Saturday, January 16, 2010

Happy New Year!

It's 2010, and we are finally able to get out and about again now that my ankle is getting better -- thank goodness!  This past week we went to the music time for kids at the public library, to the playground, and on several shopping excursions.  Sophie has a lot of fun when we leave the house, as long as I remember to bring a snack and beverage for her!  This week we hope to go to a playgroup, where I can see how she does in close quarters with other kids.  If she's ok, maybe we'll start having groups at our house again.

So, what is Sophie up to these days?
  • Her words for yes and no continue to evolve.  Now yes is "dotay" (from "otayOTAY!") and no is "notay" (from "no, otay!").  Sometimes it's hard to catch the difference, and even when you do, they're still not always accurate signals of what she wants.  But mostly we can tell.
  • Her new favorite sentence is something she heard me say while I was nursing Ben in the car: "don't be sad baby Ben; it's ok."  We hear that one now as much as "baby Ben has a big burp!"
  • She (and her dad) love a song from her new CD "For the Kids" called "We've Got to Be Clean" (a cover of an old Sesame Street song).  She especially loves the line about how "in the bath, we wash our ears and elbows and feet."
  • She likes adult music, too, especially if it's a song she's heard a few times or one where she can pick out a word or two.  Often when I put on one of my songs that she knows, she'll go totally still and just stand there listening intently -- you can just see her soaking it in to remember it later.  One song has the word sky in it.  When it came on, she stopped what she was doing and began to concentrate really hard on the music.  As soon as the singer sang sky, she immediately pointed her finger straight up in the air!  She had just been standing there, waiting for that one word she knew.
  • Her favorite book right now is Mr. Potato Head's Mix and Match Book.  Definitely not my favorite.
  • Sophie really loves broccoli!  Thank goodness there is something green she'll eat.
  • For a long time, it seemed like our house was pretty childproof.  All of a sudden, though, Sophie is getting into a whole new class of things, most of them bad.  We're trying to figure out how to get her to understand about doing what we say, and to stay away from things she knows she's not supposed to touch.  As it is, we tell her something is bad, and then she just keeps doing it while saying "bad!"  To her, it's just one more thing to label.
Now that things are getting easier around here, we're working on two things with Sophie.  The first is to get her to eat and drink only at the table, and eventually to eat what we eat for dinner.  We've let her get out of hand in both of these respects, so that she makes messes with both food and drink all over our carpet, and so that she always gets her own special meal for dinner.

The second is that we're moving her (and Ben's) schedule back one hour, so that she naps from 1:30 to 4pm and, most importantly, goes to bed at 8pm instead of 9pm.  This is actually more important for Ben, who won't take a bottle and therefore needs me to be around when he goes down for the night.  But anyway, that's our weekend project... or really my weekend project, which John is going along with because he generally does what I ask him to do.  :)

1 comment:

  1. That picture with her wearing the sunglasses is super cute!

    We've had trouble getting Alisa to eat at the table too. She went from being a good eater to not eating much at all and she started requesting to eat in the living room. We gave in (on foods that weren't too messy) because we were desperate to get food in her. Then of course, it became the norm instead of the exception and she'd she'd throw a fit if we said she had to eat in the kitchen. Eventually we got her to like eating in the kitchen because we let her sit on the stool by the kitchen island instead of her highchair. And now she's big enough to sit in a regular chair at the table, which she likes. Basically, the trouble started when she no longer wanted to be confined to her highchair.

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