The Michael Family Musings: Mia, Months 13-15

Well, it’s been three months since I last posted updates about our sweet girl. I’ve decided to change up the format just a bit, but overall the information should be about the same as it has been in the past. Here are some updates on the last 3 months we’ve had with Mia since her first birthday.

Stats:
Mia is now in the 84th percentile for weight and the 48th for height. This is a complete reversal from her previous stats. She has generally been in a higher percentile for height then for weight. She’s in mostly wearing 18 month clothes, but we can still squeeze her into a few things that are 12 months (mostly shorts, PJs and shirts in 12 months are too small). She’s in size 4 diapers. She wears size 4 shoes, but her feet are growing so fast I can hardly keep up. She’s gone from size 1 to size 4 since her birthday.
When she turned one, she only had 3 teeth. She now has 11, including 4 molars, and has 2 more working their way in. Yeah, that has been fun (not). Her hair is getting much longer; her bangs are only just above her eyes. She’s got sweet little curls in the back. She’s still our fiery little redhead, and she has hazel eyes.

Schedule:
Most days, Mia still takes 2 naps, though I’m pretty sure she’s starting to transition to just one. She wakes up somewhere between 8 and 9, we have breakfast and go for a walk, and then goes down for a nap around 10 or 11. Her first nap is generally about 1.5-2 hours long. After nap, we have lunch and then play, run errands, have play dates, etc. Her second nap (if she has one) is usually around 3 pm and never lasts longer than 45 minutes. I usually let her watch one episode of Sesame Street in the afternoon, and then we play, go for another walk and have dinner. We do some more playing after dinner before bath time, story time and bed sometime between 7:30 and 8 pm. She sleeps 12-13 hours a night (generally uninterrupted, but we had a few nights where she woke up a time or two).

Milestones:
She started walking about a week after her birthday. At first, she didn’t really do a whole lot of walking; a few steps here and there, mostly just in between us or between us and the furniture. By the time she turned 13 months, she was pretty much exclusively walking. A few weeks after that, she taught herself how to stand up without pulling up on the furniture. Now she’s all but running all of the time.

As I hinted to in the 12 month post, Mia is now weaned from breastmilk. All in all, the weaning process was actually a lot smoother than I was expecting. It was my original goal to make it to her first birthday, so I was very pleased to do this. I had considered going a bit longer, but the closer we got to her birthday, the more I realized how difficult this would be. Starting around 10 months, she seemed less and less interested in nursing. She would drink breastmilk from a bottle or sippy cup, but I was down to nursing only once a day for about 15 minutes because she never wanted to hold still. I had to pump several times a day to keep up with the amount she wanted to drink, and I really didn’t like pumping. I did a lot of reading and studying on weaning methods, and in the end we decided that we’d start by trying the ‘cold turkey’ method. The night of her birthday, we gave her the first cup of cow’s milk. She took like 2 sips and then rejected it and started crying. We ended up giving her breastmilk from a sippy cup that night. I was wrecked with worry when this happened, and so I was afraid she’d never wean. I was preparing myself that I’d have to exclusively pump for several more months because of her growing disinterest in nursing. Jason then suggested we try warming the cow’s milk, which made perfect sense to me. She had, after all, been drinking warm milk for 12 months. The next morning, I heated up a cup of milk and she drank it with no problem. We had to go on warming her milk for about 3 more weeks, but eventually she started drinking it cold. Now she loves milk and drinks 4-5 sippy cups of it each day. From my end, it took about a month for me to completely ‘dry up’. I did have to pump once, and I also hand expressed several times in the shower to relieve the pressure.

We started teaching her how to use utensils while she’s eating. We bought her a little set of plastic spoons and sporks. She knows to put the utensils in her mouth once food is on it, but she hasn’t quite figured out how to get the food onto them. We usually have to help her with this. I’m still leaning towards thinking she’ll be left handed.

Mia has started screaming a lot. She screams when she’s excited, when she’s mad, when she’s happy, or when she just wants attention. I know that it’s just a phase, but it’s a difficult one. It’s hard to explain to her why she can’t scream. I try to tell her that we need to use our ‘inside voice’, but of course she doesn’t really know what that means yet. Here’s to hoping she learns quickly!

She can identify people and things (like some animals) from photos or books. She can also retrieve familiar objects when I ask her to (i.e. if I ask her to go get a particular toy from her room). She also can identify parts of her body. For instance, when we say “where’s your ears/eyes/feet/etc.” she can point to them.

