Fear Factor, Here She Comes!

Lately I've really noticed Sophia's personality blossoming. Several people have commented on the mischievous sparkle in her eyes. She seems to be pretty fearless and definitely very physical. We went to the park the other day and she was having a great time going down the slide face first. She climbed the stairs and slid down the slide about 20 times. Yesterday I took both girls swimming for the first time by myself. I was reminded of why, in the past, I didn't think this was a good idea. Sophia was everywhere! She didn't care if the water was up to her nostrils, she wanted to keep going. She went completely under twice. Several people commented on what a handful she is to watch. She even went up to a stranger lying in the water and patted his behind. It was pretty embarrassing. At the same time, it seems like kids of all ages gravitate towards her. I've seen this at Parents' Day Out, and the child care staff at the rec center tell me this, too. I think it might be because she makes everything look like so much fun. She always has a huge grin on her face, and often just burst out laughing. I'll be very curious to see her as a teenager. I think she will continue to keep Yale and I on our toes!

M&M Addiction and Throwing Signs

I think I've unintentionally passed on my chocolate addiction to my oldest daughter. A friend of mine suggested using M&Ms as a motivator for using the potty. It was a really good suggestion because potty training is going very well. In fact, tonight Olivia went to bed with underpants on. Now, I may think this was a mistake in the morning, but she wanted to do it and her diaper is often dry in the morning, so I thought it was worth a try. Anyway, my friend suggested that I give Olivia one M&M every time she pees in the potty. I tried that, and both Olivia and I thought that one just didn't seem to be enough. So now every time she pees she gets two M&Ms. At first this didn't seem like much at all, but I wasn't considering who I was dealing with. I swear that every time Olivia goes pee, she holds in just a little so that in five minutes she'll have to pee again and will get 2 more of her new favorite treat. The last couple of mornings she's earned 10 M&Ms before 9:00 a.m. This girl either really has to pee a lot or she's scamming me for candy. I guess it doesn't really matter much as long as it's getting her potty trained. I'm proud to announce that Sophia has been doing a new sign. She has been signing for "more", but it's her own version of the actual sign-language sign. She points her finger to the palm of her hand. I've read that it's not unusual for kids to modify the signs. I remember Olivia doing the same thing with a few of the signs. Sophia is also signing more for milk. She had kind of quit signing all together for awhile, so I'm glad she's back on track. Sophia had her one-year check-up a couple of weeks ago. The doctor said she looks healthy and developmentally on track. She's cruising around furniture, she knows at least 3 words (mama, dada, baba, and her 2 signs count, too), she can wave and clap, and she's feeding herself. She's between the 25th and 50th percentile for both weight and height. We've completely switched from formula to whole milk, and we're working on weaning her off of the bottle. We've cut out two bottle feedings, and now she only takes a bottle twice a day. Once she gets better at using a cup, I think it will be fairly easy to wean her off of the last two bottle feeding. She's seems to enjoy eating more finger foods. She really likes cheese, Goldfish crackers, bananas, any kind of cereal, green beans, and peas. I think she'll be a good eater just like her sister.

Potty Training Time!

WARNING: In the following paragraphs toddler words such as pee, poo, and potty will be used. Readers who are opposed to using childish terms for excrement, urine, and voiding should use discretion. Olivia and I started working on potty training about 6 weeks ago. She started off well, but then put the breaks on after she pooed for the first time in her little potty. She was pretty grossed out by the whole experience, and refused to use the potty again for several weeks. Just the other day she informed me that she wanted to pee in the potty so that she could get her fingernails painted pink. This was an incentive I had used during the first round. Just like an old toilet-trained pro she went directly to her potty and peed. Then I told her if she used the potty two more times, Yale and I would take her and her sister swimming. Knowing this, she became like an athlete training for the Olympics, only her sport was peeing. She quickly reached her goal and was determined to go swimming that moment. It took some explaining for her to understand that, due to circumstances beyond our control, we would have to wait until the next evening for our swimming excursion. Swimming was all that she could talk about. She was so excited she could hardly stand it. She was so excited that when I went to to check on her that night before I went to bed, I found her dresser drawers open, clothes all over the floor, and her sprawled out and sound asleep in her swimming suit. She had dug it out of her bottom drawer and put it on to sleep in it. It was awfully cute. Finally, after 24 hours of talking about swimming, her swimming suit, purple bagels (this is what she calls the purple inner tubes at the rec center), and "swimming by self", we made it to the pool. After floating on the Lazy River with her dad, splashing with her sister, and swimming laps with a green noodle (another flotation device), it was time to go home. Even though she was soaked, shivering, and blue, it only took as far as the locker room before she started asking to go swimming again. I'm sure we will be using swimming again as an incentive for potty training. Sophia seemed to really like the pool, too. She's pretty tricky to manage in the water. If you let her crawl in the shallow end, she zooms every direction, and doesn't seem to care if the water is deep enough to flow into her nostrils. Trying to hold her in deeper water is like trying wrestle a greased bull dog. However, I must say, she looked quite striking in her new lime-green polka-dotted swimming suit that she got from her Aunt Beckie for her birthday!