Dizzy Bug

Hope everyone had a fantastic turkey day! Ours was much smaller than usual, but I think we still cooked up as much food as we normally do when we have 4x as many people here. Little bug is now a huge help in the kitchen, and by help I mean that she wants to stir everything, pull on your legs to get picked up when you have raw meat on your hands, and no matter where she is in the house she can hear an oven door open that apparently she needs to run to.

I started letting her stir up the pies that I made the day before Thanksgiving. She did great stirring the pecan pie, but considering that it is mostly molasses and corn syrup she can't really toss too much out of the bowl. Then I was making a pumpkin pie so I decided to let her keep mixing. I was just telling daddy what a big girl she was turning into, when 'whap' she swung the spoon out of the bowl and slammed about a cup of the pumpkin pie mixture all over my pants. That ended her culinary career (this week anyway).

She has a new trick that apparently goes into hyper-drive when she gets a lot of sugar in her system (i.e. letting her eat out of the dairy whip can). She likes to spin around the living room in a circle until she gets so dizzy that she'll stare at the carpeting (I think it is to see the flowers move in her self-induced hallucinogenic trip). Since she is standing still to stare at the carpeting she invariably falls down. This would be entertaining since our furniture is soft and child proof, but the hardwood floors aren't. So as soon as we see dizzy bug in action, we run over to get in the catching position to make she doesn't take an off-carpet dive.

I thought that part of the spinning and staring at the floor was because she was obsessed with her new Dora slippers that we got her because her socks were sliding all over the floors, and she pulled off the gripper socks whenever we'd get them on her. But apparently she'll spin in Dora slippers or without.

Little bug had a great time today running all over the house and watching football while she tightly gripped her own football as if she was going to get called into the game somehow.

Got the Moves

Rocking out to Hannah Montana means we have to come up with a dance routine. Little bug's dance moves consist of every move she knows how to do done in various sequences. She stomps her feet, waves her arms around, does "head, shoulders, knees and toes", then spins in a circle. Repeat. I think she is now qualified to work alongside Paula Abdul.

Clean Up...Not So Much

After continuously watching little bug tear the house apart night after night, I decided that I'd teach her to clean her toys up after herself. Yes, all of you experienced parents can start laughing now.

I figured I've been picking up after her for almost 16 months, so she should be ready. Plus she likes putting things into bags, so a win-win, right? Here's how it went down. Before I put little bug to bed, she had pulled everything out of the lower two shelves of our kitchen cabinet and had tossed/stacked/hidden items all over the living room and dining room. I picked up a few things and then showed little bug how she could put the paper packets of grits back in their box. She put one in and I cheered for her, so she ran and got another one, cheer, that's when she figured out how to outsmart the system.

She would put the packet of grits halfway into the box and I would prematurely cheer for her, then she'd pull the packet out and run around the kitchen island. She'd run back to me and repeat the cycle. Needless to say, the rest of the evening went the way she prefers, which is her watching as I pick up the rest of her mess.

From Worst Audience to Best!

Back when little bug was a baby we used to tell her our jokes/sarcasm and she would just stare at us. I would always tell daddy that she was my worst audience ever. That has all changed with the phase she is in now. If you laugh, she laughs like she doesn't want to be left out of the joke. Today she was in her car seat and daddy and I were talking, I laughed at something he said and we heard giggles from the back seat. Too funny.

We took her to the aquarium today which was nice and uncrowded. I think a lot of folks are starting to hit the malls. Daddy dropped us off at the front since it was cold, and when little bug and I walked into the aquarium she yelled, "whoah" and took off running to the wall of fish. She kept pointing to the fish and giggling. Then after a few minutes she realized that daddy wasn't with us. So she started yelling, "da-da!". I picked her up and walked her back to the main entrance so she'd see him as soon as he walked in.

Then I realized as people were giving me strange looks, I'm holding a kid that looks nothing like me and she's yelling for her dad as I inch us back to the main entrance. I'm sure security had a camera focused on me if I took a run for it. Luckily daddy walked through the door and she ran for him and then pointed out all the fish again.

When we were having dinner tonight, we had biscuits that little bug likes as a side. Once they hit the table, she kept pointing and whining that she wanted them - not understanding that they were too hot. She finally started yelling, "pan, pan" and pointing at the bread. She didn't think it was funny this time when we starting laughing at her barking commands to us in Spanish.

Jumping Bean

Last night when daddy was leaving to go to class, we stood by the window to wave goodbye. Once his car had left and was out of site, little bug said "bye-da". She was a dancing, jumping and running machine. She ran around our kitchen island four times, and then she said 'whoah' and sat down as if she wore herself out.

We had a big dance party jumping around the living room and then she bounded up the stairs and made me close the gate behind her. When I take her upstairs to go to bed, I tell her to say, good-night fish to our fish tank. Tonight she closed the gate to the stairs, turned around and said, 'bye-fish'.

