In this last month…

Argh, been delaying blog posting again because I wanted to write about some of the cool day trips I did with my parents when they visited…..a month ago.  But so many fun things have happened over this last month and I better write them down before I forget:

• This isn’t new but Natalie loves saying bye bye all the time now.  As part of our bedtime routine, we change her, then mommy brushes her teeth, mommy gives her a kiss and leaves the room, daddy reads her the book, rocks her and puts her to sleep.  Lately though, after mommy brushes teeth, Natalie will just look at me and give me a dismissive “buh bye”.  Like, “okay you’re done, be gone”. Ha Ha.
• This morning, after she woke up, she just lay there babbling.  At one point, she started saying “bye bye” and waved at an invisible person over and over.  It was hilarious.  I caught it on video–forward to start around 45 seconds to see her start her bye byes.

• She’s getting better at going up and down the stairs via walking.  As long as she’s holding onto a railing, she can balance herself better now that she can do it.
• She’s really picking up on comprehension. We can open a book of animals and ask her to point at the cow and she’ll point at it.  Or, we’ll say “where’s the thing that says moo?” and she’ll also point at it.
• She’s slowly getting better at utensils.  I recently gave her a bowl of yogurt and a spoon and she fed herself the whole bowl!  It was messy but she did it.  We also gave her some eggs and a fork and she did pretty well with that.
• She’s tried actual sipping from a cup which she finds fun.  She’s also gotten better about drinking from the default plastic cups with straws that you typically get in restaurants for children.  She would previous just squeeze it or tilt it back like a sippy cup so it didn’t work.
• Signing manners — she can sign please and thank you now.
• At the playground, she’s really good about climbing up to the slide and then going down by herself.  It’s incredible.  Natalie is really a little climber.

• She can really pick up on words now — her current vocabulary includes: mama, dada, nat, katherine, mauer, please, more, no, bath, potty, yucky, peepee, wa wa (water), ba ba (dog), moo, apple, nana (banana), bunny, all done (she says this a lot), bye bye, hi, socks, shoes, baby…..I’m sure there’s more but you can see, it’s really incredible how many words she’s picked up recently!
• We’ve gotten her used to sitting on the potty now.  She doesn’t go at all — it’s too early for potty training but for now, we just want her to feel comfortable sitting on the potty.  We got her a Potty book and read it to her.  When she sees us go, she says “potty!” and “pee pee!”.  So she understands what’s going on.  Crossing fingers that this may lead to early potty training!
• Her sleep was really crazy in most of September….waking up 1-2 times a night, inconsolable and often sleeping in bed with us.  It was miserable.  This lasted for weeks…then suddenly, a few days ago, it stopped and she started to sleep through the night again…if not for longer! I’m talking 12-13 hours…even 14 hours one night (she slept in til 10am this last weekend!)  I swear there is a tooth there that I just can’t see that must’ve been causing her pain all this last month.

Anyway, that’s all I can think of for now — hopefully I’ll have time to write about recent day trips.