Kalia : 14 1/2 months

FOREWARNING : LONG POST, TONS OF PICTURES!!!

Kalia has been such a ham these past few weeks with all of her talking!  She :

• knows where her hiney is, and taps it while saying "hi-ey, hi-ey, hi-ey".
• calls the roomba "moomba".  She woke up the other day from her nap saying "mooo-ba!  hi-ey, hi-ey, hi-ey!!!" while taping her little hiney.  
• is starting to say animal sounds.  I sing Old McDonald to her all of the time, and now when I get to a cow, she says "moooo" and a horse she says "neeeigh!" and she just started saying "quack, quack, quack" for dug.  She's mimicking her bath toy with the duck noise!  She also says "e-i-e-i-e-i" for the "e-i-e-i-o" part.
• says "neigh!!" when we jog by the horse farms, even if there's not any horses out.  Smart girl!
• says "Elmo".  Sometimes it's "Mel-mo".
• says "ro-yo" for "fro-yo".  I freeze her greek yogurt blobs and told her they're called fro yo, so she goes to the freezer and says "ro-ro" or "ro-yo" when she wants some.
• says "nah" for no.
• says "bubbles" and still loves to chase them all day long.
• wants to know what every single thing she eats is called.  She'll point at it and make an "aeh??" sound until you tell her what it's called.
• has conversations with me all day long.  She puts out her hands and says all kinds of things.  Some, I understand...some, not so much!
• says "woo-ba" for woosa.  Chris says "woosa" to her all of the time (from Bad Boys 2 - means to calm down and relax, to chill.  Chris says it means chillax).  After she goes through all of our names (Daddy, Momma, Kodi!) a bunch of times before she falls asleep, she'll say "wooba, wooooba, woooooba" as she's drifting off.  She says it at random times during the day too, so funny!
• says "ow", "oh no" and "uh oh".  Ow is probably the most prevalent, and she uses it correctly in context, but it isn't very believable.  She'll fall, say ow, then hop up and do whatever she was doing previously.  She's skinned her knees a couple of times and just kept going!
• has started running.  Literally.  She has the bounce to her step that you do when you're running.  Of course, she thinks because she can run now, she should do so...all of the time, everywhere.  It leads to a lot of falls and "ow's" before she's right back up and running again!
• plays with her dolls...a lot.  She points out all of their parts, and then rocks them and hugs them and talks to them.  She doesn't have any dolls with hair yet, so I'm not sure if she takes after me with how I played with dolls (I carried all of them around by their hair!), but I don't think she'd know what to do with a doll with hair anyways, what's hair??
• plays with her blocks and lego's a lot too.  She's able to connect her lego's now, so her and I build and destroy towers all of the time.  I still tell her about structural integrity with us needing to alternate the blocks so they don't break apart as easily.  She tells me some gibberish back.  It's probably exactly how I sound to her :-).
• loves to read her books.  She flips through them all day long.
• has really gotten into riding around on her little toy cars too.
• is really liking drawing on her chalk wall.  I keep the chalk on the ledges, so she goes up to it and claps up in the air until I get the chalk down and then we draw.  She draws lines all over the place, but I draw pictures and tell her what they are.  She's obsessed with the moon (she says "maaon!!" everytime she sees one in her books, and we go outside every morning when she wakes up looking for it), so I drew the moon and stars on there, and we work on shapes.  She can point to the correct shapes most of the time.  The moon and stars she always gets right!
• loves to play in her tent.  She runs through the playroom and dives into there, and plays with her dolls and brings her books in there and flips through them.  We'll go in there and read with her a lot, but when I'm making lunch / dinner, I find her in there by herself a lot of the time.  She only sits in there for a few minutes at a time before doing another loop and diving back in.  We've got her big teddy bear floor thing and big pillows in there, so she doesn't give herself a concussion when she runs and dives in.
