Sunday, June 26, 2011

18 Months!


I'm almost 10 days late with this post, but we've been crazy busy these last few weeks! This last month we've seen Ben's vocabulary explode. He seems to pick up on something new every day. Here are as many of the words I can think of that he says:
  • truck
  • cat
  • doggie
  • mama
  • daddy
  • Auntie
  • Hannah (but it comes out more Anna)
  • Emma
  • grandpa (more like papa)
  • Sadie
  • thank you (on very rare occasions)
  • up
  • no
  • water (I've never heard this but Nick says he does)
  • nana (means both grandma and banana)
  • apple
  • fish (ish)
  • shoes
  • socks
  • cheese
  • lunch (comes out "unch" and it means it for any meal)
  • clock
  • crap (ha ha, keepin' it real)
  • Elmo
  • grapes (comes out "prapes" which I personally find adorable)
  • neck
  • elbow
  • bubble
  • ball
  • what is that?
  • wow
  • whoa
  • achoo (I'm not sure if he's saying "bless you" or just copying the sound I make when I sneeze)
  • cracker
He doesn't verbalize yet many of the words he knows how to sign. He used to say "me me" for milk but I haven't heard him say that in awhile, and still signs for milk. He signs please, more and water and all done (which is a frantic waving of his arms - it gets more frantic the more he does it).

He can do the animal sounds for cat, elephant, lion, duck, dog, and monkey. He can point to his head, eyes, nose, mouth, neck, elbow (his Nana B taught him those two while she was here), shoulders, tummy, knees & toes. He sings "e i e i o" so very sweetly. He doesn't sing the Itsy Bitsy Spider, but he does all the hand motions. I tried to teach him I'm A Little Teapot the other day, but he looked at me like I was nuts. Ha ha. I'll try again.

He loves to climb (he climbs all over the coffee table, couches, dining room chairs and would get on the dining room table if I'd let him). He loves to hang and swing from the bars at Little Gym and walk on the balance beam (he can almost do it unassisted). He's very close to doing a somersault all by himself and is trying to jump. He loves to run, walk on his tiptoes, walk backwards, dance, twirl, and be silly. Chase is one of his very favorite games.

He's still doing some tantruming but I try very hard to react the same way, every time. I get down on his level, talk to him in a low and calm tone (for the most part, I won't lie and say that I never raise my voice to him). If he starts to get super bad, I know he's either hungry or tired.

As for meals, I've found more and more that I have to feed him as he runs around the house. For lunch he will hardly sit in his chair for more than 5 bites. Dinner and breakfast are better, but not by much. He's on the skinny side for weight (at his 18 month check up he was 33 inches tall and 23 pounds) so I'm working to feed him more often. His trouble is that he easily burns off everything he eats because he moves non stop and that I can't convince him to eat enough. I do my best and try to sneak in extra calories when I can with mayo on his sandwich or butter on his toast or waffles.

He loves fruits, veggies, pasta & bread. Bananas use to be his very favorite but the last 2 or so weeks he's turned his nose up at them. It seems grapes & melon has replaced it for the time being (he especially loves cantaloupe). He very rarely turns down broccoli or carrots. He's not huge on meat - chicken is one of his least favorites. He'll eat ground beef if it's in something, like burritos or spaghetti, but not all by itself like in a hamburger. Potatoes were one of his very least favorite foods, but just this morning he ate several bites of hash browns without spitting them out. He's just now starting to be interested in juice, so we've been offering that to him occasionally, but for the most part he'd rather drink water or milk.

I think it may be time to break down and go get him his first haircut. It feels almost like a waste, since he doesn't really have a lot of hair, but some of it is starting to get on the long side and looks more messy than cute. I'm trying to tame it down but I'm not sure how much longer I can hold out. I'd like to take him some where that deals often with first time haircuts and that will make it fun for him and me. :)

I belong to a few mommy & me groups, in an effort to get him more socialization and for me to meet new friends. Right now, I'm wondering why I bother. He'd much rather go off and do his own thing, which means I have to follow after. He's not getting any socialization and neither am I. I'm hoping this will change soon, because I think all the ladies in the group would recognize me by my backside as I run off to chase my kid! ha ha

We're not looking to start potty training just yet. Maybe in a few months, but I don't think he's ready and I've heard if you try to start before they're ready - you're just asking for trouble. I'm excited to put him in a "big boy bed" and sort of revamp his room from baby to little kid, but I don't think he's ready for that either. There's too much he could get into right now if he decided to get out of bed and play in the middle of the night. Again, maybe we'll see about that in a few months.

