Noses and Boxes

Evie's been doing a lot more free standing this week.  She gets her feet set apart wide enough and then just stands right up.  It seems like every day she's able to do it faster.  Many people think she'll be walking in the next month or so.  I don't know if I buy it.  I think surely there's a lot more to gross motor movement in going from standing to actually propelling forward.  But maybe she will.  I told Gram the other day that so long as Evie was walking by Christmas, that would be fine with me.  The fact that she still crawls lets me hold on to a little bit of that infanthood because she's not toddling around yet.

One of the things that's been reestablished for me since she started daycare is how to tell if Evie is truly ready to be gotten up from a nap.  She doesn't nap more than an hour and a half at school and she really still needs about 3 hours of naptime.  So when she comes home in the evening she catches that next round of napping at some point.  But these days she's just so sad when it's naptime because she doesn't want to miss out on anything (or so I assume).  She gets mad that her eyes are tired and that she is being rocked to sleep.  Sometimes she'll try to talk to herself to keep herself awake.  But she's usually pretty out after a few minutes.  The problem comes when she wakes up before she's ready.  I used to go and get her if she fussed for more than a couple of minutes.  But now I've learned that if I do, she is grumpy for the rest of the time she's awake.  I mean, not 100% of the time, but she's way less chill and easy-going.  How do you know if she's actually ready to get up?  She starts babbling or cooing to herself.  I think her natural state of mind is simple happiness.  She wakes up and starts jabbering to her seahorse/glowworm in the cutest voice.  And that is when you know she's really ready to be awake and social again.

I also have to commend Evie on her tolerance of nose wiping.  When you approach her with a tissue, she lifts her head up and squints a little bit, but usually doesn't fuss or pull away, which she was doing for a while.  I think she and the kids at school are passing around some mild bug because all six of them have runny noses all the time.  And I'm guessing she gets her nose wiped a fair amount at school.  I don't know if she's as cooperative for them as she is for us, but the key seems to be to approach the nose very gently.  Wiping vigorously and hurriedly is not a good strategy with Evie.  She appreciates the delicate approach.  (This may be the most ridiculous paragraph I've ever written.  Parenthood has certainly increased my ability to wax on about some of the grossest topics of conversation.)

We did have an incident yesterday where she bit someone at daycare.  I knew it was going to happen at some point.  She has been getting her upper left canine (finally broke through two days ago) and when she's teething she just wants to bite.  So if you get in her way or make her frustrated, watch out!  The nice thing is that biting is not a response from her if she is not teething so, at least for now, I'm not worried that it's a pattern of behavior.  Fortunately the daycare didn't say anything to us like they did to some friends of mine, "This better not happen again tomorrow."  Like you can control a 14 month old with a biting problem...

Speaking of, she turned 14 months on Tuesday, so I snapped a few pictures:

 

Sporting pigtails, playing with her dinosaur toy (thanks, Aunt Kristy!)

 

Standing with her toy box

 

Cheesing it up

 

Pondering...

I almost forgot to mention my favorite thing that she did this week.  We have lots of rubbermaid bins that we let her play with because, well, why not?  She loves to get inside of them...

 

Whether she fits or not:

 

I should mention that I'm going to move my updates to Thursdays now.  I work from home on Tue, Thu, Fri, so it's just so much easier to take some time in the morning to update rather than trying to cram it in after the hour drive home, making dinner, spending time with Seth and Evie...  So move the reminder on your calendars to Thursdays.  ;)