I Can't Believe That She is Ten!

Today is the 10 month birthday of our Little Miss. J is blown away that she is 10. Concept of time is still a bit tricky, so even though he knows that she is still a baby, he can't quite comprehend how she has a larger number than he does. He acts like he gets it when you explain it, but then he says stuff like, "Yeah, kind of like having one week and then 30 seconds in a year." I have no idea what he means, but if it works for him, I just go with it.

As I was attempting to get my daughter to eat some pieces of elbow macaroni, all she did was pick them up and then smear them across the high chair tray. This got me thinking (yet again)about how much more difficult she is to feed than J. Once in awhile I can get her to try a bite of something, but it usually ends up on the floor or in her seat. This girl is tough! It took me forever to get her to eat more than a teaspoon or two at every meal, and I thought that she would go to true solid food and abandon baby food altogether, but I think she is just very slow and picky. She seems to be one of those babies that you have to offer a food to at least 20 times before she will accept it. The tough part about it is once you offer her something that she doesn't like, she signs that she's all done and then nothing else is getting into her mouth whether she likes it or not. The only exception to this are bananas. She will eat a banana if it's mashed, pureed, cut up in chunks, or right out of the peel, anytime, anywhere.

The funny part about this strange little eater of mine are the combinations she will accept. In some ways she's quite the bougie eater. She's not a fan of carrots, but she LOVES a combo of carrots, apples, and mangoes. Will she eat mango by itself? No. She won't eat squash on its own either, but pair it with apples and it's going in. She will suck down blueberries, especially the tiny, wild, organic, frozen ones from Costco. I can mix blueberries with green beans and I might be able to get her to eat a few spoonfuls. She's not a fan of pears by themselves, but she will grab a whole pear out of my hands and suck all of the juice right out of it. She only has two little teeth buds right now, so we'll see what happens when she gets more.

I've been feeding her more meats because her iron levels came back a bit low at her last doctor's visit. They seem to be her thing. I can mix up some ground roasted chicken or turkey cutlet and put it into anything and she will barely bat an eye at it. That texture is fine, but she hated when I offered her couscous. I don't get it. Last night she finished all the chicken and carrots I made her and she still wanted more, so I was feeding her the chicken dry. She kept eating it and washed it down with a little water. Mmm, mmm, good! It really looked disgusting. We won't be repeating this tonight because she woke up at 1:30 last night with the biggest diaper and I am pretty sure it's because she ate about 3 times more than she usually does at dinner.

Little Miss has finally taken to the idea that books can be fun. She has been sitting for 15-20 minutes at a time for the past few days as I read to her. She's figured out how to sign "book" and while I repeated the book "What's On My Head?" for what I think was the 10th time in a row, she signed "thank you." It was so sweet. She did it every time I started reading the book again.

This weekend we have two birthday parties. One is downtown at a park and the other is in the complete opposite direction an hour later. I have yet to figure out how we are going to go to both, but we'll do it somehow. J has to make three birthday cards this afternoon because the second party is actually a double birthday. These parties make numbers 4 and 5 for March. J has probably eaten his weight in cake this month.

We also have a lot of yard work to do. All of the rain left us with a ton of weeds and other dandelions. We need to get a bunch of dirt and put it in the beds near our foundation because we have gigantic puddles. Our garden isn't even started yet because we have sprinkler issues that are going to be addressed on Monday. It's going to be 80 degrees tomorrow and it's gorgeous today. I'm pretty excited about that.

Well, I hoped to be able to share a pic of J and S today, but the computer still does not have all of the stuff I need on it to download stuff. Right now it is basically an Internet machine. We'll try soon. In the meantime, please send good labor vibes to my friend, B in CA. She's not in labor yet, but would really like to be, and she's pretty much run out of labor inducing things to try. Since I have sooo many readers, I thought I would just put that out there for her.