magrilless

Fantesstic Friday

I have become a lazy blogger, haven’t I? Didn’t mean for that to happen; sorry. But you can see why I have to spend more time in the real world these days, and why I want to. Tessa is really just a sweetie and a half. We’ve retired many of the baby things around here. No more teeny bathtub, no more bottles in the cupboard, the crib mattress went down a click, the 9-month and smaller sized clothes were donated and the 12-month ones appeared, breastfeeding is on its way out. We are fresh out of babies over here.

Tessa is still a very little girl, off the charts for height and weight still but creeping up toward them. She has entered the squiggle phase of growing up, where being confined (in arms or high chair or for a diaper change) seems intolerable. “I need to be independently wiggling!” She is brave enough now to walk while holding only one hand, but still very much prefers to crawl. She is more tolerant of books now; she doesn’t scream and throw the book away the second we sit down. One day I even got through two before she squiggle-wiggled away to find something more interesting. We are in process of taking away her morning nap. I think she still does much better when she sleeps a little, but this week has seen not even one successful morning snooze. She is over one-year-old however, and it’s nice to not be tied to the house (with Maggie) until 9:30 every day.

Weaning is clipping right along. Tess has had no problem transitioning to a cup or to cow’s milk. It’s her absolute favorite part of every meal. Often we have to put the cup away for the first half of dinner so she’ll actually eat something before chugging down the milk. Her body adjusted without complaint too. None of the scalding and lacing with bananas that we had to do with Maggie. Right now we’re at two breastfeedings a day, first thing in the morning and right after nap time. Next week we’ll work on the afternoon guy and then it’s just a hop skip and a jump to me drinking copiously and using recreational drugs! (Just kidding.)

Eating is still posing a bit of a challenge. She’s very picky about certain things — no white cheese, only yellow; no overly ripe avocados; no green vegetables or any longer carrots or prunes; no sourdough bread, but any other glutenous fare is a go, no meat or beans unless they’re pureed and come with either fruit or bread. We have come up with several tricks, like ketchup and teriyaki sauce. And putting a little puff at the bottom of the fork so it’s what she sees coming toward her mouth. I know she’s barely one and we have to give her a little bit of a break, but babe cannot live on fruit alone!

Happy Holidays

So this is how we spent our holiday season, in case anyone wondered if we were feeling a jolly spirit around here.

Picking out our Christmas tree

Walking around Durango’s downtown shops for free nibbles we found Santa!

Maggie dressed us all up as princesses in homemade crowns one night.

Maggie’s school’s holiday potluck featured a visit from Santa. When asked what she wanted, she told him she’d sent him a letter.

Making tamales with a couple other mom friends. We ended up with pork, spinach and black bean, elk, and green chile cheese.

Cookie exchange with friends

Christmas colored cast, of course

Touring the Aztec ruins in New Mexico

And quality time with family we hardly ever get to see

Hope your last month was as full of wonder and cheer as ours was!

Maggnificence

It has been an eventful month for Miss Maggie. Of course, there is the fractured wrist. She was spinning in circles in the living room before dinner, got dizzy, and fell down on her arm.

fell down wrong. We went to urgent care the next morning when she was still being super careful with it. They x-rayed and determined she has a buckle fracture. She will tell you her bone goes whoopdewoo, but bones are supposed to be straight. This was the last day of school before winter break so we dropped in to pick up all Maggie’s things and so she could tell her classmates about the ordeal. A few days later we went to the orthopedist and they put on a hard cast, although we talked them down from one that would have gone above her elbow. So far, it has stayed on, has not given anyone a concussion, and has not slowed her down one bit. Unless we’re talking about stuff that Maggie doesn’t want to do alone, in which case her cast is a terrible burden and she needs a parent to help her mightily.

And then Maggie consented (barely) to going to the hair salon and getting her hair cut! They took off about 5 inches and she was very brave, with the help of a piece of candy and a cookie. The man who did her cut (the hair waitress, in Maggie’s words) wasn’t exactly the paradigm of cheer or mirth, and didn’t seem like he especially knew what to do with a kid, but we all did our best to ooh and ahh and encourage and now she is (still) just adorable! It has revolutionized our morning routine; we no longer start out the day fighting. It is part of her morning chores now — to brush her own hair.

We also went to a bridal store to try on a dress. Maggie is soon to be a flower girl for Bill’s brother’s wedding, and she is dreading it, as you can see. Either that or she is in hog heaven.

Fantesstically Wonderfully One

And we have no more babies in our house. Well, you know, I mean, kind of. Tessa turned one yesterday and has passed that stage of helpless blob. We are now in the phase of discoveries and growth and learningness. Where imagination starts to emerge and opinions become cemented and a little body takes shape and independence.

In true second child fashion, poor Tessa kind of had her (supposedly) special day hijacked. All manner of little dramas took the attention away from her yesterday, the most dramatic of which was the trip to urgent care to get big sister’s arm xrayed and splinted. But Tessa did get to meet the fish and watch a water fountain and get whisked away by a handsome medic with a little stuffed animal (while I went with Mags for the xrays). So maybe urgent care was not as much a bust for her as it may have seemed.

There were friends dropping in and lovely singing phone calls (which baffled her each time) and a few presents and cards to open (mostly done by Maggie who couldn’t keep her patty-paws off them). And when we went to preschool to get all of Maggie’s things (it was supposed to be her last fun day of school before Christmas break), I politely asked if the kids would like to sing Happy Birthday to Tess. In a wink she was whisked to the front of the room, presented with her own birthday crown, and serenaded by many small voices. (A few seconds after the video ends, she did clap her hands and smile.)

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And thus our sweet and unassuming little girl slips over into one year old. Still sweet and cuddly and social and engaging and now ready for new adventures.

Fantesstic Friday

Near

Far

Tessa is adventurous now, getting into trouble all over the place. She loves to stand up at the bookshelf where the kleenex box resides and has now learned to flip it from upside-down to right-side-up so she can tear tissues apart and eat them before mom catches her. She’s had some stairs practice, so she figured out she could climb from the dog’s bed to the hearth just like stairs. And then when the dog bed went away (the next moment), she went straight from floor to hearth. I remember when she could barely pull herself up to stand there because it was so tall. She climbed into the dishwasher the other day when I was putting away dishes. I heard a small crash last night and discovered she’d pushed the bathroom door open and was attempting to get into her baby bathtub (which was sitting on the floor). She routinely finds pebbles on the floor that have come in with our shoes and is constantly putting them into her mouth. That and crumbs from dinner, feathers from the down comforters, bits of paper that Maggie has cut into pieces, pine needles from the Christmas tree, clumps of dog hair on the rug.

Tess has started to mimic behaviors, which is super cute. She’ll put a brush up to her hair, the play phone to her hear, a hat on her head. Actually she kinds of aims for her head and tosses the hat and it goes flying behind her, which is probably cuter than getting it right. She’s just started to get the “more” sign at meals and kind of touches her fingers together while saying “mo.” She doesn’t understand “finished” yet, but that may be because she hardly ever wants to stop eating. She’ll clap if you clap, point if you point, pat the dog if you pat, and, still my favorite, laugh if you laugh.