This past weekend, we found something that doesn't exist in California: an empty soccer field. (Although LA has plenty of empty basketball courts - a rare find in the south).*
So we let Leah run wild. She had the best time, and spent most of this time running away from us. Since there weren't many people around, we didn't feel the need to chase after her, and she had a blast. (She also slept incredibly well that night...I think we'll be finding empty soccer fields a lot more often).
As a product of preschool, she also is a bit of a social butterfly. She has no problem walking straight up to any kid on the playground. It's fun to watch the Peanut hold her own out there.
Leah is walking really well these days. So for those of you who haven't seen Leah in a little while, enjoy these clips.
*Editor's Correction: L.A. does not have plenty of empty basketball courts. They are filled with skateboarders.
Leah took her first official steps on Labor Day - September 3rd, 1 week before her 14-month birthday. She'd taken a step here and there for about a week when we tricked her into it, but on this day she began stringing them together.
Yesterday was the first day we could get her to walk between something other than 2 people. (The book "Brown Bear, Brown Bear" seemed to do the trick...she loves sliding the little windows). Tonight, she surprised us by suddenly walking halfway across the room to AA. She's getting better and more confident each day. But we tend to wear her out "practicing" - she certainly lets us know when we've hit the limit.
This is Leah playing with her first balloon back on her 1st birthday. It's the only toy she has that takes weeks to wind up on the floor rather than seconds. I was actually impressed that, after she figured out that she needed to grab the string, she figured out how to hold the string.
We think Leah has been trying to say some words the past couple of months. I don't think we can count any as "first words" yet, but it's fun to watch her imitate us. So far, here's what we think we've heard:
Wetbar (I swear I heard it once)
Touchdown (after we practiced with her for months)
Thank you
Sfoot (what a genius...making up her own words)
Dumb (which she said emphatically about 2 inches from BA's face while staring at him and waiting for her bottle to heat up...thanks Leah)
Big girl
Uh-oh (well, more "uh" than "oh" but still)
Where's Nana?
Peek-a-Boo (ok, it's more of a grunt when she's peeking at us from around the kitchen door frame, but it's cute, so we'll take it)
And she's been trying to sing with AA, which is pretty funny. She's been practicing the Queen's aria from The Magic Flute. Good luck with that, Peanut.
We think she also tried to say "blog."
So if you've got a spare 3 minutes on a Friday and you want to see a smiley, flirty, happy, curious, clapping, tissue-pulling, diaper-wearing, just-another-day-hanging-out-at-home, grunting-when-I-concentrate Peanut, then enjoy this clip. And listen for "blog" about halfway through.
We enjoyed celebrating Leah's first birthday all last week. We are fortunate to have friends and family who care about Leah so much. Some presents started arriving during the week, and Leah loved opening them up. See how excited she got?
First present to arrive, all the way from California from Auntie Kristen
The Peanut loves styrofoam peanuts! She just pops them in her mouth like they are nothing...doesn't even stop to think about it. The more we try to stop her, the more determined she is to get her baby paws on them and munch away.
And she's really learning how to tear into some gift wrap! Check out the stance she picked for maximum gift-opening leverage as she really puts her back into pulling the wrapping paper off....
Saturday was her official first birthday party, and it was a wonderful event, full of family and "firsts." We grilled hamburgers and hot dogs. Leah had her first cheeseburger, and ate it like it was a plate of black beans (the girl loves black beans for some reason). We paused for a thank you to everyone for coming and their help/support during Leah's first year, especially Leah's grandparents.
We owe thanks to many folks, but we shared examples of what each grandparent has done for us this past year. They are worth repeating:
Grandma: AA's mom was there from the beginning...I believe she arrived on day 3, while we were still trying to figure out which end was up. She cooked for us and held Leah while we tried to get organized and adjusted. She was up first thing every morning to take over so we could get some sleep, and she stocked our freezer before she left. She's kind of like James Bond in the kitchen...give her a paperclip and a battery, and she'll whip up a salmon salad. This past week, she's been watching Leah so we wouldn't have to send Leah back into the germ pool known as daycare, which would derail AA's already-behind-schedule studies.
Granda: AA's dad was a huge help too. I think he's been thrown up on most out of all the family members, and he took it all in stride. He took night shifts and early morning shifts, and I know he did some grocery shopping for us too. Early one morning, I walked out of our room and he said, "You see that burp cloth over there? Bring it to me now. I just changed my first diaper in 30 years." So how does it compare to riding a bike, Wayne?
