem so restrictive.

By pure luck the family of lions had gathered directly on the other side of the glass so we got to see the mom nursing her cubs and the dad taking a nap.

Colleen and Clay got some nectar and we got to hold and feed a parakeet and inside the petting zoo Nora got to feed and pet the deer.

It was a sweet first experience up close with all the animals.

Easter

For Easter Nora Lee and I went to San Diego to celebrate with my family. Matt had planned on going but booked a commercial at the last minute and stayed in LA to shoot it. Our weekend was jammed packed but lots of fun. We went to the Wild Animal Park on Saturday (more on that later), to see Oklahoma! on Saturday night and then had an Easter feast and hunt Sunday.

We stayed with my brother and my sister-in-law at their house and celebrated Easter Sunday at my mom's house in Fallbrook. The feast was amazing and the hunt was really fun. All the adults searched for eggs with playing cards in them - the best poker hand at the end won. I didn't do very well but still ended up with an awesome gift, Obama's book "The Audacity of Hope". Nora spent time with her grandparents playing on the property and kicking her feet in the pond and watching the fish.

Nora Lee was the only child at the hunt and she did very well getting her eggs and putting them in the basket. By the time the hunt happened in the afternoon she had not taken a nap and was exhausted. She wasn't fussy, but had that glazed over look and sort of stumbled around like a zombie. When we drove back to LA that evening she was asleep before I got out of my mom's driveway.

It was a perfect first Easter.

The Latest

Nora Lee is 13 months and is now more of a little girl than a baby. She is not yet walking but takes up to three steps on her own before going back down to the ground. She is very fast and can get up and down off of the couch and bed and walks easily while holding onto furniture. She laughs a lot and we are constantly amazed at how much she understands. Although she speaks almost no words yet, she seems to understand most things we say.

She LOVES music and dancing. She dances any time music comes on and usually sings along if there are lyrics. In the car or at home there is music on almost all of the time and you will hear a tiny little high voice singing along. Her dancing is the most precious thing I have ever seen. She shakes her little hips back and forth and it kills us.

A few weeks ago I put on the "Sound of Music" and was amazed to find that she would stop and watch whenever the singing and dancing happened. The rest of the time she ignored the TV but when the music was on, she was thrilled. I began doing an experiment and she consistently stops playing and gets a HUGE smile on her face and begins to dance when Gene Kelley or Fred Astaire comes on the screen. I have been anti-TV for her but after seeing how much joy she gets from the old time dance and song numbers I loving TIVO-ing musicals and showing them to her. Matt is of course THRILLED with her love of music, dancing and singing. We are both excited to see how that develops in her.

She still has eight teeth but a few more are on the way. She has had a break from teething for a while which has been really nice.

She is VERY inquisitive. She wants to know what everything is called. She only says a few things and one of them is "Ga da?". Ga da means "what's that?" and she says it ALL the time. When we say what the thing is called she is satisfied and is quiet or points to something else to learn the name.

Nora Lee still loves food and will befriend anyone in the room who has food to share.

That's all for now.

Love,
Sara

Adventures with Poop

I have two short stories about poop that I wanted to document.

One is simple and involves a diaper change when Nora had pooped about 30 grape sized pellets which as I unfastened her diaper she grabbed and threw all over the bedroom. Deeelightful.

The second is more disturbing, so put down your sandwich before reading further.

We use cloth diapers and wash them in our washing machine. This is no big deal and we do several loads of diapers each week. Since Nora Lee has been eating solid food we have to have a poop pail along with a regular pee pail. When she poops we dump the poop in the toilet and then put the soiled diaper in the poop pail to soak. On this particular day I noticed that the poo pail was maxed out (its quite small) and so I decided to put in a load to wash. I lifted the pail by the handle and began crossing from the bathroom into our kitchen toward the washing machine. As I entered the kitchen the handle broke and the pail fell to the floor dumping poo diapers all over the floor and splashing my entire face and body with poo water. Matt heard the commotion and came running in to find me soaked and startled. He was horrified and found it hilarious.