Too Cool

Little bug is doing much better and is back to tearing the house apart. She's sleeping now but still waking up in the middle of the night just enough to make daddy and I look like zombies. Hopefully she'll get back to sleeping through the night again quickly!

Now that her legs are longer, she has perfected the art of clinging to your waist so you can't put her down. I can walk around the house without even holding onto her, and she clings to my neck and wraps her legs around my waist. Cute, until you try to lay her down to change a diaper.

When I kiss her good-bye in the morning she now puts one arm behind my head, and her other arm around daddy's neck and she makes us kiss each other. Then she laughs as if it grosses her out.

I've also realized that she's getting too cool for us. She was standing on the fireplace, singing Hannah Montana songs so I stood next to her and started singing and dancing. She looked at me like I was crazy, and she shoved me off the ledge. I've already started embarrassing her. Success.

Sleep Deprivation Weekend

Thursday night/Friday morning little bug woke us up at 1 am after she had gotten sick in her crib. She got sick all over her sleep sack, sheets, and daddy since he had picked her up. We put her in bed with us, but no amount of brushing her teeth and changing her clothes could get rid of the stench so we put new sheets on her bed and put her back down by herself. Daddy stayed home with little bug on Friday.

During the day she acted fine, except that she wasn't eating. Not even pot stickers for lunch when we went to a Chinese restaurant with friends. Little bug usually can eat her weight in anything that resembles a dumpling, so we knew there was something wrong. She was up crying a little bit on Friday night and then moped around the house most of the day on Saturday, again, not eating. I called the doctor's office and the nurse said I was around the 10th caller with the same symptoms, it was only 9am. We gave her pedialyte which she hated - so we switched her over to lactose free milk to try to not upset her tummy.

Then Saturday night she decided to wake up every few hours and cry unless we were holding her, and she was out of her bed. We finally got her to go to sleep in our bed, but that means random kicks to the ribs. Needless to say, I'm thankful that she's feeling better today and I have my fingers crossed that she'll sleep tonight.

On a lighter note, she's figured out how to climb onto the couch by herself. I was doing dishes and usually can let her run around without checking on her. She was quiet (never good), so I looked in the living room and she was laying on the couch staring at the ceiling. She didn't like the 'here's how to get off the couch' lesson as much as she likes climbing up on it. She also learned how to take off her sleep sack. I went to get her up from a nap since I heard her talking to herself and walked into her room to find her standing up, talking to her stuffed bear, with her sleep sack folded up in the corner of her crib.

Duck, Duck, Duck... Goose!

Or at least that is what I tried to teach little bug to say tonight. It sounds more like "uck, uck, AHH" - but she got the concept down. Tonight was ladies night since daddy was off at class, so the house looked like a tornado that met up with a hurricane after a landslide hit it by the time I put her to bed.

I think her favorite "game" tonight was pulling the coffee filters out of the box, and throwing them through the baby gate to see them float down the stairs. Between that and jumping around in our recycle box of bottled water bottles the night was a success.

Now that she is around an 8-month old during the day (the nanny is branching out), little bug has started trying to get more attention. She'll fake fall on the ground and try to catch your attention. If you don't look, she crawls around like a baby and tugs on your pants to get picked up. Then in the next minute she wants to sing Hannah Montana songs. She's already conflicted at 15 months.

Little Bug's Choice

When we put little bug to bed each night, she gets to pick a toy out of her toy box to sit with her while we read her a bedtime story. She stands there and stares at her toys for the longest time each night, and you can see the wheels turning inside her head trying to figure out which toy she wants.

Recently she's been picking a little dress that a friend of mine made for one of little bug's dolls. Little bug doesn't pick the doll, she just wants to sit with the dress.

And last night she picked a box top. If this trend continues, this will save us a lot of money on toys this Christmas.

Trickery

To celebrate Halloween, little bug had a doctor's appointment. I thought she was just getting a flu shot along with her normal check-up, but I forgot that she was getting another MMR shot, whoops! Her Halloween started off with a big trick, a shot in each leg! But she's doing great, she's 31.5" tall (in the 75th percentile for height) and 21 lbs 15 oz (putting her in the 25th percentile for weight). So we need to feed her some more dim sum to chunk her back up again!

After the doctor's appointment she got a nice treat - chicken nuggets from Chick-Fil-A which is the only way she'll eat chicken. Then we went to our friend's house to dress her up and let her play with the girls. She's skipped right over the Elmo phase and wants to do exactly what the older girl's do - which is sing & dance to Hannah Montana songs. So we all chased each other around the front yard for a while and then let them have a dance party.

We headed to Chili's around the corner for dinner, and little bug was playing with the coasters. She kept handing them to the waiter while he was trying to take our order. Then she tossed her arm over the side of the high chair and leaned back, nodding her head as she checked out the restaurant like she owned the place. She looked like a big pimpin' little ballerina.