Nana Wanda: AA's stepmom cooked great southern food for us and took a few night shifts too. She raided our fridge for Dr. Pepper, then stayed up holding Leah all night long in the dark. I'll never know how Wayne and Wanda rocked Leah all night long in pitch darkness, but somehow they did. And one day, Wanda told us to "get lost" so she could deep clean our apartment before they left. When we came home, all the windows were open and she was scrubbing away like her life depended on it.
Papa: In addition to surviving on frozen dinners and Long John Silvers while Nana stayed with us, BA's dad held Leah and entertained her while we ran errands and got things done around the house. Most recently, he assembled all of our porch furniture while AA studied and BA slept to recover from being sick. He also helped us transition to a home in Atlanta by watching Leah as soon as we got to Atlanta so we could house hunt, shop, and get organized.
Nana: So that AA could return to school and BA could return to work, we needed someone to watch Leah until she was 2 months old and could attend daycare. When we asked BA's mom if she was up for the task, the next day she said she had a 1-way plane ticket to LA. She stayed with us for about 5 weeks, and she was amazing. She was up, showered, with a cup of tea every day at 6 a.m. We'd hand Leah over (because we'd been on the couch holding her all night), and head straight to bed for an hour or two. Some days we would come home, and she'd have the dishes done, the laundry folded, the bathrooms cleaned, dinner ready, and Leah strapped onto her. I have no idea how she does it. Keep in mind that we couldn't put Leah down for the first 2 months...somebody had to hold her 24 hours a day. So Nana did all of this while holding Leah. And she just spent another 2 weeks watching Leah so that she could get healthy. Of course, she never got healthy until she got tubes, but we were so glad to have Nana's help around the house.
And Aunt Haley deserves a big "thank you" as well. She has been such a trouper through all of this, learning how to feed, bathe, and put Leah down at night so we could go to dinner alone every now and then. She's traveled all over, she's cooked, she's cleaned, she's babysat....she's done it all and never complained. She's been as wonderful of an Aunt to Leah as she is a sister and sister-in-law.
It wasn't easy for them....it's not like we lived right down the road. Everybody had to spend time and money (and time off of work) to fly across the country to do these chores for us. You all may not remember all of the little things you did, but we won't forget them. We can't thank you enough! But back to the party....
Then it was time for Leah's first taste of cake. AA selected a strawberry cupcake from "A Piece of Cake" and topped it with (a replica of) one of Leah's favorite bath toys - a little pink squirt ducky we call "Matilda." Leah was equally interested in eating the cake and Matilda.
As usual, Leah made such a mess that it required two people to clean her up. The only difference on this day is that while she was being cleaned, she had an audience to entertain.
We opted for Leah to go naked the rest of the day. It seemed appropriate.
We asked for "No gifts please," but no one followed the rules. So we decided to open Leah's presents while everyone was there. Leah got many wonderful gifts...way too many to mention here. She got clothes, money for college, toys, educational things, music, bags, books, and more. We opened a 529 for her (which I'm sure Leah and AA were equally thrilled about), and got her some baby Converse shoes. BA bought her a case of Kleenex tissues....4 boxes worth. Leah loves to pull them out, one by one. We always stop her, but he thought giving her hundreds of tissues to pull out and just letting her go to town would be a fitting first birthday present. So she did, and we got a good laugh out of it.
Then we put on her Converse and topped it with a pair of "babiator" sunglasses our friend Emily got her.
After we opened presents, Leah got another "first" - she had her first taste of ice cream. BA decided to get a homemade ice cream maker and make vanilla ice cream from scratch for the party. AA's Dad had to save the day in the end by hitting the store for more ice. It didn't turn out quite as planned, but everyone ate it up, so it must have been ok. Leah certainly enjoyed it!
Leah's biggest toy was a red wagon from Nana and Papa. Papa assembled it for us a week earlier, and we hid it from Leah until the "big reveal" after the other presents had been opened. She loves this thing. We think she just enjoys seeing all of the scenery go by, compared to when she's in her stroller. It's kind of funny actually...80% of the time she's in her wagon, she clinches onto both sides, stays pretty quiet, and maintains a very serious look on her face. It's like she's driving or something - "no funny business when I'm being pulled in my wagon." The rest of the time, she's smiling like crazy, talking up a storm, pointing at things going by, and rocking back and forth when we stop (to queue us to keep going). It's adorable.
Ready to go.