Before you all decided to never come over to my house again or to kiss me, let me assure you that both my body and my home have been sanitized to the max. At least after being showered with poo water no one can say I don't care for the environment.

Mexico Part 4

Mexico Part 3

Mexico Pics Part 2

Mexico

In the first part of January my brother Clay got married in Mexico. I was excited about this event and the trip but nervous about Nora Lee. She has done a little traveling with us by plane but before she was mobile and I envisioned a challenging five hour flight with a squirming little one.

We left home at 4:30 a.m. to begin our journey to LAX, then had a five hour flight, and a two hour busride to the resort where we were staying. We lucked out and had extra seats around us on both the way there and way home. This was an incredible blessing. My mom and step dad traveled with us to help with Nora and it was really nice to have four adults to one child. She slept part of the way there and did incredibly well on the twelve hour journey.
The resort was stunning and we spent the week enjoying family and friends and the beautiful Mexican Riviera.

Nora had never been in the ocean and she enjoyed playing and eating the sand. We were told to let her eat the sand and once she tasted it she would find out it wasn't so tasty after all. So we let her take that first handful, which was followed by another handful and another. When I picked her up to stop her from eating more sand she began licking the sand off of her fingers. So much for that advice :)

I snorkeled and Matt played with a wave runner. We took turns with family spending time with Nora Lee. There were forty adults and one child so there were many arms for holding and playing with her.

We took her to the Mayan ruins in Tulum where she rode on my back as we toured the historic site. It was pretty amazing.

She was the flower girl in the ceremony and she and I walked together and threw the flowers. It was a sweet experience and a beautiful ceremony on the beach. I even got to party into the night while family was with Nora Lee in our hotel suite. I had a blast.

I have to say that although traveling was tiring, she was an incredible little travel companion.

Nora Lee's 1st Birthday!

A few days after Christmas Nora turned one year old. It's an understatement to say how fast this year has gone by. It seems I was just finding out she was in my belly.

The unfortunate thing about having a birthday so close to Christmas is that most peopple are busy or out of town. This may be even more of an issue as she gets older and actually has friends of her own.

Right after giving birth last year, it was about 5 a.m. and I was lying in bed and I suddenly realized that I was famished. My best friend Lena was there and offered to cook me whatever I wanted and my greatest heart's desire was blueberry pancakes. I might of eaten a thousand of them that morning.

So, for Nora Lee's first birthday we thought we should make blueberry pancakes again. We had a low key day with a few friends and family members. She got more wonderful presents (the poor thing) and best of all - she got to eat her first cupcake.

Let me first say that Matt and I are pretty strict about her sugar consumption. And what I mean by that is that until the cupcake she had had almost no sugar. (I say almost no sugar because I suspect the grandparents may indulge her every once in a while). Anyway, for her birthday we decided to put a cupcake in front of her and see what she would do. First she looked at it, then looked at us, then looked at it, then looked at us. Then smelled it and took a small bite which turned into a big bite which turned into stuffing the entire thing in her mouth. I was quite surprised because I assumed she would take a few bites, but no, she ate the entire cupcake. We all died watching her enjoy this treat. I wish I let myself enjoy cupcakes that much - one more thing I can add to the list of "What I have learned from Nora Lee".

After the cupcake, we hosed her down and put her on the floor to open presents. After about fifteen minutes she was zipping back and forth squealing with delight as she zoomed from room to room. What a sugar rush (and the reason we don't let her eat sugar :)

I'll finish this segment by saying that she crashed pretty hard that night and we didn't hear a peep from her until morning.

Christmas

We decided to stay home for Nora's first Christmas. My dad, brother, and sister-in-law came up to celebrate with us Christmas morning and we had more loved ones over in the afternoon. Nora enjoyed opening presents and playing with all the wrapping paper.

She made out like a bandit - surprise, surprise.