Little Miss Independent or 11 months

Of course, every day something happens and I tell myself that I should make sure to mention it in my blog... Of course, every time I start writing a post for the life of me I cannot remember most of those things. Oh, well... Here we go.

Our little-little precious darling baby girl just turned 11 months last week! In less than a month we'll be celebrating her first birthday! At one of the Gymboree classes during the parent sharing time we were asked what has been the biggest surprise in our parenting experiences. While almost every day contains little wonderful surprises, I think the biggest surprise is how quickly Sophia grows and changes! I know it's no rocket science, but I hadn't thought about it before: how much a baby needs to learn during the first year of life! It's just amazing!

Anyway, I should stop stating the obvious and start recollecting the moments I wanted write down.

1mo:

11mo:

If I needed to come up with the theme of the month it would be "Independence and Freedom". Sophia's been showing quite a free spirit reacting strongly to any attempts to limit her freedom. She loves exploring, watching, trying new things, but she hates it when somebody tries to help her by moving her hands instead of just showing. She'll wash her hands under the running water, but will try to not let you do much with them. She'll eat her cereal with a spoon and let you fill up the spoon, but won't tolerate you touching the spoon when she brings it to her mouth. She'll let you pick up a piece of fruit of veggie that might be too slippery on the tray, but she won't let you put it in her mouth, she'll have to take it on her own. The list goes on and on...

It is combined in a very interesting way with how much exclusive attention and quality time she needs and likes and how snugly she can be ( I just love the little hugs that she gives Kyle and me! It melts my heart!!). On this picture one of her bears got lucky:

Sophia used to love her jumperoo (notice all the stuff that we had to put under her feet in order for her to stand on the lowest setting!):

She still does love it, but in a different way:

Another common theme in this house is the discovering of the kitchen cabinets and drawers... Did I say kitchen? I meant all the cabinets and drawers that are within the reach of the little curious hands. Whenever you feel that your pots, measuring cups, bowls (basically anything unbreakable and not sharp) are not arranged properly or your house is lacking a certain charm that can be added by various plastic bags, socks, books and magazines laying in random places, please, feel free to invite us over and our brave designer, passionate about experimenting, will give your home a refreshed look! :)

Socks... I don't know what is so fascinating about socks, but Sophia loves all types of socks. She can spend a long time going through our drawers with socks, moving them back and forth, looking, sometimes chewing :) Whenever we take off her socks, she grabs them and holds them in her hand wherever she goes. If you gain a special favor you might be awarded with the honor of holding one of her socks for a little while.

Food... It's been as interesting as ever. Sophia's discovering all sorts of food, but I can't help mentioning her love for the pickled asparagus and pickles! The faces she made when first trying them were just precious. But she's fallen in love with these treats! In fact, she'll eat anything as long as you alternate it with pickles... or cheese (she loves it!). 

Our big girl is almost ready to walk. In fact she walks all around just holding onto one of my fingers. As soon as she gains enough confidence, she'll take off and there will be no stopping. I think that switching to the new level at the Gymboree class for children between 10 and 16 months is encouraging her to want to start walking, since most of the toddlers in the class are running around on their own.

Sophia's been talking a lot lately. In her own language, of course. I'm guessing the mix of Russian and English that she's hearing can get confusing. :) She's saying a few short words except for dah-dah and ma-ma that we can understand or guess what they are... but in any case she's usually very vocal and clear about her feelings and wishes.

She's started waving "hi" and "good-bye" again. She used to wave "bye" to Kyle when we was leaving for work at 8mo, but she wasn't interested in it for a while. These days she waves to a lot of people when they are saying "hi" or "bye" to her. If she feels like it, of course.

One of Sophia's favorite games is peekaboo. She wasn't a big fan of it when she was younger, but 3-4 months ago she's figured it out and has been loving it ever since. In fact, her favorite thing to do is take a blanket and cover up her face and wait till we start asking "where's Sophia? where's our baby girl?". She'll wait a second or two and then will take it off with a most excited and happy look!

Well, I'm sure I'm missing something, but my sweet honey has got me a cup of tea and I would like to proceed to having it. This post is getting pretty long anyway.

