Calliope at Fifteen Months

Trying to put her hat on by herself......And missing her head entirely.

(Note to current and prospective parents: It makes filling in pregnancy journals and baby books SOOOO much easier if you title your blog posts like this! I wish I had started sooner.)

My little girl is fifteen months old today! The months are flying by but life couldn't be more wonderful.

Calliope is walking pretty well now. The nanny says she's definitely walking more than crawling now. Crawling is probably still slightly faster, but I can that crawling is definitely on it's way out. Twice today I heard her coming down the hallway and was completely taken aback to see her walking instead of crawling.

Soon she will be running. Yikes!

I was worried I would be sad about this new step (no pun intended) towards independence, but it's actually quite the opposite. I'm really excited for her to be able to do more things for herself. I am eagerly looking forward to going for walks together without the stroller. Even if they are to the end of the block and back. Just a Mama and her girl, out for a stroll... sounds heavenly!

It does seem funny sometimes, though, to be holding hands as we make the sloooooow trek from the kitchen to her bedroom (all of twenty feet) when I could just as easily scoop her up and be there in a few seconds. But I think she's proud of her ability to move, and I want to foster that. And now she's starting to push my hand away and walk on her own.

She's just started trying to practice running... and what better place to practice than in the tub???

She loves being able to carry things around with her, which she obviously couldn't do when she was crawling. I think she carries things around the house on purpose just to show herself that she can.

On Monday, she walked and then crawled (she can't navigate the change from bumpy concrete to padded surface on her feet, still too unsteady) to the "big kid" play structure at the playground. I followed her over and watched as she pulled herself to standing at the end of the "big kid" slides\. I wasn't worried because I knew the slide was too high up for her to climb onto.

Until, moments later, she successfully climbed up on it. I moved closer and watched, astounded, as she scaled the "big kid" slide, reaching the top without any help from me, a height about level with the top of my head!

I was very nervous about her falling, but felt that she got there on her own so I had to respect her abilities.

I waited and hoped she wouldn't step off the side of the platform or attempt one of the ladders. Finally, she turned around and went down the slide on her belly, as she's been taught.
Video of Calliope climbing the slide, then sliding down, all without help

In other news, sleep suddenly shifted back towards twelve hours at night, after several beautiful weeks of thirteen hours each night! She is now taking a single nap at 11 or even 11:30.

The nap varies in length but probably averages a little more than an hour.

She started waking up earlier, so I've pushed bedtime earlier, a la Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child, and I think it might be helping a bit, but not entirely. But I've decided that after I nurse her, if it's before 7 am, she's going back to the crib to wait for 7. My concern is that if I let her get up earlier, she'll see all the rewards of waking up ever earlier. Her buddy gets up at 5:15 am sometimes! No thanks! She doesn't protest going back in the crib, and often goes back to sleep for a bit. After that, she sits quietly in the crib until I come and get her. I'm so grateful that she likes her crib and her own company.

Eating varies widely. She barely eats any dinner but generally eats a large lunch. Today I tried fresh breakfast sausage patties from the turkey guy at the farmer's market. She devoured them! This was a major victory because it's very hard to find meat she will eat.

Feeding her is generally challenging because she doesn't like very many foods... and previously beloved foods suddenly fall out of favor. She mostly refuses yogurt with me but will eat it with the nanny at snack time in lieu of the nursing with me.

She is still throwing food, often without reason (ie she is still hungry and still wants to eat whatever it is she just threw). Based on a suggestion from the SMC Forum, I'm getting her down from the highchair to pick up the food she threw, usually each time she throws something. It's annoying, but when I'm consistent, it does seem to help. (I'm trying to be 100% consistent... doing better this week.) The challenging part is that it's a lot of extra effort for me... especially when her hands are covered with peanut butter so I have to get the washcloth and clean her off before putting her down on the floor to pick up the food there... only to be replaced in the highchair to get messy all over again.

She is getting her first three molars, all at once.

Signs: She finally learned the sign for water enough to consistently use it. (I'm impressed that Shannon's Finn is learning 1-2 new signs a week! We have to up our game!). I'd love to work on "help me" for our next sign, as I'm hoping that could short circuit some toddler frustration which is already showing up in small doses.

