This lovely girl is 16 months old today.
She is lovely, and happy, and absolutely not a baby anymore. Although, I still call her my Lydia-baby much of time (so much so that she's started walking around the house saying "baby, baby, baby") she's absolutely her own little toddler-person. However, she is still in size 3 diapers and size 4 shoes. I wish that we had a scale just so I knew how much she weighs. Over 20 lbs, certainly. She still wears 12 months cloths, although her 18 month clothes fit her just fine now.
Some other details from the month:
--She sleeps consistently from eight oclock at night to seven fifteen in the morning. It's wonderful. However, she has occasionally started crying in the middle of the night and when I go in I've found her with her sad little foot stuck between the slats of her crib. I don't know if she's always stuck her feet out and only recently they have gotten too big to slip back through or if that's a new thing. I'm hoping that she grows out of it soon because it's so sad.
--We are still steadily napping two naps. The first nap is from 9ish to 11ish. The second nap is from 3ish to 5ish. My mom keeps telling me that she is ready to transition to one nap, which is probably true, but I'm not ready to transition to one nap yet. So we are still happy with our arrangement.
--We had a lot of fun this last month. We played with friends, went to a couple of splash pads, had a couple of pool dates, had Aunt Melissa Shaye come stay with us, and other fun things.
--We are growing up quickly at this house. She copies everything that we do. Including relaxing on the chaise. Everything she does is so darling.
--Lydia is still a great eater. She's stopped eating everything that I put in front of her. She used to be happy with whatever I wanted to feed her, but now she has a definite opinion about what she wants to eat. But I think that has more to do with her desire to assert her independence than it does with actually enjoying the types of food I feed her. She loves grapes, but occasionally she will decide that isn't what she wants at that particular moment and so off the tray they go. (That's another thing that I thought we were past, but has reappeared. If she doesn't want to eat something she tosses it over the edge of her tray.) However, all that aside - she still enjoys a great variety of food. Some of our favorites this month: Melon, grapes, pasta, zucchini, peas, bagels, rice with soy sauce, relish (we serve this when we have hotdogs and she's happy to just eat the relish plain), string cheese, and graham crackers. She hasn't been as impressed with tomatoes as she used to be and she all but refuses to eat animal crackers. I'm grateful that she's such a good eater, because most of the time I just feed her whatever we are eating for dinner. Sometimes she likes things that I wouldn't have even thought to feed her - like this picture. Raw onion. She was sitting on the counter while I was making dinner (Fajitas), and she reached over and started snacking on the onion that I was cutting. She really liked it and kept coming back for more. That's just one example of how good of an eater she is.
I know I said that she hasn't been eating tomatoes as much as she used to. It may very well be because we canned tomatoes and she ate so many of them. (Don't judge this picture. We had a line of people cutting tomatoes at the counter and no place for our giant pot, so I had it next to the counter where I could dump the diced tomatoes. We didn't think about how it was the perfect location for Lydia to snitch out of. After this picture, we made room for it up on the counter. We really are sanitary people.)
--She's learning how to problem solve. For a long time if the ball rolled under a table she would cry because she couldn't get it. Then she learned that she could crawl under to get it - but she couldn't ever get back out. Now she's learning how to manipulate her body to get her and the ball out.
--Two of the things she absolutely adores in this world are her books and her dad. I love to watch them together. It makes me so happy and grateful to be blessed with these two. If Lydia sees a book she will "ooh-ooh", pick it up, and then bring it to you to have you read it to her. Her favorite thing is when her daddy is home and can read her the books.
--Oh, and dancing. She loves to dance. Which mostly consists of her spinning in circles. If she hears music she automatically starts dancing, but she is sometimes prompted by nothing at all. I often wonder if she just gets a buildup of happiness in her little body and just has to let it out. I certainly know that each time she dances, it brings a smile to my heart.
-This month we celebrated two of Lydia's Great-Grandma's Birthdays. Coincidentally, both wonderful women had their birthday's on the same day: August 29th. My Grandma Knowles turned 80 and David's Grandma McAllister turned 88. It was so fun for Lydia to be able to spend some time with her great-grandmas and for them to be able to spend some time with her, too.
