G’n'R Out West

We’ve had a fun couple of days, visiting with friends and enjoying the winter.  Adelle has really gotten very stable outside now and is actually enjoying the winter snow a bit.  It is really neat to see, since prior to the last few days she was pretty immobile in her snow gear and although she was ok to be outside, she wasn’t really enjoying it.  Yesterday we met with my friend Janet and her 3 dogs, and Adelle had an awesome time chasing the dogs, watching the birds and making footprints in new snow.

Today we took off to the mountains to try out snowshoeing with our friends Heather and Andrew, and a few of their friends.  It was awesome, it had been a long time since I’d done it, and I don’t think Greg ever had.  It was hilarious fun.  Adelle did quite well, despite being totally immobilized by so many layers or clothes.

Here is Adelle just before we left for the snowshoe, she is very strong minded when it comes to her clothes these days, and her little rubber boots, despite being a size too big, are a must!

Heather and I all bundled up for our little adventure

Adelle has really gotten into pretending.  One of her new pastimes is changing her baby’s diaper.  This one was particularly funny because she put the change pad up on a stool making the manoeuvre that much more difficult.  The only downfall to the diaper changing is that she is really into keeping the house clean and putting dirty things in the garbage…because of this we have to watch very carefully that none of the diapers dirtied by her dolls end up in the garbage!

We had such a fabulous Christmas.  I have just gotten back from the airport to drop off my dad.  We will miss him so much…especially Adelle who really got attached to her Bampa. 

Christmas Dinner was really fun.  My cousins were over and Adelle had a great time.  She and her cousin Luca made us all laugh at dinner.  All the adults were still eating, and they had finished, so they took off to the bottom of the steps and had an in depth conversation about something upstairs.  They kept pointing and talking gibberish to each other.  They really sounded like they were having a serious discussion.  Here is a little shot of the two of them playing with baby Aidan’s car seat…luckily baby Aidan was nowhere near it!!!

Adelle got VERY attached to my cousin Kevin.  It was hilarious.  She just wanted to be near him.  She wasn’t jealous when I spent time with Kevin’s baby Aidan…but when Kevin spent time with his baby…Adelle tried her hardest to get in between them.  She even started calling Kevin Mama…it was hilarious…poor Kevin.  He has a tiny little baby to take care of AND Adelle demanding his attention.

Goofing off with Grandpa Gary

Just being cute.  And also, Adelle is really into taking her clothes off all the time.  I have no clue where it came from.  Last night she actually got her shirt up over her head by herself…but she got stuck on the sleeves.  Soon she will be able to figure it out.

Apparently, while I was out yesterday Adelle did some cooking.  This consisted of Adelle putting a bunch of pots on the counter and saying ‘co-co, co-co’.  I am told it was totally adorable.

Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas.

This one will be short on words, since Adelle is napping and we are madly preparing for our Christmas dinner with my cousins.

My dad has been here the last few days and we’ve had lots of fun with him.  As an early Christmas present to my dad Adelle learned how to say Grandpa…sounds sort of like Bampa.  It is really cute. 

We bought Adelle a little kids table and set it up in the kitchen last night.  She came down this morning and thought it was really great.  Lots of oohs and ahhs.  She has already spent a fair bit of time sitting at it both colouring and cooking.

Here is Adelle sitting at her new table, there are a few interesting things to take  note of in this photo.  First off, her legs are crossed at the ankles, Adelle legs are almost always crossed at the ankles…even when she is mad.  If she uncrosses them when she is mad…you know you are really in for it.  Second, she is putting her crayons away.  So far, I have learned the crayons are much more fun to dump out and put back, then to write with…I guess we all have our own hobbies.  The last thing you should take note of is the two unwrapped presents.  Adelle absolutly refuses to open either one.  She definitely has more self control than I do!!!

Adelle feeding her baby that Nana (Greg’s Nana) gave her.  She takes great pride in giving the baby a bottle…even if her technique leaves a little something to be desired.