Bye! :)

A quick update

I haven't been in the blogging mood lately. I'm not sure if it is going to come back any time soon, so I guess I should make a quick update on our baby girl.

She's been super active (has she ever been not very active?) and she's been able to get around very quickly. I know we all go through the same experience, but it amazes me how exciting it must be to be able to go anywhere you want to go after having to depend on other people for it for 8 months. And Sophia is EXCITED! You should hear her high pitch squeaks when she crawls closer to a cat. She hasn't quite figured out that scaring the cats with loud noises is not going to get her a very good quality time with the pets. She's paying close attention to us saying "be gentle" and showing her how to pet the kitties, but half a minute later she succumbs to the temptation and grabs a tail or whiskers. It has surprised me how patient our kitty-cats have been with our little one. I guess they've adopted her as one of the care-givers too and even try get her to scratch behind their ears. Cammy will come and rub against baby's hand trying to get attention. It is super cute!

There are a few other things that entice Sophia. Even though it still rains a lot we have been able to get outside for short walks (as in baby walking in her Juppy walker) 

where she can explore all beautiful plants in full blossom! (I love this time of year for the bright yet gentle colors of the awakening nature). Whenever our curious baby girl spots something interesting, she points at it with her pointer and makes sure we see, hear and understand where to go.

Another fun thing she's been discovering is going to the park for walks. Her first time in a swing was a little scary, but now she'll try to bounce and move her legs in order to go faster!

Here's our cute heart discovering grass:

No matter what Sophia is doing when she hears me open the dishwasher, she zooms through the room. I have only about 10 to 20 seconds to grab all of the forks and knives out of the silverware basket that's attached to the bottom of the dishwasher and is located in a very "grabable" spot for the baby with a goal. My mother-in-law made a good point saying that in 12-15 years it'll be much more difficult to get her to have to do anything with the dishwasher!

Another favorite activity is laundry. Everything about laundry. She's not a big fan of the noise made by the washer, but she loves standing next to the dryer and watching me get out the clothes. She has lots of fun when I'm sorting through the laundry or putting it away. She plays with the laundry basket, gets things out and puts them back many times. She'll find anything else on the floor and come put it into the basket. She'll push it around as a walker. I think she learned to squat for the first time when holding on to the basket and trying to pull one of my sweaters through the hole near the bottom of the basket.

Organizing. We do believe that's Sophia's way to rebel. She's trying to organize everything. Give her a container and she'll put everything into it. Take it out and she'll crawl, pick it up, go up and down as many times as needed to put every single thing back into it! The other day we were sorting through piles of stuff in our office that's been working as a "spare closet" since baby's been born and she had lots of fun grabbing anything she could get a hold of and dragging it into her container!

Our little organizer doesn't miss the shelves either. She'll crawl up to a shelf with a toy, put the toy onto the shelf, pick something of the shelf, play with it or move it to a higher shelf, put it back and repeat ten times. At the end of her playing time all of the objects will still end up on the shelf!

*Note to self: If your baby is busy playing and gets very quiet, it is never a good sign, no matter how much you are enjoying the moments of peace and the chance to finish doing whatever you started. Today Sophia decided that the changing table needed to be wiped with the diaper wipes and apparently it was very, very dirty, since the neat baby girl used up the whole container while mommy was folding and putting away her clothes!

Eating. It's been a learning trial-and-error experience for all of us. It took me a while, but I learned to discern the expressions that our sweetie pie has during meal times. I had no idea there could be so many of them. At least I learned pretty quickly to recognize when she opens up her mouth for a sneeze and not rush a spoon full of cereal into it, unless I wanted to clean it off myself, Kyle and the rest of the kitchen / dinning room :) We've been trying lots of different foods. Since Sophia is getting bored with the pureed stuff we've been experimenting with textures and forms. Some of them have worked better than others. But she still loves her chicken, cheese, yogurt, puffs, apples plus carrots, small pasta, bread, celery, corn. She is OK with other foods and we are trying to offer her more types of food from our table (the ones that we think are healthy enough for her, of course. So even though she was pointing pretty clearly at it, she still got no pizza on the menu).  Of course we are NOT OK with some foods that Sophia has tried... like cat food... :))

Is this the result of "success" or "error"? :)

Who needs hair styling products anyway?

