Now that New Year Day is over, things are looking up. We’ve had an amazing 2-3 days with Katherine. It’s going to be tough to go back to work tomorrow and leave her at home all day. One small consolation…I bought and inserted pictures of our family in frames to take to work. Also, we are scheduled to start a family evening class with a local toddler group – part education for parents, part socialization and fun for the children – and a Kindermusik class on Saturday mornings.
Katherine Language
It goes something like “daba daba yib … yib….” and many other sounds as well. She’ll point at Bisco and say “dao.” We still don’t have a consistent “mama” but we get plenty of “dadas” and “da”. She’s definitely talking to us! We’re just not sure what she’s saying.
I think Katherine gets pretty frustrated sometimes with us. For instance, she was yawning by 4PM today when we were shopping. I popped her back in her crib for a late afternoon nap, but she must have spent 10 minutes crying intermittently before I heard a thump. It turns out that she had dropped her lamb and one of her shoes on to the floor. I got the picture and took her downstairs for a small snack. She was very hungry and ended up eating a bunch of green beans, cooked chicken and a fried egg – she had eaten less than 3 hours earlier!
Stranger Anxiety
Katherine has been definitely going thru a bout of stranger anxiety. This first showed up over the holidays whenever she saw Steve’s sisters’ in-laws. She’d seen them before, but they would look at her directly, and she would cry very hard.
This happened again last night. One of our PEPS friends, Frank, looked at Katherine and said “hello.” She just cried and cried until we distracted her with toys. For at least an hour, Frank would avoid any eye contact. Finally, towards the end of the evening, she walked straight up to him, smiled and handed him Bisco’s toy. What was really weird was that she was fine around all the other adults – they held her and she didn’t have any issues.
Katherine also attended a birthday party for her friend Mac yesterday. She spent the first 20 minutes of the party wanting to be held or right next to us. She then ventured to play with her friends in an inflatable house with plastic balls. Once we were fully into the party, she joined other children playing with toys and even riding on a plastic rollercoaster. We put her on it a couple times and she was pretty excited to zip up and down the curves and then coast for 20 feet on a plastic cart with wheels.
More New Foods
I gave Katherine a fried egg for the first time this afternoon. She loved the yolk and ate the pieces as fast as she could pick them up. She would also pick up an egg pieces, place it on her spoon and then try to get the spoon to her mouth!
The other new food that she just wolfed down was a carrot cake cupcake at the party. I crumbled the cupcake and gave her maybe 6 or 7 little bites. Steve took her away to get cleaned up. After they were done, she walked back, stood next to my leg, raised her arms and pointed to indicate that she wanted more cupcake. I guess while she didn’t want to eat her own birthday cake, eating someone else’s birthday cake was fun.
Sporting New Sweaters
We’ve had record low temperatures, snow and ice over the last week. In addition to her cool new boots, I bought Katherine a couple new sweaters to see her thru the winter. On of the sweaters has this matching cupcake hat that looks really cute on Katherine. Check out the pictures to see her new duds – a whale sweater, a striped sweater with matching color hat.
