Jia:

• Our Little Artist: As you can see from the post photo, Jia now has an art table. I snagged this table + 2 chairs from good ol’ Ikea for $19.99! A steal! Regular price! It weighs about 5 pounds and it has great little tiny person chairs that come with it. I haven’t been to Target yet, to stock up on some Washable Crayons or those special magic kid markers that only mark on special paper, but those are on the Target shopping list. She really loves her little table and the markers, really likes trying to eat the markers in between scribbles, actually. But, she is really good at putting the caps onto her markers (my highlighters) now. It only took her a few minutes after I showed her. She’ll turn the cap to the correct side in her hands and insert the marker tip. She loves doing it! I’m guessing this is the appropriate age for this sort of thing, but all I’m thinking is, “you’re such a little genius!” Haha… 
  • So since she loves putting the caps onto markers, she like, REALLY loves it. She’ll hand me markers so I can take the caps off of them, and if I don’t, she lets me know. (by yelling at me) So, as the loyal servant to my child, I keep uncapping the markers for her, and she keeps on scribbling on the table itself, scribbling her chin, drawing on the paper, getting blue and green on the corners of her mouth, dropping markers on the floor, and then, eventually, re-capping them. 
• Our witching hour is now 4 PM until bath time. No, scratch that. It’s 4 PM-bathtime and then again during PJ time. She becomes irate if she doesn’t have additional food options in front of her. She’s irate if I don’t pick her up, after I was just holding her and she pushed away from me. She gets mad if I take her clothes off for her bath, but squeals out of giddiness to run down the hallway naked. Ha 🙂 Little crazy person. 
• But if she’s mad, taking her outdoors completely eases her frustration and keeps her occupied for an unknown length of time (because I have always taken her inside before she even hints at being finished with the yard). 
• She’s experimenting with different terrain, learning to steady herself while walking and standing.
• I think we’ve weaned away from one of her four feedings. She used to nurse at 8 AM, 11 AM, 4 PM, and 7 PM, but for the past week she’s been pretty much completely dropped the 4 PM feeding (disinterested, would rather play, impatient). I wonder what’ll happen naturally with the remaining feedings; if they’ll drop naturally at all. 

• She’s into toast now. I’ve tried it with butter, peanut butter, and cream cheese, but cream cheese is by far her favorite on toast. I was elated when this finally happened because it meant I could try grilled cheese sandwiches for her and she likes those now, too. Whew. Thankfully! 
• The Sunroom: We have this back section of the house that we refer to as the “sun room.” It’s separated by our back door but it’s not insulated like the rest of the house, so we don’t spend a lot of time out there – in the winter it’s bitter cold, and in the summer it’s unbearably humid. We exit our house by opening our back door, walking through the sunroom and then exiting the sunroom via the carport. So, Jia walks to and from the car. She loves the sunroom. It’s uncharted territory basically, with lots of new stuff to explore. So when we come in from errands or taking the dogs outside, she really likes to spend time there, browsing, organizing our shoes, playing with the dog leashes, finding stale rice puffs that she’s dropped in her jogging stroller. So, when we come inside and close the sun room door, she cries in protest almost every time. To her, there’s just way too much stuff that she hasn’t finished playing with yet!
• Lookin Fly: Since I’ve been putting that little top ponytail in her hair, I got a little brush for styling. After a few days of brushing her hair into that little “firecracker” as my mom calls it, she’ll now take her brush and try to comb her hair herself. 
• We lost our cow wubbanubb (temporarily… it was found – of course – the day our new one arrived via Amazon Prime) on Easter at my in-laws’, so I finally broke down after 5 days of searching for it and ordered a new one. Before the new one’s arrival, she had a cow, frog, and giraffe. The new one to add to the collection is an Ella Bella pink elephant. I made a point in the beginning of not getting all frogs or all giraffes, so that she would learn to accept multiple pacifiers and not be picky. So, I was pleasantly surprised when she took to the new elephant right away without being difficult.  Yay, win. 
• Wipe your Slate Clean: Those bath time crayons? She’s watched me wipe her tub “slate” clean with a light green wash cloth after each bath. So, Tuesday night when she was in the tub, she would draw on the side then wipe it clean with the wash cloth. 
• She is fascinated by pop-up and interactive books. Megan (one of her godmothers) bought her Butterfly Butterfly, a book with a pop-up butterfly at the end. So of course, when the last page of the story is coming, she anticipates the butterfly jumping out of the page, and she loves it! So much that she grabs the pages before it, closes the book, then quickly reopens it so the butterfly flaps its wings! Over and over and over. Another cute thing she is doing now is wandering over to her books and quietly sitting down while she flips through them. 
• Clean Up, Clean Up, Everybody Does their Part: I made a game of tossing her Mega Blocks into its little storage container and she thought it was really funny and laughed at it. So I would hand her a block and she would try and throw it into the container (sometimes successfully, sometimes not). So I started to do this with her bath time toys but that one’s still a work in progress. 

Mom thoughts:

• My friend Taylor brought it to my attention that in this area (the DC/Northern Virginia area) pre-school applications to start at 3 years old, need to be filed like – last year. Or no, two years ago. Are you kidding? She JUST TURNED ONE! She turns 14 months TOMORROW (April 16th)!! Apparently even moms who put themselves on waitlists at 11 weeks pregnant still don’t have spots for their now- three year olds. Ridiculous! So we scheduled a tour of my old preschool, St. Luke’s. It’s still the same old-school-in-that-nice-comforting-kind-of-way and was pleasantly surprised at tuition rates, application/registration opening dates (no early 100-years prior waitlist applications), daily schedule of activities, and extended-day enrichment activities.
• I’m clueless on how to wean her from breastfeeding. Though we may be moving to 3 feedings vs. 4, I don’t know how I’m supposed to go about introducing cow’s milk while cutting down on nursing sessions… I mean, is it like night weaning in that I cut down on the time nursing until we reach no nursing for some feedings? I wanted to figure out baby-led weaning, but it seems we are out of that window? She’s eating finger foods but her attention hasn’t shifted entirely to solid food from nursing.
• I don’t know if I am ready to stop breastfeeding. I don’t know how to do it and what it means to not nurse her anymore. I’m so used to it, it’s what I’ve been doing all day, every single day (with the exception of March 24th) for the past 14 months. I’ve read about moms who are afraid of losing their connection with their baby. I mean, I can definitely understand that, but then again, moms who bottle feed can still connect with their babies – my friend whose son had a traumatic tongue-tie situation exclusively bottle-fed her son with breastmilk, until he was about 10.5 months old. But yeah, I understand the fear of losing that connection, because it’s such a special bond that breastfeeding moms have with their children, something that wasn’t replicated by anyone else. 
• What I am ready for, is to diet. I’m too paranoid about the quality of my milk to really go hard core with dieting, so I am having a hard time deciding on what I really want to do – if I go until my goal of 18 months, that means I can’t diet for another 4 months, which puts us at August. But, I’ve gotten 14 months under our belts, so shouldn’t we be good? I’d like to (I think) have her weaned by the end of May… I’m afraid of how she will take weaning (though she’s shown she’s pretty easy-going), like if she’ll have separation anxiety or something. I’ll have to look into this. I think I’d bookmarked some good blog posts about weaning, so I’ll have to read those. 

Pictures:

Modeling the “Be Mine” infant lap tee courtesy of TheTinyCollection.com!

Almost got it…

She is good at pointing marker caps back on!

Til next week!