Her vocabulary is growing so quickly I can hardly keep up. I haven’t really tried to count, but she probably has at least 30 words in her vocabulary. Many of her words still sound the same (for instance, ‘buh’ means ‘ball’, ‘bear’, ‘bread’, ‘bed’ and ‘book’), so I have to use context clues sometimes. She still says ‘dis’ a lot when she’s trying to learn something new. I swear she picks up a new word every single day. Sometimes I really don’t know what she’s saying, but for the most part, I can understand what she wants. She hasn’t spoken any sentences, but she has put two words together a few times; things like ‘Mama up’ or ‘Elmo eyes’.

She is still using her signs to an extent. She uses the sign for ‘milk’ exclusively; she does not use the word yet. For ‘water’ and ‘more’, she’s switched to mostly only using the word and not the sign, but sometimes she uses the sign too. For ‘all done’ and ‘thank you’ she uses the word and the sign at the same time.

She loves to give kisses and kiss everything and everyone. She also likes blowing kisses.

She has said ‘thank you’ unprovoked a few times. She’s still learning when to use it, and most times I still need to remind her, but I think she’s starting to catch on. I’m also working with her on ‘please’.

Unless she’s really tired or sick, she doesn’t want me to cuddle her. It makes me kind of sad, but it also makes me appreciate the rare times she lets me even more!

She can identify the letter ‘M’ now. She has a few of them hanging in her room and she used to ask ‘dis?’ when she’d point to them. I’d tell her “that’s the letter M!”, so now, when she sees one, she points and says “Ehm!”. Smart girl!

While we haven’t completely cut out the use of her pacifier, the use has definitely gone down. I noticed that she wasn’t using it most of the time when it was clipped to her, and it was just getting dirty and dragging on the ground. We now only give it to her when she’s sleeping or if she specifically asks for it.

Big Events:
We went to Mia’s first baseball game on Memorial Day. She actually did really well; we made it through about 6 innings before we had to leave for her nap. She also ate an entire hot dog and about a third of a snow cone.

We took Mia to the aquarium because she loves fish and all manner of aquatic life. We had gone one previous time when she was about three months old, but she slept through that trip J She absolutely loved it this time; we walked through the whole things twice and she kept shouting ‘shish!’ the whole time.

Mia got sick for the first time at 13 months. It was nothing serious, thankfully, just a cold, but she did manage to get both Jason and I sick. She had a fever for a day or so, but she was congested and coughing for about a week. I’m pretty sure her being sick was harder on me than it was on her!

We had our first family vacation in July. We went up to Great Wolf Lodge (an indoor water park) in Grapevine. Thanks to a portable DVD player and Elmo DVDs, the drive actually went well. We did discover that she no longer sleeps very well in the car. The longest we were able to get her to nap while driving was about 45 minutes. She did, however, sleep very well in the hotel room in her pack’n’play, so I was thankful for that! We’ll be traveling a lot this fall, so that will be a handy skill. We had a really great time at Great Wolf. She is a real water bug, so she had a blast splashing in the kiddie portion and swimming in the pool. She wasn’t big enough to go on the big waterslides, so Jason and I would take turns watching her while the other went on those. It was so nice to spend some time together as a family!

We took our first trip to the Austin zoo earlier this month. Mia’s favorites were definitely the wolf pack and the train ride!

Favorites:
Things do to: Swimming, reading books, dancing, Daddy coming home from work, talking on the phone on Google Hangouts, looking at pictures or watching videos, bathtime
Characters: Elmo is definitely #1, but she loves Cookie Monster a lot too.
Books: She has this Mickey Mouse Clubhouse book called “Let’s Sing” that plays songs while you sing along. She also really likes “Elmo’s First Book of Colors”.
Songs: The ‘Letter of the Day’ song from Sesame Street is her absolute favorite (she calls it ‘yay yuh’), but the ‘Itsy Bitsy Spider’ (‘pider’) is a close second. We sing/listen to these songs about 500 times a day each :-)
Food: she still really loves cheese and she’s a big fan of most fruits (though strawberries and blueberries seem to top the list). She’s been a little bit pickier about meat; usually I can only get her to eat chicken or turkey. I’ve discovered that calling all meat ‘chicken’ helps :-)
Toys: Her stuffed animal wolf is definitely the top dog (see what I did there?). She also likes anything Elmo related and any toys that make an obscene amount of noise.
Shows: The only show she really watches is Sesame Street, so we’ll go with that :-)
Movie: She doesn’t really have the patience for movies. Usually it takes us several sessions of watching to get through one. She seemed to really enjoy “Finding Nemo” though, probably because she loves fish so much.
Animals: Wolves, fish, elephants, dogs and cats

And now, pictures! Because, why not?