Another interesting technique.  Adelle’s Auntie Celeste gave Adelle her first pet dog…likely the closest thing she’ll ever have to a pet dog anyway.  She was really into it at first until it scared her a bit because it moved faster than she thought it would.  Mostly she likes it when we chase her around with it…she especially likes to get caught. 

Unwrapping gifts with Bampa.

I know a few of you were pretty anxious to see Adelle at Christmas…so I thought I’d do a quick post and let everybody know how much we miss them!!!  Lots of love to everybody we love who is far away from us today. 

It seems like she is all grown up….sigh.  She is in that sponge mode, seems like every day there is something new.  It is really fun.

She is so loving and wonderful.  Our girl loves daycare and  has really settled in.  She will reach for her teachers when we walk in the room, and she hardly ever says goodbye to us, as she has too many other things to take care of to worry about her parents.  At the end of the day, I usually see her before she sees me, so I get to watch her secretly at daycare for just a few minutes.  When she does finally notice me she gets so excited that whatever is in her hand gets thrown across the room, and she comes running, chanting ‘mama mama mama’.  I don’t think life gets any better than that. 

…but like anything, there are exceptions:
1)  If she is eating a treat when I come to get her, she is initially excited to see me, but she ensures that she gets every last crumb of her treat into her mouth before running over.  She eats it frantically though, and I can tell that she is torn between eating the treat, and having a hug.   One of life’s complicated dilemmas.
2) If I take her to daycare before 8am: If I take her to daycare before 8 am she has to hang out in the 19 months + room until 8am. She is also in this room after 4pm.  In the afternoon, she is perfectly happy in the room.  Before 8 she usually cries when I drop her off.  She cries even if her regular daycare worker is there.  They know she is like this now, and if I do drop her off before 8 they usually take her into her regular room with a few other kids and she is perfectly happy with any of the daycare workers in there.  I am grateful that they are so accommodating. 

Sleep:
The first half of the month sucked because she wasn’t sleeping well and she was grumpy all day and she looked terrible.  I got all stressed out about it…and just when I started to get stressed, she started teething, then got the flu…all the while sleeping 15 hours a day.  It is ridiculous.  Anyway, the last week we are back to normal, mostly sleeping through the night, but Greg and I are lucky to get the occasional night time snuggler in our bed.  The last few times she’s come to bed with us, she has slept really well.   

Napping is still going great - we are so fortunate to have such a great sleeper. 

Eating:
She is either eating everything in site, or we are having a food stand off.   Or that is how it seems these days.  One day she will refuse to eat our meal, so she will eat nothing until bedtime snack.  The next night we will offer her something we know she will like (because we don’t feel like another battle), and Greg and I will have leftovers of the meal she refused the night before.  Of course, that is when she will eat her meal and then beg us for what she turned her nose up at just the night before.  Sometimes I get so irritated.  I know most parents have much worse food battles, so I know that I am lucky, but that doesn’t console me when I feel like she is doing something just to watch my reaction.  Last week we had our friend Reema over for dinner.  Adelle asked Reema for her carrots, Reema obliged and Adelle ate carrot after carrot.  I can not even remember the last time I was able to get that kid to eat a carrot…arg.

Getting Around:
She is the boss of everything at her level.  This month she has slowly started to tackle climbing.  She isn’t too adventurous (lucky for us), but she can sometimes climb up onto the rocking chair by herself.  She will also stand on her little stool, or her little ride on toy and look at us as proud as she can be. 

Hair:
Way too much of it…and I have no clue what to do about it, or with it.

Eyes:
Mostly brown…sometimes green.

Language:
She knows tons of words now.  Her favorite is owl.  She must love the way it feels in her mouth when she says it.  You can tell she enjoys it when she says it.  Last night Greg said a bad word and she imitated the intonation…but not the word thankfully.  We have to clean up our act around home if we don’t want her saying certain words that on occasion slip out of our mouths!!!

