Update on Jia: 

• FIRST STEPS! This just in! As of 3/24/15, she is walking! Slowly but surely, it took our little sprout 1 year, 1 month, 1 week, and 1 day to get her first steps in! She took a total of about 6 steps on 3/24 and then this morning (3/25/15) she took about 7 steps in a row! Our video quality isn’t so great, so we’ll document again later. Recall, she did take 10.5 months to crawl but was crawling like a speed demon, so pretty soon I imagine she’ll be walking confidently! 
• I read from a BabyCenter newsletter that if your toddler isn’t yet walking, what you can do to encourage them is to pretend to trip over your feet while you walk – showing that even adults have trouble with it. So I did this. And fell over. Many times, and she belly laughs a LOT! This was good for when I actually fell down the stairs trying to step OVER the baby gate (instead of opening it, since Jia was standing at the gate), she laughed while I gripped hurt parts of me in pain. 
• Sprouting a left bottom molar and a bottom right tooth, for soon to be a total of 8 teeth. This means she’s temperamental! She really had no distress through the first 6 teeth, so this is the first time she’s just a crabby unpredictable mess hah…
• Because of the above, her naps are unpredictable. It’s a few days of 1 hour and 30 min naps and then a day of 30 minute napping after rolling around flailing her limbs and chattering to herself for almost an hour. Or even 1 hour and 15 minutes of blabbering and rolling around. That day we had no nap until 4 PM that afternoon.
• She loves Happy Family Brand’s Happy Creamies! While at my weekly run to Target, I picked these up from the baby aisle, along with teething crackers. Gave them to her after she picked through all the peas in her macaroni and cheese and ate an orange and she scarfed them down. 
• She’s also back to her Happy Baby Puffs, yay! I like to put this in a snack cup for her to nosh on while she and I go jogging.
• I hate to admit this, but LittleBabyBum nursery rhymes (on YouTube) make her so happy. After jogging with her and I need a quick shower – I play this on my phone and she is just quiet and happy. I don’t like to show her screens, since The Academy says not til after 2 years, but sometimes ya gotta do what ya gotta do. I also handed her my iPhone when she for some reason is screaming and upset in the car (babies and toddlers are not fans of traffic and mine in particular dislikes car rides IN GENERAL) with the video playing. It works like magic. Only to be used in dire times of need. (To view Little Baby Bum’s YouTube Channel click here) 
• Scavenging Around: My friend (and one of Jia’s godmothers) Megan was here the other day and Jia was digging through her purse. She pulled out her car keys and then crawled over to her princess mobile and tried to use her keys with the car. She also did a cute thing where she took an item out of Megan’s purse, looked at it, then placed it back in (versus throwing it aside). 
• MyPhone… She took Megan’s iPhone and put it up to her ear and said “bababababa!” Apparently Jeff has been teaching her how to use the phone on her learning farm toy that has a pretend phone, quick little learner!
  

  I made these baked sweet potato bites a week or so ago and she seemed to really dislike them. But then I tried again a while after and it turns out, she really likes them 1) cold; and 2) sitting in their foil pouch (not on her plate). So I ripped off a square of foil to put on her plate and housed the sweet potatoes in there and it was just about the only thing she ate for dinner.

  Steam a sweet potato for about 15 minutes. Remove.

  Cut into small finger-sized pieces

  Place on non-stick foil (or spray with cooking spray or drizzle with olive oil)

  Cut pieces of unsalted butter and arrange over sweet potatoes. I used a cheese grater and grated a cold stick of butter over them. Sprinkle with cinnamon.

  Place in oven at 350 deg for about 15 minutes. Watch them, because I really didn’t pay attention to how long I really baked them! Allow to cool and serve! 

• Pasta! Whole wheat noodles and these spinach/garlic noodles from Trader Joe’s, cooked then mixed with some butter then organic marinara sauce is something she apparently likes! 
• Claps and bounces when music is playing, a LOT of clapping!

From Me: 

• I taught myself how to sew. Well, my mom tried to teach me back in high school but I had the attention span of a gnat. So after receiving Jia’s champagne moccasins from The Little Doe Baby, I really wanted to see if I could make moccasins myself. It didn’t seem too complicated. I found lots of tutorials on Pinterest, so I used one that had a really simple and straightforward pattern and did some tweaking of my own (for the fringe). This is so exciting – my mom is such a talented seamstress and I just didn’t care to learn this really cool skill back when I was younger. So I’m borrowing my aunt’s sewing machine and trying my hand at it and it’s really fun!! Never thought I’d say sewing was fun or addicting! 

I would’ve added photos this week, but I caught a stomach virus and came down with symptoms on Tuesday very early morning, so I’m thankful I’ve written most of this post before that happened. I’ll make it up next week unless something happens and I get sick again… 

I’ll take a second one for the team (this stomach virus + that time at the end of February when I got terribly sick 1 week before my Philly trip and it lasted through my Philly trip…), just as long as Jeff and Jia aren’t sick. #motherhood – am I right? Glad I am keeping down my toast this morning (well, so far…)

Photo Credit: Lee Liu Photo