Just a couple of my favorites...

I know I've probably said it before, but I really really wish sometimes that I had a Pause button for life. I don't want to rewind or stop, but an occasional pause so I can get a solid grip on the moment would be appreciated.

I've been due for a "how's Lydia doing these days" post for quite some time, but I think I just get overwhelmed with just how much she is changing and growing that I'm afraid to write it down. Perhaps for fear that I'll forget 90% of what I should be writing down, or perhaps because writing it makes it all that more real. Sometimes I just want to pretend that my baby ISN'T growing up. She isn't going to stop needing me, she isn't going to change, and she for SURE isn't going to start learning how to disobey!

But alas... I've sat in denial too long. Today Lydia took her very first solo steps. Two very wobbly and unsure little steps, but they were there. She did a few more one-step attempts, and one other two-step try after Daddy came home. If she does the walking thing the same way she did the sitting up and standing things, she'll be confidently walking everywhere in a week or so.

Also today we took another big step together... weaning. Today is the first day that I will not be nursing her at all. For the past week she has been down to just nursing at bedtime, so tonight we put her down without it. She was crying at first, but she had been fussing from the instant we got her undressed to put her PJ's on. We got her ready and I rocked her and sang to her until she had calmed down. I offered her a sippy cup of warm milk but she refused to even take a sip. So once she was quiet and calm, I kissed her on the head like I always do, told her I loved her and that it was time for night night, and gently placed her in her crib. She didn't fuss.

While I have never been one who looooved nursing like some moms do, there's still a part of me that is sad for the transition. I'm so happy to have nursed her for almost a year (cut short by a few days so that she has time to adjust before birthday parties, doctor appointments, pictures, etc). It was a great experience and I feel lucky that we didn't have any difficulties along the way. I loved nursing for the special time of cuddling (those of you who know my sweet girl know that she is a major wiggle worm, so cuddle time is special!), but I am looking forward to a bit more freedom. Since Lydia gave up on bottles very early on, I have been tied to her physically for the past year. Date nights for Brent and I have had to fit around Lydia's bedtime schedule, meaning we either had to be home by 7 or wait until 7 or 8 to leave (in which case whoever watched her didn't get to see her). It will be nice once this transition is over to be able to actually go out for a dinner date and not have to worry about bedtime for the baby! I'm trying to focus on the positives here. :)

Lydia is growing and learning so many things these days. She is interested in little puzzles like figuring out how to pull her plastic barrels apart and then put them back together. She definitely has my (lack of) patience though! Lydia will try two or three times to get the barrel halves together, then she will start to cry and flail her arms around throwing the halves across the room. She definitely gets frustrated easily, but I try to help her and encourage her to keep trying again. She continues to be my little mimic. She loves to mimic mouth noises including attempting to whistle... which is hilarious because neither Brent nor I can whistle! She heard my parents whistling when we visited and now I'll see her randomly trying to do it herself. As far as actual words go, she will repeat certain words when you say them to her - mostly mama, dada, and night night - but doesn't do much when it comes to saying things on her own. The only word I'll fully give her credit for is "hi." She says hi a lot in the proper context and without prompting. I cracked up in the grocery store the other day when we were standing at the deli counter and Lydia leaned to the side to look around me and enthusiastically shouted "HI!" to the lady who walked up behind us. My goodness what a friendly little girl I have!

She hasn't picked up a whole lot more sign language, but Lydia did make up her own version of the "I love you" sign. She doesn't have the coordination to bend just the two middle fingers down, so instead she just bends her whole hand down. But it is certainly a specific sign she does for "I love you." She is also learning to blow kisses, however she doesn't understand the second half (the "blowing" part) and instead just smashes her hand onto her lips whenever I mention kisses. Lydia has also learned how to drink from a straw, but still prefers to just chew on it unless she is thirsty.

On to eating... this has been the largest obstacle for me and certainly tries my patience. Especially as of late. Not only does she enjoy dropping food on the floor, but she also feels the need to change foods every 3 bites. It doesn't seem to matter what I feed her. She will take 3 or 4 bites, then refuse to eat any more of that food. I'll then switch to another food for 3 or 4 bites before she won't eat that anymore either. I wouldn't mind so much if I could just cycle through 2 or 3 food and she'd be happy... but no. Once she's had her few bites of something, she is DONE with that. It gets so frustrating! I honestly don't want to have 15 foods prepared to offer her at each meal. The one and only thing that seems to be foolproof to her games is baby food green beans. Yes, she loves them. The other day she ate almost 2 whole packages in one meal. But beyond those, even things that she used to absolutely love like grilled cheese get refused after a few bites. I've been trying to teach her to sign "all done" when she doesn't want anymore of something rather than dropping it on the floor, but it hasn't worked yet. I've tried ignoring the food dropping, and telling her no. Neither as phased her. But regardless, I could deal with the food on the floor if she would at least eat a decent amount before tossing it... then signing for "more" because she is hungry but wants something different now. I'm out of ideas here!