Serious business
It's been pretty hot recently, so Leah was a little sweaty by the end of her first wagon ride with AA's family. After all, it's tough work sitting back and letting other people pull you along like you're a princess.
Later that weekend, Grandma and Aunt Haley worked with Leah on climbing the stairs. They've been working on this for a while now. This time, she climbed all the way up by herself.
About halfway up, she started saying "Ma Ma." AA was studying upstairs with the door closed, and apparently Leah wanted to see her. She climbed and climbed. With one step to go, she turned and looked at us. We encouraged her to go ahead. She climbed the last step, and didn't stop for a millisecond....she immediately crawled at lightning speed straight to AA's door, butt bouncing in the air the whole time. It was hilarious and very sweet. We just happened to get it on video. She's done it several times since. She knows where her Ma-Ma is!
Thanks to everyone who helped us celebrate Leah's first year!
Leah is sick. She woke up this morning hot, with fever, and spent the day moaning in pain (she's now in bed, moaning there too). She took almost no naps, would burst into tears randomly, and refused to eat most of her dinner. I finally got her to eat puffs and rice krispies after she refused her sweet potatoes and veggies with pasta. I think she just has a nasty cold and is having body aches. In any case, today I got barely 1 hour of study time in, and I had planned to spend at least 5 hours working. And because she had a fever today and is feeling so miserable, I won't be able to take her to daycare tomorrow. While I love the opportunity to spend quality time with my little snuggle-munch (I've already planned tomorrow out - a walk in the park and a family lunch with daddy at the Chick-fil-A near his office), I'm stressed over all the Bar studying I'm not doing. I lost two days to pink-eye a couple weeks ago, and now I'm losing two more to this cold. And if the amount of moaning/crying she is doing now is any indication of what tonight is going to be like, I can kiss sleep good-bye.
So we called in the Reserves. Nana is driving two hours from South Carolina tomorrow morning to watch/cuddle/console my little sick baby and I am going to study. God Bless Nana!
On a lighter note, we've learned that Leah's favorite genre of music is Irish pub songs. My dad (Leah's Granda) was recently featured on an Irish CD sold at the pub where he bagpipes (do you realize that there are very few people in this world who could write a sentence like that!) He sent us a copy and Leah decided she liked a couple of the songs. When I want to get her away from something in the other room, I just turn on one of her favorites and she'll instantly stop whatever she was doing and crawl to the speakers.
Here, her Granda is singing in the chorus on this one, her favorite, "Rosin the Beau".
In our Atlanta hotel room, Leah discovered a new way to get around. Not only was I impressed by the Peanut's ingenuity, but I was also proud of her frugality!
In addition to photos that were being held hostage by our moving company, we had videos that also were confined to the camcorder and we couldn't upload. Here is the first of that batch. This video was taken back before Leah started refusing her purees. We were staying in the hotel room in California and for some reason Leah decided to have a little fun with her food. She had never done this before, and she hasn't really done it since, but it was super fun in the moment.
Each of these blog posts goes through a careful screening process before it hits the web. There's:
Picture/video taking
Picture/video transferring
Picture/video backing up
Picture/video selecting
Picture/video loading to youtube or a flash drive
Picture/video editing
Picture/video uploading to the blog
Writing/proofreading
AA essentially serves as Editor-in-Chief, who can veto anything at any stage along the way. The blog would be far worse without her in this position, so this set up works well.
This particular post made it through each of those stages, only to be vetoed last week. But I thought it was good, so I decided to highjack the blog and post it as a BA's Corner. Take that, AA.
Every now and then, Leah has a giggling fit. There's no telling what brings it on. I can make her laugh from time to time by tickling her or what not, but Leah really takes a liking to the particular way AA says or does something at random times. It could be part of a story about going to the store or something that happened that day...doesn't matter. But when something strikes a cord with Leah, AA stops the story at that point and repeats that last phrase, expression, or gesture over and over again. Leah goes nuts, and it's hilarious.
The one challenge is that if Leah sees the camera, she'll stop. So these moments are tough to get on video. But we managed to get a couple.
For our families and good friends who care, we captured Leah's first crawl on video.
First, she spent a couple weeks thinking about it ...
Then she made her move ...
By the next day she'd picked up speed.
She's been crawling like a pro for two weeks now and she hasn't slowed down at all. I'll set her down in one room and walk to the next to get something. Within 10 seconds I'll see a little shadow coming around the corner, and then I'll spot a hand, and then another hand. Then her little smiling face pops around the corner. She loves her new freedom.
