Upstairs Downstairs: February 2009

I'm sure that we all dream of raising children who are kind, considerate and generous. Erin, however, seems to have taken generosity a bit far. I had trouble getting her to eat any of her finger food yesterday for breakfast because she fed all of it to Duncan. Lucky dog.

In other news, Erin is now independently mobile. She will now army crawl with a great deal of protest. It's not pretty, but it gets her across a room. She has also continued to babble quiet a bit over the past few days. She's not talking all the time, but something definitely clicked this week. I'm back to work tomorrow to finish up 2 more weeks of adolescent medicine and then Erin and I are heading out to Portland again. We're hoping for better weather than we had for our last trip. I'm also starting to dread the plane ride. Any ideas how to keep a 10 month old happy on a plane for several hours?

I know that we are a bit late with this post as Erin is now almost 9 1/2 months, but better late than never. We have been without reliable internet for the last 6 weeks and have been so busy our eyeballs were spinning, but so I will celebrate our new cable internet and my current vacation with some updates.

Erin is starting to really assert her will. It's a very strange feeling to have the day dictated by the will of a 9 month old, but each day that is happening more and more. Before she had preferences, but it was pretty easy to distract her and redirect. Now, there is only the iron will of Erin. It is her way or screams and crying. The funny thing is that it's not always that easy to figure out what she wants/doesn't want and she has no way to tell me, so sometimes it's a lot of trial and error before we figure out exactly what the issue is. Life is certainly getting more interesting with Erin.

She continues to be a great eater. She'll eat almost anything and is getting really good at feeding herself bananas, pasta, cheerios, fruit, cheese or whatever else I've cut up for her. She seems to enjoy feeding the dogs almost as much as feeding herself and if the dogs are not right next to the highchair (a rare occurrence) she will refuse to eat until they have been called and she can see them. They adore her now that she routinely feeds them cheerios and offers her hands for them to lick. Luckily she seems immune to doggy germs and has stayed healthy despite the ingestion of a fair bit of dog drool.

Erin is mostly sleeping well at night. She sleeps through the night most nights and a few days ago I decided that we are done with nighttime nursing. I'm sure that this is more of a big deal for me than for her at this point, but I figured that I should take the opportunity that she'd given us and stop while she seems fairly indifferent. Erin's napping is less than ideal at this point. She's taking only 2 short naps and seems really tired by late afternoon. As a result, we've moved her bedtime earlier for the time being, but this is always tough to keep up when I'm working.

Erin desperately wants to be a girl on the go. She still refuses to crawl, or even think about crawling and many tears are shed each time I try to encourage it. So she remains non-mobile... or more correctly, non-mobile independently. She insists on walking with help everywhere and all day. She gets upset when we pick her up and is furious if we sit her down. She wants to walk with help, she wants to cruise with help and that's her activity of choice. She's getting pretty good at it and will take a few lunging "steps" between people and can pretty easily cruise along her crib or the coffee table. She can even walk from the couch, to the chair and then over to the book box without help. Of course, she prefers help, so we mostly do it holding hands. Whenever she wants help, she holds out her hand and looks for your hand to grab. She also decided that walking is not challenging enough on it's own, she must stoop to pick up books or toys and loves to try walking through Oscar or Duncan. Truly she thinks that she can move mountains.

Erin is becoming a bit more of a Lee girl. When she is intent on something, she sets her jaw and when she smiles she scrunches up her nose and grins, both expressions are similar to pictures of me at this age. She is also becoming a girl who loves her books. 90% of our day is spent walking in circles around the house or looking at books. She has a box of books in the living room and a shelf of books in her room and we go back and forth many times a day to look at the books. She has several favorites and could flip through some of them endlessly. She chooses books over toys and hands them to us to read to her. Sometimes she seems to just love to flip the pages, but definitely discriminates books she likes from ones she doesn't. It's difficult when we do not agree, but I'm hoping that her taste will mature and we can be done with Baby Faces.

We took Erin swimming for the first time last weekend. She had a blast and loved splashing and kicking her legs. Matt was upset that I bought her a one piece swimsuit/diaper without a top. He thought some other babies might get the wrong idea about what kind of girl she was, but we managed to keep them away.

Erin now has 3 teeth with another one on the way. She got her lower right and upper right before she got the lower left and looks like a jack-o-lantern. She has discovered that she can crunch her cheerios with her new teeth, but also enjoys recreational biting and is thrilled by grinding her teeth. My peds preceptor told me that all kids grind their teeth when they get them, but it is horrific. I'm hoping both the biting and the grinding will go away once the novelty of teeth wears off. Keep your fingers crossed.

I guess that's about it. We are looking into a few daycares, including one bilingual daycare, in anticipation that one of these days Jan, Dean and Laura will cut us off. Erin also wowed me today by babbling. She's been making more sounds for a few weeks now, but today was the first day that I would actually call it babbling. I'm very excited and hope that her language will start to take off soon.