Month of Milestones

It's been a very busy couple of weeks in our household. First off, we moved out of New Mexico and into our temporary location in Colorado. Thank goodness for "Hoodwinked," if not for that movie we would NEVER have gotten everything packed in time. Of course, I'm still an anal retentive cleaning person and was cleaning until nearly 2 am the night before we left and still was cleaning the next morning, courtesy of our cats puking on the carpets, the freshly shampooed carpets, during the night....have I mentioned they are for sale? Needless to say, I was a rampaging wacko and decided to drive one car by myself so as not to piss everyone around me off. It was a good decision and 3 hours down the road I was finally not annoyed with everyone around me. Three hours, a thunderstorm, and torrential downpour later and there was a lovely glass of wine in my hand and Grandma was entertaining the baby.

My daughter has been "cruising" on the furniture for months now. She started pulling herself up to furniture the moment she started walking and we were actually expecting her to walk much sooner. However, my daughter seems to be a perfectionist and started walking 3 days after Father's Day and 1 day before my birthday. It was a very nice present to see her zooming around on her chubby little legs. She is very proud of herself, but it has made traveling more difficult. She wants to walk everywhere and she no longer wants to hold your hand. Independent little thing wants to do it all by herself.

We are visiting my family in Alaska this week and the airplane ride was...interesting. We took a red eye because we thought she would pass out on the way up and stay asleep the whole trip. Which might have happened if the little girl sitting next to us would have let her sleep when I said, (Repeatedly)"I think we're going to try to let her sleep now..." and variations. She finally switched seats with her mother; who then turned on the seat light and proceeded to knit for an hour. I was a little pissy. It was past midnight and here she is knitting away all the while a child next to her is whimpering with exhaustion. To give her credit she didn't care that my daughter was making noises or occasionally kicking her...but she didn't turn out the light for a long time. So, a brief note to travelers...I have the right to be on this plane with a child. I also have a right to politely ask your older child to stop playing with my baby, and I have a right to politely ask you to turn off your light. Sigh...

I have a few friends who are pregnant or just had a baby and many of them are breastfeeding (YEAH!!), and they are all figuring out what is going to work best for them in terms of pumping, how long to nurse, when to introduce the bottle...etc. I said I would nurse my daughter until she was ready to stop or until she was about two. I nursed for a long time so I was very surprised when my daughter decided to just stop. She had been decreasing her demands for nursing gradually, but one day she just didn't request it at all. She would sign "milk" and I'd show her her milk cup, which she would snatch out of my hands and start drinking out of. That was that.

She's learning new signs too, which I love. She just started really picking them up when she turned a year. We had been signing with her for months, but she just kind of looked at us like we were crazy, then while in Toronto for a wedding she signed, "more milk, more milk" and then "all done/finished" when she had had enough. We were all a little bug-eyed at that one. She now signs: milk, all done/finished, food, please (still working on it a bit, she says it on someone else), change (new and learning it now), again, more, want, thank you (new and still learning)
She says: Puppy, baby, momma, dadda, and (sometimes) thank you

It's been a crazy month and it's only going to get more crazy as she starts to color with crayons, learns more signs, wants us to read her stories, and listens to music and dances.