In just 3 short days my baby girl will be one year old. I know it is cliche, but it really does go by so fast. I think back on all that has happened this past year and how much she has changed and it truly is amazing. So much is different now! We will be celebrating her birthday next weekend when my family has a chance to come up to visit. It will certainly be crazy around here... my parents, my oldest brother with his wife and three daughters, and possibly my other brother will all be staying at our house! This will mean 4 little girls (ages 6, 4, 2, and 1) will be running around terrorizing my home. Madness! But I'm sure it will be good fun. I always love having my family around. And in addition to my family, many of Brent's family members will be over next Sunday for the birthday party. We decided to keep it for family only, but even with just family members we will have a ton of people in our house for the evening!

I'm just hoping and praying that Lydia is feeling well. She has been under the weather for the past week and threw up for the first time ever on Monday. Tuesday afternoon and evening she spent hours just cuddling and napping with me on the couch. I can't honestly say I didn't enjoy it because, as mentioned above, cuddle time with Lydia is short and infrequent, but I was so sad that she felt crummy. Things seem to be looking up now, though, and she was mostly back to her normal antics today. The only not normal thing is that she is still being pretty clingy to me, not wanting me to even leave the room. But I'm hoping that is teething related. She was that way when she cut her bottom two teeth and she looks really close to cutting a top one now.

So there ya have it... updated life of Lydia. Long post due to the fact that it's taken me nearly a month to force myself to write it. She'll have her 12 month doctor appointment on Tuesday, so I'll likely post more info on how she's doing after we get her new stats. Is it funny that I am SO excited to find out my baby girl's weight? Don't worry, Lydia... I promise I'll get over it before you reach high school.

I'm having a hard time keeping up with Lydia's baby book(s) and it's making me very nervous about my ability to do this for future children. I even started out with intentions of not going all-out for Lydia and doing a ton of stuff that I won't be able to commit to with others. But here I am, just doing trying to do the minimum and failing! I finally sat down today to attempt to document all that Lydia learned, liked, and disliked when she was 10 months old and quickly realized that I can hardly remember. Oops. I'm a bad mommy. Ha!

So Brent and I decided that we'll just see how things go with future kids and will hide or burn all evidence of extra stuff that we did for the first one or two. Better to deprive tham all then to gradually deprive them more and more... ;)

Yesterday Lydia turned 11 months old, and while I realize that many moms continue to speak of their childrens' ages in terms of months through the second year, this is the last time that it is more or less necessary. She won't be "zero" years old anymore. The next step is the big ONE YEAR.

I'm excited and anxious at the same time. So much has changed in this past year. Lydia has grown into an adorable, fun, sweet, joyful, and downright entertaining toddler. I can't get enough of her! As will be the case throughout her life, I find myself thinking about all of the stuff that is over, as well as all that is to come.

We continue to move slowly but steadily towards weaning. Now that she is 11 months old, I have backed off to just 2 nursings a day: first thing in the morning & last thing before bed. Pretty soon the morning one will switch to an after-breakfast thing, but we'll keep with 2 nursings for another couple of weeks at least. I've moved gradually from 4 down to 2, but the last 2 will likely both disappear in the week or two before her first birthday. Lydia does pretty well with finger foods, but gets pretty involved playing with it rather than eating it. She doesn't care for milk very much, so she'll probably be getting her dairy needs met with yogurt and cheese. I really wish she would get more teeth so she could do better eating some of the things the rest of us eat. It can stress me out sometimes trying to come up with enough things for Lydia to eat to provide both nutrition and variety... as well as being easy enough for her to pick up to feed herself.

Discipline is another item on my mind a lot. It's so hard to figure out how much she understands! She definitely can throw little tantrums now, and she obeys often enough for me to believe she understands what we mean when we tell her no... but boy is it difficult to decide how to handle things when she disregards our instructions!