Of course, I'll have to mention how quickly our little crawler and cruiser moves between different furniture. She's getting pretty tall too! She reached Kyle's glasses that were laying on the counter in our bathroom! (Well, it's not a very tall counter, but seemed to be tall enough until now).  She'll climb up anything. I still don't understand how she learned to do it so quickly. I suspect that if she weren't so cautious, she'd be trying to walk by now.

Another very exciting event in the life of our little baby girl was the visit of her grandparents and her Dedication that happened the week after Easter. It was a very important and touching moment for all of us!

It's been a few weeks since I've started writing this "quick" update. So I better get it posted now before another "few" weeks go by.

8

Eight... eight... eight... Eight is one of my favorite numbers. Somehow it seems to be complete in every way.

But this post is not about the number of course. 

A couple of weeks ago our little baby girl turned 8 months. My, oh, my! She's getting so big:

One of the main themes going on in our house is baby proofing it. Hmm... Did I say 'going on'? Well, that is an exaggeration, of course. Kyle has installed the outlet covers, but that's pretty much as far as we've gotten. We are still thinking about the rest.

Meanwhile though little Sophia has discovered various ways to move around. She started with spinning on her tummy and scooting backwards, continued to trying to "swim" and "fly" (figured out it wasn't doing her much good) and started pushing herself forward sometimes using just arms or just legs and sometimes coordinating it all together and actually crawling in a more traditional way. One thing I can say for sure is that she needs a good motivation do something that takes a lot of effort at the moment. Maybe it's growing up in the house with cats, but she quickly realized that there has to be a correlation between effort and reward, meaning the reward must be worth the effort, otherwise she loses interest in it. For example, a turned on phone is a good reward worthy of crawling a couple of feet, while a toy is a semi-satisfactory reward that doesn't not deserve more than a few inches of reaching.

Update: A laptop was definitely worth the effort:

And here comes the reward (Mommy, I'll just order a couple of Kindles of Amazon.com):

Favorite words.

Of course, I cannot help mentioning that Sophia's been very talkative lately. She makes all kinds of sounds and most of them are a variety of squeaky high pitch noises, but she loves saying 'papa' (Russian for Daddy) when playing, 'mama' when she needs something and 'haaaaai' when.. well, whenever she feels like it. Oh, and we hear 'brrr' a lot too.

Favorite activities.

• Jumperoo.
• Crawling (even in sleep!).
• Trying to get to cat food (must be very yummy!):

• Chewing on labels and tags.
• Trying to get to various cords and chew on them.
• Pulling on Mommy's and Daddy's hair.
• Looking out of the window (and licking it).
• Riding in a cart in the store:

• Chasing cats:

• Rolling a ball back and forth (she's actually rolling it back to me on her own).

There are a lot of other things to say and show, but this post has enough pictures and videos, so I should be done for now. :)

Solids

This has been yet another wondrous and exciting chapter of our journey as parents of our not-so-little baby girl!

It all started when she was about 5 1/2 months old. We got her a high chair and let her play in it at the table when we'd be having a meal (mostly breakfast since dinner happens after her bed time). Sophia's always been interested in objects and actions she hasn't seen before. She was intensely watching our spoons and cups going to our mouths and back, and food and drinks slowly disappearing from the table. From the look in her curious eyes we could tell she knew something important was happening, but she wasn't quite able to figure out what kind of mysterious ritual or game her parents were following or playing. Also, the certain funny shaped 'curved yellow fruit' constantly attracted her attention. So we decided it was the time to lift up the curtain and offer a tiny bit of banana to our banana girl. She tasted it, stopped to think about, tried some more and at the first opportunity she leaped forward and tried to grab the whole thing, actually biting off a small piece with her two little teeth. This was just the beginning.