We were at a friends house the other day and they noticed that most of Adelle’s words were B words.  They said one of their children was like this as well.  It is funny, when you think about it.   Although she does have a number of non B words, most of them do start with B and mostly they sound alike.  That is, if you don’t have the finely tuned ear of a parent and a little context to rely on. 

The one funny word that is a B word, but she doesn’t even attempt to say properly, is bird. She still says ‘ga’ no matter how many times we say bird to her.  We say bird and she repeats ga quickly and looks at us all proudly like as if she just replicated the word we’d said exactly.  Interesting.

Personality:
She has had a bit of a hard month with being sick and teething.  But she is usually a joy to be around.  She makes us laugh everyday.  She loves to talk to us and she will often join in if we are laughing at a joke. 

One of her favorite passtimes these days going through her baby book.  There is a picture in it of her kissing our friend’s dog.  It is her favorite picture in the whole book.  She will ask us to get the book out and then wait VERY impatiently as we flip to her favorite page.  Then she’ll woof for a while while she enjoys her favorite picture.  I think I’m going to make her her very own picture book with family, friends, and of course, her beloved dogs. 

Stuff that happened this month:
- she got 3 of her one year molars (but is still missing on of her bottom front teeth
- she started to growl when you get impatient
- she developed a passion for putting things back..I’m hoping this one sticks with her for a while

Adelle shows us her FAVORITE Christmas decoration, a ‘ga’ as she calls it.  Adelle is quite interested in the tree, but also very careful.  She thinks gifts are really great.  She even opened one while we weren’t paying much attention…luckily for me, it was one of mine….thanks for the socks Ron and Fran!
 

Our little naked baby, she requested her clothes ‘off-off’ yesterday

We’ve started to give Adelle a snack of yogurt each night before bed.  She has started to become a bit picky in the evenings and so we often have a hard time getting her to eat a proper meal.  So after we put on her pjs she has a little snack of yogurt and then it is off to bed.  Tonight I asked her if she was ready for yogurt, she got excited, nodded and said ‘o-yog’.   So I said yogurt again and she smiled and said o-yog again.   My heart melted at the cuteness.  Sometimes I just can’t handle it. 

These past few days Adelle has really become a bit of a chatterbox.  I’ve always considered Adelle a fairly chatty child…although I admit I don’t really know that that is an unbiased assessment.  However, that aside, something has seriously changed in the last few days.  She has gone from speaking to us on occasion to having these serious indepth conversations with us.  It has been really fun having these conversations with her.  She seems pretty happy to talk to us and doesn’t appear irritated at all that we have no clue what she is talking about.  Although, every now and again she throws in one of her one word commands and gets irritated with us pretty quickly if we can’t figure out what it is she wants.  This irritation brings me to another little development.  The growl.  Yes, our daughter has learned to growl.  We figure she learned it at daycare.  One of the main advantages of daycare is that we can take full credit for each of her wonderful new developments, and those we are less impressed with we can just blame on the daycare.  If she gets frustrated or upset with us these days she growls.  Greg is not overly impressed with the growling…I still find it a bit funny, but it is slowly wearing on me too!

Some cute stuff:

‘Oh no’ - Adelle now says “oh no” if something doesn’t go exactly right, like she knocks her milk over at the table….again with the cuteness!

‘Go’ - She has also started saying ‘go’, which actually means, ‘where did it go?’.  That one took us a really long time to figure out.  I am sure Adelle is pleased that we have finally caught up to her…..sometimes it feels like she is 300 steps ahead of us.

Adelle had a great weekend.  She had been sick most of last week, so it was great that she was feeling well and we were able to really have a fun weekend.  She only ended up making it to daycare once all week.  We have been complaining and worried about her sleeping for so long, and as soon as she got sick she started sleeping like crazy.  Including sleeping through barfing in the middle of the night.  How sad is that?  I wished she would have woken up and let us know she was an old puke baby. On 3 occassions we never heard a peep from her all night, and when we went to get her in the morning she had puke on her.  One morning Greg described it as a puke mohawk…which apparently was the most disgusting thing he’d ever seen.  I was lucky enough to be at work for that little event.  Thank you Greg for dealing with that one.