The house has undergone a major babyproofing overhaul as of late. It still looks like a house in which civilized adults live (we are not going to be those parents who clear the entire house out so the kid can't touch stuff), but we've added in a few more precautions. Brent installed cabinet locks on the cabinets containing harmful items (though Lydia still has not shown much interest in opening cabinets anyway). We bought a gated playyard (6 connecting gate panels) and have used these to gate off the entertainment center so Lydia can no longer get into all of the cords. And finally (my favorite) we got the playroom set up upstairs! The bonus room above our garage is one of the largest rooms in the house, and now it is cleaned out and full of toys and activities for Lydia. She loves it! She has lots of room to crawl around in there and space to push her walking toys also. I still want to add some things to help organize all the toys, and also a child-sized table, but I'm so pleased to have it be functional for now.

It has occurred to me lately that passion is something you simply cannot manufacture. You can't pretend to be passionate about something. Sure you can pretend to like things, maybe even to love them, but you can tell when someone is TRULY passionate.

This thought has put me in kind of an uncomfortable spot. Namely because I am not feeling very passionate about a number of things that I WANT to have a passion for. Try as I might to muster up some intense emotions, it just doesn't stick. I'm not quite sure what to do.

I've heard a lot of people say how having children brought them so much closer to God. They suddenly realized what unconditional love really was. Instantly they became aware of how much God loves us. I really wish I could say I have had a similar experience, but if I'm going to be really honest here, I don't feel any closer to God now than I did a year ago... before Lydia was born. Perhaps despite this experience of knowing the intense love a parent has for a child something still keeps me from accepting that God can feel the same way about me. I know it to be true, but it's like it still isn't real to me (if that makes any sense). I keep thinking back to the phrase from the Truth Project: Do you really believe that what you believe is really real?

I know this stuff. I know the facts. I've been raised in a Christian household. I know the stories, I've read the books, I've heard countless sermons. I've even dug deeper into the history of the Bible, all of the history and facts that give us reason to believe that this book is all that it claims to be. So why do I still feel so empty? I want to be passionate about Christ and all that He is. He has changed my life, no doubt about that, but too often I feel like that gets forgotten.

How can you get passion back when there is no way to manufacture passion?

Lydia is all over the place these days! Just a couple of weeks ago she began to "army crawl" on occasion (still mostly rolling to move though). Now, she is full blown crawling! Still not super quick, but gaining speed every day. She finally got the hang of crawling movements a few days ago while we were in Cincinnati celebrating Christmas/New Years with my family. Additionally she became an expert at sitting up this week (going from lying down to upright position). Lydia just loves to hit all of these milestones away from home!

There's no stopping her anymore. She can sit, she can crawl, she can pull herself to standing, she can cruise along the furniture, she can walk with assistance (holding hands or a walking toy), she can bend/reach from standing to grab toys on the floor, and she can (not gracefully) sit down from a standing position. If I want to leave her for even just a second to do something, I better be making sure she can't get to anything she shouldn't... because otherwise she will!

Lydia was doing very well for awhile with the "no mouth" and "no touch" commands, however we have noticed in the past few days that she doesn't obey them much anymore. I have to believe that she understands them because she used to listen... so perhaps she is testing us? Trying to push those boundaries? Yikes. I am so not ready for that. We're trying to be firm, use stern voices, and take things away when she doesn't obey. Anyone have any other suggestions for disciplining a 10 month old? It's just so hard to figure out what she actually understands!

In addition to all of the wonderful new skills in the realm of mobility, Lydia is getting better at sign language too! At last! I've been trying to remember to do several simple signs to her since she was a newborn... it's so fun to finally see her using some of them! She is improving at "more", sometimes doing it correctly but still sometimes clapping instead. 7 times out of 10 I can get her to do the "all done" sign after meals. I see the sign for "milk" a lot, but I'm not sure she really associates it with nursing. That's probably one of the signs I did with her most frequently, so she might just be using it as a default sign for any type of communication. When I am getting ready to nurse her and say "milk" along with doing the sign, she definitely knows what I'm talking about. But when she does the sign herself, she does it for just about everything. Not to mention that it is similar to how she waves. We are working on "eat" and "drink" as well... what are some other signs that would be good to start with her?

One final note of other random Lydia things: She waves hello and bye-bye. She shakes her head no. She loves to be bounced and will continue bouncing on her own if you stop. She knows how to dance. She points at things. She is still a great traveler. Her babbles and squeals and laughs and noises fill our house every single day. :)