-We did a lot of yard work this month and Lydia was a trooper. She played outside while we dug, raked, planted, and a myriad of other tasks. Most of the time we tried to work while she was napping, but when she was awake she was happy to help us. Here she is helping us to dig a hole for our tree in the backyard. (Good thing we remembered to plant the tree and not her!)
--I mentioned that Lydia loves books, food, and cars/trains/airplanes. However, the thing that she loves the very most in the whole world is shoes. She LOVES shoes. Her own shoes, her mama's shoes, her daddy's shoes, random shoes she finds on the floor, shoes at the store. She loves them. I'm really impressed at her skills in walking around in them. She can put pretty much any shoe on by herself and can walk, turn, and spin in them. Even David's large tennis shoes. She's really very coordinated.
To illustrate her love of shoes... I thought I'd include some picture of her shenanigans while I was shopping clearance at the Outlets across the freeway. I swear she found every single pair of shoes in each store we went to. She was in heaven!
-She is SO full of energy. Observe.
-She has got the saddest sad face in the world. If you try to make her do something that she doesn't want to do - she immediately scrunches up her face and whines. Poor girl. Being a baby is so hard.
--We are already teaching her about the basics of Utah State fan-ship. We sing the fight song in the car and dressed her up for the kickoff football game last week. I seriously want some more Aggie gear for our little girl. She is the cutest little Aggie fan, ever. (Also, those tennis shoes? We got them as some handme downs and they are easily Lydia's favorite shoes. She loves them. She will chose them over any of her others. I think it's so funny.)
--Speaking of her really cute Aggie outfit, it's seriously a miracle that we got a picture of her with her USU bow on her head. This is what most of our pictures looked like.
You may have noticed that the majority of pictures this month are bow-less. I don't know why, but she's recently decided that she hates wearing her bows. I don't know why, because they are so cute. But unless we are going out, I usually don't even try to fight the battle because this is always what happens:
--This month we've started tending our favorite Cooper kiddos on Friday mornings. Lydia has loved playing with Carson and Elsie on such a regular basis. Lydia and Elsie have started interacting more and have started copying each other's actions. If one of them does something, the other will start doing it as well. Then they look at each other and laugh and keep doing it. It's darling.
--Lydia still loves her cupboard in our kitchen. She plays in it frequently and has just started sitting down and letting the door shut on her. She will sit there for minutes at a time just jabbering to herself while her legs are sticking out. I love it.
-First Haircut! I blogged about it here: Lydia's First Haircut. In summary, she did a great job and I love her new little trim.
--I think I may have mentioned that Lydia only had two teeth until she was almost 15 months and then last month during our Houston, TX trip - she had three teeth come in. She still has only those five teeth and it's so funny. I was under the impression that the top two teeth usually come in together, but Lydia's top left tooth came in along to the one just outside of that. That front tooth is huge. Seriously, at first I was concerned that it was actually two teeth fused together. Then I was worried that the top right tooth hadn't developed and that's why it hadn't come through. But you can now see it getting ready to break the skin and so I'm not worried anymore. I'm just content to smile along with Lydia's toothy grin.
-- Even though she's got lots of energy, she actually likes to cuddle more than she ever did when she was little. I'm such a lucky mama.
--I couldn't get many good pictures of the signs, but Lydia is awesome at signing lots of things now. Some of her favorites are dog, airplane, train (she does this at least 50 times a day), food, milk, and many others. I love that she can communicate with me. She still isn't saying any words continuously. Occasionally she will say Mom, train, amen, Dad, and Baby. Sometimes I wonder if I'm just imagining that she says those words because she doesn't say them all the time - but she's definitely communicating. It's so fun. (This is her signing car, which looks remarkably like she's doing the Scotsman. Like I said, training her young.)
-I wanted a good picture of her looking at the camera and smiling while still wearing a bow on her head for the main picture on this post. (I know. It's a lot to ask for.) We dressed her up pretty and over the space of an hour or so I took almost 300 pictures. Approximately two resembled the picture that I wanted. Most of them looked like this:
But I did get some cute ones that I felt that I needed to include here at the end. They are just too cute.
We love you, our happy-baby Lydia. You bring us so much joy! Happy 16 months.
