Bridget at 1 Year Old

So I'm done with blogging for the foreseeable future but I have something that I want to write down so I'm putting it here.

Here are some things I want to remember about Bridget at 1 year old:

She's into clapping.

Her favourite thing to say is a sound that we think is like 'uh-oh'.  And she loves it when we repeat the sound she makes - it makes her laugh and laugh when we do that.

She loves looking at books and will sit on her own in the living room with a pile of baby books for a half hour or more.  She only occasionally likes being read to though because she usually wants to grab the book herself.

She eats mostly everything but just in the past couple weeks we are seeing hints of pickiness.  She often drops the things she doesn't like (like eggplant) off her high chair tray.  Yesterday she ignored her bean salad and just cried until I gave her one of the tortilla chips I was eating.  And she doesn't like bananas.

She still slithers to get around even though she can crawl properly.  She can pull herself up to standing when holding onto something.  But she's not moving her feet along at all.

She likes it when Daddy plays guitar.  She likes playing songs on her little toy pianos.

She doesn't like when we go over bumps in the stroller.

The easiest way to get her to sleep is to carry her in the ergo.

She can be very clingy to Mommy.

6 months and 33 months

Here's Bridget's 6 month picture with the bear.  See some earlier ones here.  

And then later on in the day I hear from the kitchen "take my picture" and I find Henry sitting on the chair with the bear.  So here is Henry at 33 months with the bear.

Redecorating

I had a little bit of an urge to redecorate.  So I made a few small changes.  Made some new curtains for the dining room and recovered the table lamp by the laptop, both of which were made almost 2 years ago.  And I bought a new rug, picking that out took longer than the two DIY changes put together.  

And I decluttered and de-yellowed the bedroom.  This was fun because I did it all with Henry while Kevin was at work and Henry and I both got excited about showing Daddy the new room when he came home.  Henry helped doing the dusting and he was actually a little bit helpful.  The only DIY I did here was to make the curtains, just rectangles of fabric.  I had just enough fabric, would have liked them a little bigger.  I will have to see if that's something that keeps bugging me to the point that I redo them.  And right now I am loving the empty space and bare walls (feels so fresh after the clutter and bright colour) but I might change my mind about that later.  

Grey hat family

This year we all have mommy-knit grey hats.  Aren't we cute?  Mine and Kevin's are from last year.  And Henry's was supposed to have ear flaps but I ran out of yarn, still want to get some more and finish if off.  But that's why the bottom curls up and his poor ears are exposed.  Maybe scarves next.

Changing the Tires

Kevin put the winter tires on our car yesterday and with Henry as his sidekick it was honestly so much fun.  Henry loves to do anything with cars so he was into it.  He liked to lean the wheel covers on the back of the car and say it was a Jeep (because we always identify Jeeps by their spare tire on the back) and just play with them.  He loved when Daddy rolled the wheel down the driveway and chased after it.  And he loved unscrewing the bolts with his hand after Daddy had loosened them.  He was really good at this and we all thought it was pretty crazy awesome that our 2.5 year old was actually helping.  Still cannot believe how great having a kid is, especially this kid!  

Play Tent 2

So I did it.  I made a second play tent cover.  I just couldn't stop thinking about how I could make it better and really isn't that what making your own stuff is all about - coming up with new ideas and just doing what you have the urge to do.  

So it turned out Henry was not into hanging out and playing or reading in his tent but he was really into playing peekaboo with it.  So this one has way more peekaboo holes including 3 with curtains for real surprise peekaboos.  Of course this meant that this one was quite a bit more work which also meant that quite a few times I regretted undertaking play tent #2 but not until I was so far into it that I did not want to give up.  

Henry definitely prefers the new play tent with all its peekaboo holes and secret entrances.  So I think it was worth it.  Henry and Bridget had fun playing with it together on Friday.  Seriously, Henry loved peeking in at her, yelling peekaboo and she laughed and smiled when he did it.  It was awesome!  

  

*note that they are holding hands in this picture!!!!  

the week

Some of my favourite photos from this past week:

 

Halloween 2012

A record of our halloween.  It was a great one.

Cut and Paste

Henry and I are in love with doing cut and paste together this past week.  It started with me suggesting we make some Halloween decorations and to my surprise he said yes.  And then to my further surprise he sat with me for over and hour as we made the decorations and he kept wanting to make more.  The picture above shows him posing with the decorations we made that day.

What's working well right now is he tells me what he wants to make and what colour it should be and I cut the pieces and put the glue on and he sticks it together.  He loves the eyes, nose, and mouth stickers that we have, we have been doing people a lot.  I think it's exciting for him that for the first time he's making art that actually looks a little like what he wants it to look like.  

Uncle Steve, Aunt Eliza, and Wilson the dog

Baby Bridget, Henry, Daddy, and Mommy

Henry

 Mommy, Daddy, Henry, and Bridget

the sun

Spiderman 

Play Tent

I made Henry this play tent yesterday.  He calls it his fort.  It was a thrift store play tent with a smelly vinyl cover so I just made a new cover for it.  I set it up at night so he saw it for the first time when he woke up this morning.  He was pretty excited.  But he soon remembered that he only likes cars and he wasn't too interested in it for the rest of the day.  Actually we played peekaboo with it a few times by his request.  But he was not taking blankets and books in there and hanging out.  

The cover doesn't fit super well, it's a bit tight.  That kind of bugs me and part of me wants to redo the whole thing.  But really I don't want to do that especially since it is likely going to spend most of its time folded up in a closet for now.  

Advent Calendar

I finished up my advent calendar that I planned and bought the materials for just after last Christmas, now I'm ready for December 1 to roll around.  It is a series of 24 little pockets joined together with some double fold bias tape.  I bought a Christmas-y charm pack so I didn't even have to cut the squares.  It was still quite a bit of sewing though.  And the numbers are just stickers.  I couldn't think of any more durable way to do the numbers that wouldn't take all year to do.  So we'll see how durable they end up being.

I will definitely be putting a chocolate for Henry into the pockets (must remember to fill only one pocket at a time so there is no temptation for a little boy to eat all 24 at once).  And I want to put a little slip of paper with a Christmas activity on it.  Even though Henry can't read the paper I think it will be nice to tell him in the morning what we'll be doing.  Christmas is going to be so fun this year!