14 months

Pancake is getting so big! She is thinning out and growing taller. She is starting to walk holding just one adult hand. She is more comfortable on her feet and more steady. In her own time she'll be walking unassisted. She also started crawling randomly. She prefers to crawl than scoot now.

She likes to feed herself with a spoon but she makes an incredible mess so I don't really let her do it. She has a bit of a temper now. If she wants to do something like feed herself, or play with a particular toy and she can't or I won't let her she throws the toy in outrage and whines throwing her head back. Doodle was much more easy going. When other kids would take toys away from him he would just find another toy to play with (he doesn't do this any more, but when he was younger he did). Pancake is already making it known to her big brother that he can't get in her face or grab things away from her.

She is still an extremely pleasant baby. She smiles at strangers where ever we go and they just eat it up. She has many more words, like hat, dadad (grandad), meow, apple. She says two and three word phrases on occasion. Lately she's been saying my daddy and my mommy. I don't know where that comes from. I know she doesn't understand the concept of a pronoun yet.

She is quite a good eater. She will sometimes pick around certain foods, but for the most part she eats whatever I give her. She's good at eating big chunks of food too. She chews really well and forces the bigger pieces down her throat without my having to interfere.

She's more adorable than ever. She loves going to get Doodle at school. She has a wide smile across her face whenever she sees him. She loves to splash in the bath and doesn't mind a bit when I pour water over her head to rinse out the shampoo. She has a good amount of hair now. The back is curly and long when you stretch it out. She's such a cutie pie.

pictures for my mom

Wearing Doodle's sunglasses

In their new summer PJs

See my foot? See the Cheerios half chewed in my mouth?

Off to a great start

Today when I was shaving my legs in the shower I heard a bang and glass shattering on the bathroom floor. Pancake had grabbed the candle off the window sill. I stopped the water, got out of the shower and tried to keep Pancake out of the way without stepping on glass myself. I cleaned up what I thought was most of it until Pancake handed me a huge piece of jagged-edged glass. I wasn't wearing my contacts and couldn't really see all of it. Luckily, Pancake didn't get hurt. I scooted her out of the bathroom and finished shaving my legs.

These kinds of distractions/incidents happen frequently around here making it difficult to get anything meaningful finished. Doodle has been in a terrible behavior phase -- destroying things on purpose, ruining books, throwing toys into the neighbor's yard, etc. . .

I haven't been writing because there really hasn't been anything interesting enough to write about.

some new pictures

At Mother's Day tea at Doodle's school. It was very cute. All the kids in the school sang five songs about how much their mothers mean to them. It was adorable.

Eating ice cream cones.

Running home during last week's t-ball game.

Batting practice before the game. Nice form eh?

13 months

I just re-read my post for Pancake's birthday and realized that she has changed so much in the past month. She walks while I (or Mr. D) hold her hands. She can cruise around a table but prefers to stand there and whine for someone to hold her hands to walk to whatever she's after. She has pulled herself up twice in the past week. She's making big strides toward walking independently.

She tries to put on her own socks and shoes by holding up her foot and limply touching her shoe/sock to it. Tonight after their bath she tried to put socks on Doodle. She babbles like crazy and says many many new words every day (sometimes only once). She knows the colors blue, orange and green. This afternoon I went into her room when she was in her crib and asked what happened to her pacifier. She promptly pointed through the exact slats she had dropped it through. Of course it wasn't out the side of the crib facing the room it was the side against the wall. So I had to remove the boxes of diapers and wipes under the crib and get on my belly to reach it.

She scoots over to the cabinet where we keep most of our food, takes out the box of graham crackers, opens it, opens the bag inside and helps herself to a snack. She's done this three times now. She enjoys rooting through my diaper bag and pulling out items, playing with them, then going back for more goodies.

She calls "daddy" throughout the day. I repeatedly tell her that he's at work. Sometimes Doodle answers for me. She loves books. She turns the pages (which she's done for a while) and has favorite books. This morning I was reading a book that she didn't want to hear so she closed it. I thought she may have unintentionally closed it so I re-opened it and kept reading. She insisted on closing it by whining and closing it tightly keeping her hand on it so I couldn't open it back up. Then she reached for the book she wanted to hear.

She has a baby doll named Penelope. She hugs her, rocks her, swings her in her baby swing and says whee, eats her head and feet, throws her on the floor, hands her to me so I can be her mommy too. If you ask Pancake where Penelope is she either points to her or scoots to get her.

In addition to the sounds that dogs and cows make she now does snake. There is a snake on the bottom of the curtains in her room and when I'm rocking her to sleep she'll take out her pacifier so she can say "sssss." She looks older too and I think she's starting to lose some of her belly now that she is moving around more. I'll try to find a representative picture to paste below.

I just browsed through my pictures and the last one taken of her was at the beginning of April. I am going to have to be better about photographing her. Poor second child.