• is smarter than her Momma :-).  I drug out her big tent and tunnel to the middle of the playroom (she'll go through the tunnel to the wall, but not into the tent yet) to see if she'd go into the tent through the tunnel if they were out in the middle.  She looked at me like I was crazy, so I went through the tunnel (no small feat, I'm too big for it!) and she squatted down and looked at me through the tunnel and I told her to come get me and then hid around the corner.  2 seconds later I hear "hi" from behind me.  The little stinker ran around to the big opening in the tent and went in that way!  Yeah, much easier than the tunnel, haha!
• grabs her diaper to tell me she wants to go to the potties all.day.long.  She rarely actually pees in there, but she wants to sit on there without a diaper all of the time.  She runs back and forth to me and the big potty until I sit on there, and half of the time she pulls on my shorts until I pull them down and actually "go" with her, and then she'll sit on the potty for hours and hours and hours.  Chris came home to find Kalia and I on our potties in her bathroom, just chatting up a storm.  And no, I'm not letting him take a picture of it!
• loves to run around butt naked when she's done with the potties or after swimming.  It is hard to capture her and put a dipe back on her!
• is pretty much just moved to one nap a day.  We can sometimes get her to take a late afternoon nap, but then she doesn't go to bed until 730, and she wakes up crabby.  If she gets up from her first nap after 1130 or 12, she's just up for the day, as long as the first nap was close to 2 hours.  She's going to bed at 6 that way, most of the time asleep by 615 or 630.
• has finally, just started these past few nights, sleeping through the night again.  She's sleeping from about 615 or 630 until 615 in the morning.  She'd given us a few rough rough mornings at 4 and 5 a.m. a week or so ago, but we're back to sanity again.  Thank goodness.  I can see white in the back of her mouth, but can't actually tell if her molars have come through or not.  They take forever to get big, and she is not about to let me put my hands back there!
• cut out the morning feeding.  We're down to 3 times a day.  If I give up on the 2nd nap and don't even try, we're down to 2 times a day.  I'm working on nursing her out in the living room so she disassociates nursing with sleeping.  So far, she thinks I'm torturing her.
• has started having down time in the crib before naps.  I turn on her lamp, give her some of her books, and leave her in there anywhere from 5-15 minutes.  I go in and read her her books and sing her her songs and then put her down in her crib.  She used to scream when I laid her down to go to sleep, and now she just lays there and lets me cover her with the blanket and tell her I love her and goodnight.  Yay!  When she's been up for awhile and is getting fussy, but it's getting too late to give her her 2nd nap, I just give her about 20-30 minutes in there with her books.  She just flips through them quietly, so I think she likes it.  She won't give herself downtime for longer than about 2 minutes otherwise because she won't stay still long enough to relax!
• feeds herself off of a spoon.  I'll put food on her spoon, and she'll take it from me and put it in her mouth.  I can't tell what handed she is just yet.  She takes the spoon and chalk with her left hand most of the time, but that's because she still has her 'coveted' item in her right hand.
• bats her eyelashes when you tell her to blink.
• puts her fists up in the air to dance when you tell her to "raise the roof".  Silly girl!
• tilts her head sideways when you tell her she's cute.
• has loved going on stroller rides in the mornings, and insists that I take her in the stroller at least a few times a week.  Guess she's trying to tell Mommy she needs some exercise!
• eats what we eat for dinner most of the time.  I try to have dinner ready for all of us at 5, and I just don't add any salt to what I cook until we're at the table.  The other night I made eggplant parmesan, and she thought it was GREAT!
• helps Mommy make whole wheat waffles from scratch every Sunday.  She loves them!  
• shows us what she's got in her mouth and makes us show her what we've got in our mouth every.single.meal almost all meal long.  I think she wants to make sure we're all eating the same thing, haha!

Whew...holy cow, she did a lot these past few weeks!!  Onto pictures!

 Kalia loving on her doll (thanks Gma / Gpa Drago!)