Last weekend, I sat Leah down on the floor behind me for about 20 seconds while I put some laundry in the dryer. What I heard next made me laugh so hard. I had to grab the video camera to document her discovery.
I enjoyed it so much, that I didn't even notice her drooling until I watched the video. My favorite parts are when she does it so hard that she startles herself. Curious little Peanut.
Well my baby has an ear infection in both her ears. She's had a cold for about 7 days and last night her cough was so bad that she turned red and was gasping for air. Her cough was waking her up and she couldn't seem to stop coughing until we got her in the bathroom and turned on the steam shower. We did three steam showers overnight last night and by the morning I was watching the clock until the doctor's office opened. Turns out she has two ear infections and a little bit of wheezing in her lungs, which is from some viral cough that usually accompanies the ear infections. Poor little girl. She has been sick so much recently which I'm sure is due to daycare. I have a love/hate relationship with daycare - love them because they take good care of my child and allow me to pursue my career - hate them because she will constantly get sick as long as she's at daycare. And when she is sick, which is a lot, I can't take her to daycare so either I skip school or BA takes off from work. We had to do both this week. It's been a long week.
Of course Leah was a perfect little angel at the doctors, no constant whining and fussing like at home. She just stared up at him and blinked her eyes every few seconds so calmly like nothing was wrong. Maybe she remembered her last visit when she got her shots and thought, "if I just play nice, he'll stay away from me."
And since it's finally Friday, here's a video from last weekend, before she got this latest cold. Have a good weekend, everyone!
We go through phases where we make lots of home videos and then upload them all at once. It's a time consuming process for us so we often end up with several video posts in a row. I hope you don't mind. These two videos were especially cute, showcasing a very happy Peanut. I apologize for the weird lighting. Depending on the time of day, the lighting is either bad, or worse :( But I think they are cute anyway.
First up: Flirting with Daddy while Mommy talks on the phone with Aunt Haley.
Since all our renewed problems with reflux, we've put Leah on a new formula, Similac Alimentum. It's a hypoallergenic formula that stinks (really, it smells awful) and costs twice as much as the regular formula that we still have five cases of. I hope she outgrows the reflux in time to use the old formula otherwise that's about $200 down the drain. For a while she was refusing to eat the Alimentum because I was making the powdered kind which smelled even worse than the liquid ready-to-feed kind. Finally, I broke down and bought the ready-to-feed kind and Princess Leah is willing to eat that. The good news is that her eating habits are pretty much back to normal. She is gulping down six ounces at a time and wants more (this kid has no portion control). We are slowly increasing the amount for fear that we'll overfeed her and get thrown-up on again. But so far, since we started the Prevacid and the Alimentum, she has had zero throw-ups! Yay!!!! She still coughs a lot in her sleep - which is incredibly distracting, but not necessarily disturbing because I've read that reflux babies do that.
In addition to new formula, we started solid foods! Leah LOVES the rice cereal. I should clarify - she loves the action of eating, not so much the consumption of the rice cereal. She will see me coming with that bowl and spoon and she will start kicking her legs and swatting her hands with excitement. She attacks every bite and is just having a ball eating the food, and then spitting most of it back out. I don't know that it's helped her sleep any longer at night; she is still waking up around mid-night to eat, but she's only eating once overnight, which is an improvement. She has started waking up around 4:30 a.m. to whine and fuss and we're not quite sure why she does that. So we are back to plugging the pacifier every 15 minutes from the wee hours of 4:30 a.m. for as long as we can stretch her, usually until 6:30 a.m. when we give up and feed her.
Needless to say, neither BA nor I are well. We've both been sick for about 3 weeks now. He's had a non-stop cold and I started out with a cold and then added the stomach flu on top of that. I'm pretty much nauseated throughout the day and am sick of eating saltines and dry toast. Here's hoping the weekend brings us both restored health.
Over the holidays we discovered that Leah is obsessed with her Aunt Haley. And it's a good thing too because Aunt Haley is just as obsessed back (although she is a little more discrete in showing her affection than Leah is).
Here are some videos of Leah from way back when. It took us a while to figure out the camcorder, and it took us even longer to figure out how to upload the videos. So even though these are a little late, here are some flashbacks from Leah's younger days.
This first one was taken in the hospital when she was 1 day old.
Here's how she avoided burping with mom.
And how she avoided burping with dad.
Leah waking up on her wedge. She's about 2 months old here - and does not want to wake up. Notice all the pacifiers she's hidden around her :)