So the last few days Adelle has been so clingy and needing to be carried around the house.  It has been quite draining.  Saturday I put her down for her nap and when I went to get her, she threw up, then smiled and started laughing.  After a quick bath she had one more little bout and then starting running around the house having a grand old time.  She required very little help or even attention from us.  She came back over to me once that afternoon for a cuddle and a third barf, and then she was merrily on her way again.  She spent the rest of the day being very happy and energetic.  She never had a fever or acted even remotely needy.  Very odd. I guess finally being able to throw up must have made her feel much better. 

Saturday night she slept soundly through the night.  When we got her up in the morning we noticed she had a tiny little puke at some point in the night, but it was all dried up…so sad. 

She had a great morning and a great nap on Sunday.  When she woke up we decided to take her to our company Christmas party, as she appeared to be healthy.  I am glad we went.  She had such a great little time.  They had so many activities for the kids (swimming, skating, crafts, balloon animals, fancy tattoos, characiture artists, a kids play room with foam floor and all kinds of fun crash mats and play structures, a bouncy castle and a bunch of gym equipment).  We decided not to bother with the swimming or skating because Adelle wasn’t feeling that great.  Despite that we still managed to stay very busy for 3 hours!  I think next year we will definitely go swimming as we had a peek at the pool and it is huge, with a wave pool and all kinds of fun slides and a big jungle gym.  It was pretty cool. 

The highlight of Adelle’s day was going in the big bouncy castle.  She was interested as soon as she spotted it and we spent some time watching the older kids bounce around.  She wanted to go in, but it was kind of dangerous in there.  At one point it emptied out and the woman operating it came over and asked us if we wanted to take Adelle in there while it was quiet.  WOW was Adelle ever excited.  Greg stood at the window and Adelle BEAMED while she walked over to him.  It was so cute, she was so proud. 

Greg’s proudest moment, of course, was when Adelle asked to ride on the bike.

 We also had a quick visit with Santa at the party, however, Adelle would have preferred if we’d passed on that activity!

Adelle was sick again last night at about 5am.  We couldn’t get her back to sleep after that…but she was very happy, so no complaints.  I decided to stay in with her today.  We’ve had a fun day of goofing around home and playing in the snow.    We ran around a bit and went to the park for a while.  She wasn’t too into the snow, but is ok in her snowsuit and is able to get around fairly well…but mostly she just prefers to be carried…unless I am shovelling in which case sitting and laughing at me takes up most of her time.  I am not sure what exactly was so funny about me shovelling, but it was really cute how hilarious she thought it was.  I also was lucky enough to get all kinds of her help while I shovelled…so it took up a fair bit of our morning! I love it when our little girl wants to help…even if it does slow things down just a tad. 

She had a great day, we vacuumed in the afternoon which was a big hit.  Normally she is responsible for pushing the canister for me (she is a seriously good helper).  Today she branched out and decided to actually do some of the vacuuming.  Meant I had to pull the canister around by myself, however, she was pretty proud of her new found skill so it was worth it!

Hopefully no puking tonight.  Greg is also sick…so hopefully I won’t be getting it next!

…and that is irritating.

So the last few days I have been really stressed out by Adelle’s new night time party routine.  She is always in a good mood when she wakes up and there seems to be nothing we can do to get her to settle apart from just keeping her company until she gets tired. 

It has been a bit worrisome because she looks really bad in the morning with big bags under her eyes.  It is quite sad really.  Anyway, I started to get set up to start looking at some alternatives to help us all get better rested…

Just when all this is happening Adelle comes home from daycare a total mess screaming and we can’t get her to eat.  It is very clear to us she is in pain so we give her some Advil to help out with the 3 new molars she is working on.  We calm her down, she eats, we put her to bed and she sleeps soundly the entire night, despite the fact that the Advil probably wears off around midnight which is a good hour before her usual wakeful period.  This has now happened three nights in a row.

