Anya update: 12 months
Anya celebrated her first birthday on Saturday, October 14th.
Click the extended post for more.
What is she up to now? She’s crawling, pulling herself up, and walking with assistance and along furniture. In the past week, she’s stood on her own for a few seconds at a time and looks so proud of herself! We’ve been teaching her sign language and she can sign "milk," "dada," "food," "more," and "dog."
She lets out a definitive "mow" when asked, "what does a cat say?" and makes a fine improvisation of her father’s belch (bad table manners, daddy), and she is currently obsessed with "Old MacDonald." She has also been sucked into the vortex of Teletubbies and Boohbah, though her favorite part of each show seem to be the opening credit sequences, which go on forever. She also loves watching the Baby Einstein Baby MacDonald DVD. When we need to get something done, we’ll put it on and she will stay glued to a spot.
She’s finally sleeping through the night. One night about a month ago, we woke up around 6 am and discovered Anya wasn’t in bed with us (we would put her to sleep in her crib around 8:30 and bring her into bed when she woke up at 2). Since then, she has slept in her crib every night from 8:30 to 5 or 6 am. The uninterupted sleep I now get each night has made a huge difference in my energy level during the day! Another exciting thing is that she’s gone into her crib sleepy, but not asleep and has not complained.
Anya is still nursing and I have no plans to wean her. She is nursing less than she used to and has even skipped the before-bed nursing a few times when she’s sleepy enough. I’ve spent large chunks of the day away from her (like when I went to the Las Vegas tradeshow) and she’s been perfectly happy. However, she still loves nursing as do I because now that she’s so active, it’s one of the few times she lets me hold her without squirming.
We started experimenting with solid foods at around six months, beginning with baby food and various forms of mush (rice cereal, oatmeal, etc.), but we’ve slowly introduced the foods we eat, and before long, she’s begun to develop her own tiny palate. Her favorites are sweet potatoes, noodles, steak, chicken, broccoli, plus the baby standards- organic Cheerios, Gerber puffs and wagon wheels. (For more on her explorations in food, visit Josh’s blog, TheFoodSection.com.)
We celebrated Anya’s with a brunch for our family and friends — we ordered pastries and bagels and Josh made two kinds of crostini — savory egg salad and sweet raspberries with mascarpone and honey. I made cupcakes from scratch and bought a fabulous strawberry shortcake. We were hoping to get the ubiquitous photo of the girl with cake smeared over her face but she had no interest in the cake. In fact, she spit out the piece we gave her. Otherwise, the party went well and she enjoyed herself thoroughly.
In case you missed it, here is a gallery of her first year and Josh posted a collage of a photo from each month of Anya’s first year. Below and above (second photo) are photos that CBB Reader Ashleigh-Faye enhanced for us.
