I’ve been busy sleep training and am late again with our updates!  I did take these photos on the 3rd though, so you can just pretend it’s a couple weeks ago.  It was a busy month with the holidays in there, and a hard month because both the girls got a cold.  Toddler Girl was super sick (she coughed hard enough to puke… on me) and Wonder Baby was just pathetic because she’s hardly been sick in her life.  We had a great Christmas though; it was our first Christmas as a family of four, and the first one where TG was old enough to pick up on the fun and excitement.

Wonder Baby is eleven months old!  I can’t believe my baby is almost a toddler.  I thought for sure she would start walking this month, but instead she is climbing!  She has figured out how to climb onto her sister’s bed (much to TG’s annoyance as that was her safe place to hide toys), and thankfully it wasn’t more than a week before she could climb back down.  I actually left a suitcase out for her to practice on, because I knew it was a shorter fall. The other day she pushed a box over to the table and stood up on it to see what we were doing.  It’s very cute, but I was totally unprepared as TG still doesn’t like climbing.  They are so different!  She has started pushing little chairs around while walking and standing without help sometimes, so we’ll see when that leads to full walking.  She’s not super interested in holding hands and walking; it’s just too slow and she has places to go!

Wonder Baby is very conversational; it sounds like she’s speaking a foreign language.  We’ve all gotten into the habit of speaking back to her in the same way (even TG, which is super cute) and this can lead to me getting some funny looks when we’re out shopping!  If you put her ear to the phone she will happily chat with the person on the line.  She also mimics what we say sometimes, but her first clear word?  ”No.”  I guess she hears it a lot, especially from her big sister who is always trying to keep her out of trouble (and away from her toys).  When we tell her “no, baby!” she starts shaking her head and grinning while saying “nononono!”  I’m not sure the full meaning has sunken in.  In general though, I assume that she understands a lot by this point; she just doesn’t communicate back yet.  She loves to wave buhbye, and will do it to anyone on command, which charms people wherever we go.

I’ve been telling you about our adventures in sleep training, but that started after she turned 11 months.  Last month was very rough for sleep between staying out too late for Christmas parties and having a cold.  I was so tired from it all that I have no desire to push her bedtime by being out with her for a while.  It’s just not worth a fun evening very often if it means waking up every hour that night!  She was still nursing all night and maybe 5 times during the day, which was quite a bit more than TG at this age.  She is starting to eat more solids, but hasn’t yet hit that stage where they seem to eat crazy amounts of food (maybe that’s at about a year?).  Her favourite thing is mandarin oranges, and she keeps pulling her bibs off while eating.  Any tips on getting orange stains out of… everything?

Toddler Girl is 34 months old now.  She’s very close to three and I’m starting to think of her as less of a toddler and more of a preschooler (I’m going to need new nicknames here soon!).  She loved Christmas!  We did advent all month and she was really getting into the Christmas story.  Now she will tell you the whole thing if she’s in the right mood.  I caught her acting it all out with her dolls this morning (“and Mary says “don’t be afraid, Joseph! I’m having a baby named Jesus name!  Let’s go to the stable!”).  She got four straight days of gifts, and for a couple days after she wondered if there would be any more!  The doll above is one I made for her, and Lucy is her new favourite buddy.  So glad she likes it after all my work — toddlers can be so fickle!  This makes four toys and three blankets that have somehow become essential to her at bedtime.  She also got a train set and barn blocks that she uses together, but Wonder Baby keeps coming through like a baby godzilla and eating the trains.  Frustrating.  The most used toys are her megabloks, which have been used nearly every day for the past two months.  She still finds wooden blocks more frustrating to build with.

It was a rough month for Toddler Girl as far as behavior.  She’s been inside way too much, between the bad weather and a very tired mommy.  Getting sick for two weeks didn’t help at all, because we couldn’t even take her to play with other kids indoors.  Her sleep suffered from night coughing, which only made matters worse.  Long story short, we’ve had a lot of time outs, a lot of meltdowns, and a lot of sibling fights.  I want to teach her to just… be kind to her sister.  It’s so hard.  She is often very sweet, but some days Wonder Baby can barely touch anything without TG taking it away or pushing her off.  I am hoping that the combination of being healthy and my being less tired now that Wonder Baby is sleeping better will lead to a happier little girl.

We’ve been eating mostly grain and legume free for the past couple months, but we fell off the wagon hard over Christmas (apparently shortbread is not Paleo?).  It really taught me a lesson as TG had very runny poop for a couple weeks (TMI?) and then got sick.  Maybe we all would have gotten sick anyway, but I think that eating better would have helped us out.  I felt a bit off from all the wheat we ate, so I imagine she did as well.  Treats are fun, but it’s nice to be back to our regular food, and it’s inspired me to come up with more grain-free treats to satisfy our love of chocolate without making us feel off.  TG hardly ate while she was sick, so it’s good to see her appetite back to normal.  She still eats a good variety of food, but has that toddler pickiness at random (loves apples, loves yogurt, won’t eat apples in yogurt?).  She tends to eat a ton at breakfast, a decent lunch, a small afternoon snack, and then it’s pulling teeth to get any supper into her.  She still wants to cuddle on our laps and be fed for the second half of her meals, which is a bit frustrating.

I love watching my girls grow, they constantly make me laugh.  Wonder Baby adores her big sister and often hangs outside her bedroom door smacking it in hopes of waking her up in the mornings (she wakes up a good two hours earlier).  Toddler Girl is always sharing food with Wonder Baby and trying her best to keep her out of trouble.  Lots of reasons for joy.