Why exactly would she be sleeping better when she is teething?  I swear, she does this stuff just to make my life difficult. 

Adelle I love you, but why must you always do the exact opposite of what I think you are going to do?

Adelle is obsessed with putting things back these days.  I think I forgot to mention in my last post that another one of her words is ‘back’.  It sounds an awful lot like block and book and button and sometimes baby…so you really have to be paying attention to the context.  Pronunciation aside she really means back when she says it.  She loves to put spoons back in the drawer, cups back up on tables, her toothbrush back into the cup, cloths back into the drawer…and yesterday her pjs back on.

I had to wake her up the other morning to take her to daycare before work.  She was all cozy and snugly in her fleece pjs.  I took them off and she gave me a dirty look.  After getting dressed she went over to the dirty cloths, grabbed her pjs and handed them to me saying ‘back-back’.  When I said no she tried to put them on herself.  It is so sad to rush her off to daycare in the mornings.

Some days Adelle thinks she is so funny.  Recently she discovered that sitting on her dad face got a pretty desirable reaction…so she keeps on doing it!
 

Anyway, last night she was only awake for 1 1/2 hours (from 3-4:30).  That is much better than the few nights before that.  Lets hope we continue the good trend and we get a good nights sleep tonight…and yes it can be a trend after just one day…if you want it bad enough!!

Adelle finally got some molars!!!  Yay!  She had some rotten nights, grouchy days and on Friday she had really bright red cheeks.  We checked yesterday and she had her top left molar, today she has all of them but her bottom right.  She still only has 7 teeth in the front - 4 teeth on top and only three on the bottom still. 

We’ve had lots of rough nights in the last few weeks, perhaps it was the teeth.  She never seemed in a lot of pain…so she never got Advil…she just wasn’t sleeping.  I now wonder if she would have slept better with a little Advil.  It is always such a challenge trying to decide when to give her drugs.  We did actually try to give it to her one night and she was up for another 1.5 hours after the Advil, so after that I never thought to give it to her again.  Who knows, maybe the sleepless nights and the teeth have nothing in common.

The good news is that last night she slept from 8pm until 7:30 am.  So whatever happens tonight at least we have one great night’s sleep behind us.  Those always feel so good.

Adelle has some new words:

Poo-Poo: we never say it ourselves, but they must say it at daycare.  She LOVES to say it.  She will often say it and point at her bum (especially during a diaper change).  I don’t think she knows what it means, as there appears to be no correlation to that word and her actually having a bowel movement.  I think she thinks it means bum or maybe diaper.

Co-Co: She also says co-co which means cooking.

Hi: has been used as a greeting for a period of time, but now is also used to indicate the phone. 

Owl:  this is a big one because tonight we were reading a book we’ve read a million times.  We got to the page with an owl on it and Adelle pointed to it and said ‘owl’ before I did.  It was pretty cool.   For the last number of months she will say ‘ga’ when she sees a bird, or a picture of a bird and ‘woof’ to a dog or a picture of a dog, but those seemed to be the only things she could identify.  This is certainly a new development.

Another interesting thing to share is that we had worked so hard a few weeks ago to help Adelle to ask us politely when she would like something (instead of just screaming at us).  Well our work has paid off!!!  She now walks around the entire house saying ‘helpa’ about 42 times a day.  It is pretty cute.  She often will just use it when she needs attention.  She will ask for help, and then when you go over to her you can see the wheels spinning while she tries to think of something to need help with.  She will also say it when she wants to be picked up.  Anyway, it is a much nicer way of asking for help, so I am quite enjoying this little phase.

Adelle is really into drawing these days.  It is really cute.  We don’t have a very good set up for her to draw so she doesn’t do it often at home…but apparently she is quite the little artist at daycare.  We are getting her a little kids table for Christmas that I am hoping will make it easier for her to pursue her new hobby!