...now loving on Kodi with the doll...

Now hamming it up for me with her doll, so silly!

I have no idea what she was doing here.  I walked around the corner because she got a little too quiet and saw this, so I ran and grabbed my camera and snapped one really quickly.  Praying perhaps?!  :-)

She saw me and started dancing...

...yay for dancing!

She has this ball to her face and blows on it all day long.  Daddy re-inflates it for her, so she tries to mimic him.  She's still into wiping up things.

"Moon!"

She also is really into pushing this laundry basket all over the house while running behind it.  Lap 1 :

...and lap 2!

Skyping with Granny!

"yay Mommy, Granny is in the computer!!!"

"ohmygoodness Daddy, I can't handle the excitement!  She's really there!!!"

 Hamming it up while eating.

Asking me what that's called...

...and more hamming it up!

More eating.  This time with her spoon!

 
Showing me where her tongue is!

Reading....

"Mommy, do you know Granny and Grandpa are in my book too?!?!"

"Craziness!"

"I mean, Mommy, they're REALLY in here!!  Check it out!"

"yay Granny and Grandpa!"

 Reading her horse book - thanks Grandma Debbie!

During one of our rainy days I had two failed experiments in the tub.  The first one I thought she'd love.  I mixed cornstarch and water and it turns into this slime when you let it run through your hands, but is hard when you put pressure on it by grabbing it.  Kalia was not a fan...at all.  She was all done about 30 seconds into it.

"All done!" 

 Then I filled up our big bath with her soap and made it bubbly (pediatrician said as long as I use baby safe shampoo / body wash, she'd be fine), and thought she'd LOVE the bubble bath because she loves bubbles so much.  Nope.  She touched it, and then cried "all done!" at me.  I did successfully put her in the bath with all of her beach toys for about 45 minutes, she just likes water and toys.  No other craziness!

Riding on her toy car - thanks Gma Debbie!

This next one cracked me up.  I have to stand somewhat far away to get any sort of picture that isn't just her eyeball because I still haven't gotten a replacement lens.  So, I told her I was going to get her to make her okay with me being further away, and she held up her hands the same way I do when I'm coming in to tickle her.  So silly!

Giving Kodi some loving after lunch.

"Oh Kodi, I'm sorry Mommy is mean and doesn't give you any lunch.  I'll try to sneak more food to you the next time!"

 Yay!  Stroller ride!

All excited that Daddy is blowing bubbles outside!  This is her face as she's saying "bubbles!!"

"yay, yay - bubbles over there!!!"

"oh wait, they're right there!"

"Um, Mommy??  You honestly think I'm going to stop chasing bubbles so I can smile for a picture.  You've lost your mind!"

More fun chasing bubbles and picking up sticks!

"Okay Mommy, I'm kind of tired, I'll smile for you now!"

"yay for bubbles!!  Now hurry inside Mommy, Daddy said we can SWIM!!"

Getting read to dive in.  She goes face under and doesn't really care.  If she slips or jumps before one of us catches her and her head goes under, she comes up laughing.  Some days, I don't know what to do with that child!

Blowing bubbles!

Back inside, she decided it was time to dance after all the fun outside.

"raise the roof Mommy!!!"

"Okay good, now drop it like it's hot!"

 Kalia woke up yesterday to a really nice care package from her Granny.  We told her Granny sent her something, and she got all happy and excited!  Thanks Granny!

"Granny sent me something??  YAY!!!"

"FUN FUN FUN!!!"

"woah, cool flashlight!"

"Mommy, you see this thing??  So fun!"

"yay for all my pretty clothes and the fun box they all came in too!!!  Love you Granny!!!"

She really is losing a lot of her baby features and growing into such a little girl.  Slow down Kalia, it's going by too fast!!!  'Cept teething...those silly things can come in all at once!

That should keep everyone occupied for a few weeks :-).  Until next time...