She sure is growing quickly. When our nephew turned one on Thursday(Happy Birthday Easton!) I realized that Anna was just 4 months away from her own 1st birthday.
She can finally sit, by herself, for quite a while. Watch out what's behind her though, she still takes a dive every once in a while. We put away the swing and the bouncy seat as she was a bit too mobile for them. One time she ended up trying to catapult herself over the side of the bouncy seat, and the swing had dead batteries, she never really cared for the thing anyway. She doesn't care to be on her stomach, and usually rolls quickly to her back, and if we put her down on her back she will often roll over to her belly to get something and then flip onto her back again. I imagine we don't have to worry about her walking too early, fine with me, especially since this house has stairs, something we never had to worry about with Maria.
Anna still makes Dada sounds, but has added whistling, raspberry blowing and lip smacking to her repertoire. The whistling is pretty funny, and she is so serious when she is trying to make noises.
We have moved her on to small bits of finger food. She can pick them up but has yet to master getting them into her mouth. She has made a sign that looks like milk several times and often will attempt to clap when you say "Yeah". Just today I thought I saw her wave bye-bye to me when I was waving at her from the next room.
Still a great sleeper and takes two nice naps a day also. We can't complain too much about anything, as she is a very happy little girl. We do think she is working on some more teeth, but I think I said that last month and alas they haven't made an appearance yet.
What about big sister? What is she up to these days. Maria is all about imaginative play. She LOVES to take care of her babies. Feeding them, putting them to bed, changing messy diapers, complete with a "ew, it's a messy one". I imagine she says a lot of the things she does to her babies because she hears us talking to Anna.
She is an amazing big sister. I have never worried about her doing something hurtful to Anna, so I can leave the room and not panic that she is alone with Anna. She adores Anna as much as Anna adores her. She hugs and kisses on her, and has to give her a blessing before bedtime.
She also like to imagine her "friends" are coming on outings with us, or eating at the table with us. She is adamant that they are there...case in point, we were ready to leave church last Sunday and larry turned and pulled his office door closed. Maria suddenly broke into a loud, intense cry that her "friends were still in the office." She was VERY SERIOUS too. I tried to tell her that they had come out and were waiting in the hall beside us, but nope, Daddy had to open the door and she corralled them out with us. And if you respond to her talking by mistake when she is actually talking to her friends, then you will most likely hear, "No, I am talking to my friends, silly". She likes to say silly.
Maria is also pretty much 100% day trained, but still wears a diaper for naps and bedtime. She used to have dry nap diapers every once in a while, but recently that hasn't been happening. She is working hard on being independent about using the bathroom, but snaps and zippers sometimes make that a bit more difficult.
She is learning her letters and sounds. I would guess that she knows over 90% of the letters by sight and we have been working on the sounds lately. She is a energetic reader, getting stacks of books for us to read to her. It breaks our hearts to have to tell her that we can't read all of them each time....especially at nap or bedtime. It seems that she gets fixated on certain stories of characters too. At night the story of choice that she listens too most often lately is Goldilocks and the Three Bears. I am just glad that she is listening to it, and I don't have to read it each night!
Most days she is a well behaved, happy girl, with the occasional 2 year old streak. She does like to have a say in things, and be independent. So we have to think in advance of how to avoid conflicts we know will happen. It's rare to have several time outs in a week, so we consider ourselves pretty fortunate and wonder what the three's will bring.
We have PLENTY to praise God for; out two beautiful, wonderful daughters that bring joy to each day.