For the next few days both Kyle & I found ourselves reading and researching lots of websites mentioning anything concerning the introduction of solids. The wholesome baby food website was especially helpful to us. Of course, always wanting the best for our precious little one we decided to take the healthy food route and chose yams as the perfect first food for baby. Somewhere I've read that at this stage infants just eat whatever you give them. Well, the pretty little picture I had in my mind of Sophia eagerly opening her mouth and happily swallowing whatever I offer her was cruelly shuttered to pieces by the incredibly adorable grimace that appeared on her face with the first taste of yams. She absolutely hated it. I think had I given her the most unripe and sour lemon that has ever existed she would've had less of a frown.

But it's not always that bad. You can see the precious faces she makes in the previous post.

Since then Sophia has been changing her preferences quite often but the consistent favourites are:

-bananas

-apples

-pears

-prunes

-banana and apple puffs

-acorn squash (most of the time)

-bread

-turkey

-whatever Mommy & Daddy are eating :) Turns out our little cutie loves company and when she sees us eating she could probably swallow an elephant without noticing. When she's on her own I have to come up with all kinds of tricks to keep her entertained so she doesn't get bored with food unless I'm trying to give something from the list above.

Sophia tolerates the following foods (especially mixed together with one of the items mentioned above):

-rice cereal

-home made quinoa cereal

-carrots

-commercially made peas

-chicken

-avocado

She absolutely hates:

-yams

-home made peas

-cream of wheat cereal (that has recently moved from the middle list into this one)

On a more serious note we got the Baby Brezza One Step Baby Food Maker for making all kinds of purees, which I absolutely love. Also, Krups Coffee Grinder has come in handy for making cereal at home.

Overall it's been lots of fun trying out new things and watching our sweetie pie grow:

Recently I've noticed that Sophia isn't interested in being simply fed. She wants to touch her food and try new textures. Once in a while I let her do it (luckily this time around she had some cereal with carrots and squash, so it doesn't look too disastrous. Though trust me, there was a lot of washing done after the picture was taken):

So we decided to try finger foods. Of course, at first it wasn't an easy feat, but Sophia braved it and soon enough she started eating puffs on her own and the percent of the pieces that actually make it into her mouth is increasing too. I'd say from 20/80 to 50/50 when she grabs them from the tray or 70/30 if she picks them up from my hand one by one. This weekend we stopped to have lunch at Specialty's Cafe & Bakery and since Sophia wasn't satisfied by puffs alone we gave her little pieces of bread and turkey that she excitedly picked out of Kyle's hand.

So the times when we were able to eat whatever we wanted are long gone. Our curious baby girl has discovered a whole new world of tastes and she is holding on to it for dear life! Imagine what's going to happen when she learns about chocolate and candy!

A completely unrelated to the topic of the post picture of our cute-heart that I cannot help sharing:

2012

Oh, boy... Has it really been that long? Sophia will be turning 7 months in two days!! I can't believe it. Some of the moments last so long when I'm waiting for Kyle to get home and let me have a bit of 'me-time' in the end of a long day or when we are taking turns trying to get Sophia to sleep in the middle of the night. But when I look back I still don't know how our tiny little baby girl has grown so much! I keep remembering the day when Sophia was about 5 days old and we were waiting at the lactation consultant's office. There was a lady with a baby boy who seemed to be so big. It turned out he was 2 months old! And now Sopia's almost 7 mo!

Well, it has been a long time since my last post. It was a very busy time too! Once again it was filled with lots of 'firsts'. Trying solid foods for the first time:

and drinking water from the glass;
first time standing on her own:

and crawling away on her back:

first Christmas stocking:

first stocking gift:

first gift under the Christmas tree:

 first yummy tissue paper:

 first Christmas photo with Daddy and Mommy:

 first Christmas tree:

 and first Christmas ornament:

Just two super cute photos in the swing:

to compare to almost 7 months ago:

More firsts:
first time flying:

first time meeting her grandparents in Moldova and first New Year:

first time meeting Father Frost who brought everybody lots of gifts:

first time sitting on her own:

first time walking with support but without pictures;
first rug:

And many other 'firsts'!
It's been a long time, but it's been a great time too!
Check out a wonderful post by Kyle that says it all!