Ben's schedule right now is to wake anywhere from 6:00 to 7:30. He naps from about noon to 3:00, depending on what time he wakes up. He absolutely naps no sooner than noon, but some times later, if he wakes up later. He goes to bed around 8:00 (no earlier than 7:30 on nights when he seems extra tired). I'd love to shift his schedule about an hour or so later. It would make this mama so happy if he slept until 7:30 or 8:00, napped from 1:00 or 2:00 to 4:00 or 5:00 and went to bed at 8:00. So far my attempts at putting him to bed a little later to get him to sleep in a little haven't worked. I just have an early riser on my hands!

I could go on and on but this post is already huge enough and I've lost my steam. :)

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Diary of a Fat Girl

Ohhhhhh mama.

Slowly but surely I've been losing weight. It actually started when I was pregnant, completely by accident. I was determined not to put on much weight, since I was already overweight to start with. I didn't really do anything special, I indulged my cravings (hello $1 McDonald's cheeseburgers almost every day at lunch and large fountain cokes....) but I guess I just didn't get crazy. I had morning sickness for most of my first trimester, but I actually lost weight when I got some 24 hour bug where I literally threw up every hour, on the hour. I lost about 5 pounds then and really didn't put much of that back on until the very end of the pregnancy. I think I gained maybe 7 pounds for my whole pregnancy (and Ben was just over 7 pounds at birth, so I left the hospital lighter than when I got pregnant).

The February following Ben's birth, I actually dropped a pants size from the year before (wahoo!) and since then, I've probably gone down another. Again, I'm not really doing anything special, however, we're eating a lot more home cooked meals than eating out. When we both worked, we ate out a lot. When Nick worked at EDS, he had crazy schedules, plus school, some nights we just didn't have time to do anything about dinner before he had to head off to school - so we did McDonald's or Wendy's or pizza or something of the sort.

Since I stay home now, well, there's really no excuse for me not to cook. I learned from my mom what my idea of a stay at home mom is. I watched my mom pretty much go to work every day, even though she didn't leave the home. She cleaned, cooked, sewed clothes and costumes - she was the stereotypical "housewife". That's the image I had for myself when I when I decided I wanted to stay at home with my children. Now, certainly my house could be tidier but that's a topic for another blog.

Anyway, I cook probably 95% of our meals. And those are from scratch. I don't make a lot of "heat and eat" type foods (my scalloped potatoes are from you know, peeled & sliced potatoes with milk, not from a box with hot water added). I think that had a lot to do with the weight I (and Nick - he's also gone down a pants size) have lost. I don't really serve my family a lot of overly processed foods and in the last few months, I've been trying to cut down on the amount of ground beef I feed our family as well.

My biggest obstacle with losing weight is that I'm lazy and a procrastinator. And I'm a freaking CHAMP of talking myself into doing something else instead. "I had a rough day with Ben, I owe myself a night of quietly reading a book" "I have the sniffles, I'll exercise when I feel better" you know the drill. Even that, though, I'm trying to overcome. We have a nice little circuit we walk around our neighborhood (I think it's just under 2 miles) and we can do it in about 20 minutes. I'm a lot more active now that Ben is more active, a lot more chasing him around, tickling, laughter (that's exercise!!!), running to keep him from falling on his fool head... :)

Anyway, the next thing I've done is I rented an exercise video from Netflix. I did a little bit of looking around and have seen it mentioned in a few places, so I thought I'd try Jillian Michael's 30 Day Shred. It came today. I was a good girl. I moved our couches and the coffee table, I put on comfy pants and a tank, wore my shoes (I hate wearing sneakers on carpet) and I did almost the whole thing. I did have to pause for breaks and to chug water like some one was fixing to steal it and I can't do one of the ab moves (I need to figure something out though - I have a slipped disc in my spine that really hurts if I put certain pressures on it) but I did my best to do it all. My hand weights were two cans of veggies (I don't have any hand weights... ha ha - rock what ya got!).

But there ya go. I did it. I'm certainly not going to tell you my weight, but I will say this the number on the scale is making me feel a bit better about myself. :)