Pants are overrated

And children in motion are hard to photograph.

In related news, I'm pretty sure my daughter is related to my oldest childhood friend. They share a certain tendency to put their pants on their heads. We'll see in some years whether Heidi also has the idea to pack for vacation by wearing seven pairs of underwear at the same time.

Cozy

Now she has the best seat in the house!

Learning to want things

I love watching my little girl blossom into her own person with her own independent thoughts and ideas. Today she climbed into her carseat ready to go bye-bye, so we took an impromptu trip into town and got some yarn and board games out of storage. And why not? I want Heidi to grow up to be confident and able to communicate her wants and needs and to accomplish her goals. That doesn't start when she turns 15 and can already be a go-getter; it starts now with us acknowledging and encouraging her little baby ideas.

Happy Birthday, Heidi!

And Happy Halloween, too.

HeidiPants had quite an exciting Very First Birthday. From demolishing her very first birthday cake at dinner with Mamaw, Grandad, Uncle Erik, Aunt Tara and cousin Ava

to feeding the yummy cake to Daddy

to giving yucky sloppy baby kisses to Ava

to dressing up in a ballerina outfit at McDonalds

and making huge messes with her cake there too,

she definitely thought it was the best birthday she'd ever had. For my part, I also rather preferred it to last year's birthday, for other reasons.

This is attempt #1 at using the Blogger app for iPhone, and I'm hoping the photos intersperse themselves in the text in the order in which I placed them. If not, I'm sure my intelligent readers can figure out which ones go with which descriptions. I believe in you guys!

Baby signs and early communication

Before Heidi was born, we had grandiose plans for her education and our role in it as Awesome Parents. We were going to read all the baby sign language books! We were going to learn all the signs! We were the super awesomest ever. Of course, it hasn't exactly happened that way. Baby signs never really ended up on the top of our priority list once she was born. We enthusiastically signed at her for a couple of months after she was born, on the expert advice that babies begin learning communication from Day 1, and met with zero indications of understanding. Our baby would not be a signing protegy by the age of two and a half months, so sign language went on the back burner. We'd bring them out occasionally, find no response, and forget about them again.

This summer (8-10 months old) she has begun to blossom into her own personality. She clearly wants what she wants, and began to become frustrated with us for not reading her mind. Out came the signs again.

I am officially a much bigger believer in windows of opportunity than I used to be. We have been signing "more" (which we also use for "hungry")

and "drink"

 and "all done"

 for somewhere between two weeks and a month. As of three days ago, SHE SIGNS BACK! "All done" is more of hands opening and closing than wrists turning, but it's clear what she means, which is the whole point anyway.

And we are officially on a quest for more signs. If she can tell us when she's hungry, thirsty or done, why not when she's sleepy or bored or wants to pet the dog? Some interesting resources that we will definitely be checking out:
Baby Sign Language Academy
babysignlanguage.com
signingbaby.com

Ryan (before she was born): But why baby signs? Why not just become fluent in regular ASL and sign everything around her?
^ proof that the SuperAwesomestEver syndrome comes from him, not from me. Why bother doing ANYTHING if you're not going to do it ten times more enthusiastically than EVERYBODY ELSE?

Language Acquisition

Tonight, much to her daddy's delight, Heidi demonstrated her ability to follow directions. She fetched a toy halfway across the living room before she was distracted by a shoe. (I didn't specify that her attention span was particularly long.) Daddy reminded her about it, though, and this time she brought it straight to him. Later, he instructed her, bizarrely, to put her finger into the filtered-water spigot so that she could feel the water spray around it. And she did, several times. Far be it from me to squelch learning, of course, but Daddy was wise to volunteer to clean up the mess himself anyway.

It was an evening of much language-acquisition elation. Which led to this conversation:

Him: I told her I wanted the red toy! And she went and brought it to me! And handed it to me when I asked for it! And stuck her finger in the spigot when I told her to, without me even showing her how!

Me: Well, they say babies understand words a lot sooner than they start to say them.

Him: I know! It's awesome!

Me: So we should probably start watching out for those four-letter words...

Him: Yeah...



Because there are some forms of language that just aren't acceptable in preschool, guys.

This has been your daily lesson in parenting. Tune in next time for more tips on how to be better parents than we are.

Shower adventures!

Daddy was waiting for the shower to warm up, and Baby became curious. He said, "Momma, you better come get this baby!" and I said, ""Oh, she'll learn!" She did learn, but not in quite the way I expected her to.

For the weak, for the strong

In the year or so that elapsed after the Australian Shepherds were banished outside and before Heidi learned to put food into her own mouth, sweeping my floor every day was a sure sign that I was becoming intolerably anal about my housekeeping. Now, sweeping the floor after every meal slightly increases one's chances of being able to walk across the floor barefoot without being overwhelmed by the ick.

She has me in training, folks.

Hygiene is for the weak.
Aversions to dirt and bugs and slimy things such as half-masticated bread balls in the house are for the weak.
Sleep is for the weak.
Heightened emotional states due to pregnancy are DEFINITELY for the weak.

Sitting around for hours doing nothing but playing with the baby and babbling back to her is for the STRONG.



I can't wait until the next one is her age and SHE can be the entertainment. I will referee from up above while I, you know, get stuff done. If my ideas of life with two under two are overly rosy, please don't tell me. Such optimistic ideas will be short-lived enough as it is. Let me enjoy them while they last.

Cute things my baby does

And now for your viewing pleasure...

Singing

she'll sing that way all through the grocery store, too

and

Rolling over!

This post brought to you by Granddad Friend and my shiny new to me Asus laptop.

Only it's blue, not bamboo

It's purse sized and amazing, and he doesn't use it anymore, and I was talking about how we were planning on buying one before I knew he had one languishing in his office, and I. am. thrilled.  You know you wish you had my in-laws.

I'll be able to use a decently fast computer at the Cottage now when I'm on duty, and have keybord-connected internet even when my darling husband is using our (his) desktop, and be able to answer my emails with more than just one line, and be able to make decent blog posts. Does anybody else have a terrible time writing on anything but a qwerty keyboard of ten-finger capabilities? I delete most everything I start to blog on my phone, because it comes out nonsensical. My ten fingers can keep up with my ideas much better than my two thumbs can.

Speaking of ten fingers and typing, I was thinking the other day about my sixth grade computer teacher, Mr. Mulvaney, and how grateful I am for all those tortuously boring classes of nothing but Mavis Beacon typing tutorials. Ooh, I hated it at the time, from the computer voice to the fact that there were only three games, but the current benefits of having a typing speed of 100 wpm more than outweigh the boredom of years ago.  Just think: if I were to cease my job as houseparent of troubled teenage girls and need an income, I could take dictation.

But then I wouldn't be able to play with my baby all day.

Granddad spoils her and gives her spoonfuls of coffee, but what can I say? He spoils me and gives me laptops.