She also signs "love" when I say "I love you" which is especially heart melting before I leave for work in the mornings.

In a very exciting development, she also just started combining signs, signing "more food" and "more water," both for the first time this past week.

She protests occasionally, now, about the nanny picking her up when she arrives. I know she loves the nanny and we are so fortunate to have such an amazing caregiver! But it sometimes makes me feel a little gratified that she likes me best! Until this school year, she seemed very happy to go to the nanny, though she was thrilled when I came home for the day. Now she's definitely happy to see me when I get home, and almost always crawls over, growling, to me for a hug, but her face doesn't light up in the same, "You came back! Oh, it's a miracle! Praise God, you came back!"

Calliope is not at all possessive (yet) with her toys, perhaps because she's always had to share them with our nanny-sharing baby, but the other baby, Eleanor, is sometimes quite affectionate with me at the end of the day and Calliope definitely does not appreciate this.

She continues to be very affectionate with me, and also loves to kiss Eleanor goodbye each afternoon, multiple times. Although she doesn't see Luna nearly as often, she was obviously enjoying kissing her as well! It's especially funny that Luna is 8 pounds heavier and several inches taller than Calliope, yet Calliope managed to knock her down with the force of her affection. (See photos, below.)

"C'mere and let me lay one on you!"

"Ooh, you're delicious!"

"How about a little open-mouth action?" 

(Luna seems noticeably unimpressed by Calliope's ardor.)

"Hey baby, just lie down and relax." 

"Ahh, now I've got you right where I want you." 

We are still nursing four times a day on weekends (waking, before nap, mid-afternoon (before "quiet time" if she has it), and bedtime. She does this thing where she makes this conversational-sounding "Hmm?" against my breast that makes me completely crack up. So she keeps doing it and I start silently shaking with laughter   (because I'm trying not to interrupt her nursing) until she pulls off and laughs uproariously along with me.

She loves to help me unload the dishwasher -- when she's not trying to crawl inside it -- by handing me the clean silverware, one piece at a time.

She got her first pair of shoes, after her first pair of boots weren't supportive enough and had to be returned. She is very proud of them and carries them to me from the hallway to show them to me. She also likes to be asked to bring them to me when it's time to get ready to go (we don't wear shoes in the house). And when I'm getting ready to leave for work in the morning, she brings me her shoes in hopes that she will get to go to work with me. Ah, that would be fun and entirely unproductive!

Words: She is also very proud of her new word, cat, which sounds like "gah!" I don't know why, but she always says it with emphasis. She also says ball, which sounds like "bah," and she says "bee-bee" all the time, which can mean baby, bye bye, and sometimes... I just don't know what it means. She also says "beep" when asked"what does the little blue truck say?"

She says "uh oh," only it sounds more like "eh oh."

"Me me" is another phrase I haven't yet decoded.

She understand the concept of "hot!" now -- I showed her the heating pipe in the bathroom (I wrapped it in insulated foam so it's not hot enough to burn her but it's hot enough to be unpleasant if she wasn't expecting it.) She was scared of it at first but now she understands the concept very well. So now she walks around asking "Ha?" (hot) before touching the radiators. Sometimes she blows on them, for good measure.

She says "yeh" and "nein nein nein" for yes and no. She loves to say hi, and I hear her practicing it in her crib. If I tell her we are going to see someone, she will practice until we see them... and then, of course, she falls silently. If she hears my phone beep with a message, she holds her hand to her ear, as if she was holding a cell phone, and says questioningly, "Hi?"

If I ask her to go get one of her favorite books, for example, Doggies, she can pick it out off the bookshelves just by looking at the spines of her very large book collection (mostly hand me downs). My friend's son did this (he's a month older than Calliope) and I was extremely impressed and thought there was no way that Calliope could do this... but lo and behold, she can!

She is very, very happy to read books on the potty, and can now climb onto the potty by herself, albeit awkwardly, but almost never produces anything while sitting there. At least, not for me. She does better with the nanny. We caught one pee during this entire three day weekend.

That said, I'm planning on trying a potty training bootcamp over the Christmas break. More on that in another post.