Dear Lexi,
We just finished the last ‘official’ month of summer and I have mixed emotions. I’m not ready for the cold weather to start yet, but it has been insanely busy so I’m ready for things to settle down a bit. It feels like this month has gone by really quickly and really slowly at the same time. Looking over my notes from the month, I questioned, “Did that really happen this month, it feels like that happened so long ago.” You continue to develop more personality every day. You get very upset if we don’t give you or allow you to do something and fall to the floor in tears—very tantrum like. You’ll even swing your whole upper body and head your head back and forth if I’m holding you and almost try to bang your head against mine, and then get even more upset if you do as it hurts. It is a very interesting little pattern you have. You continue to be very shy around new people and places for the first 20 minutes or so requesting to be held or hiding between my legs but eventually warm up and leave my side. Overall, you are a very happy little girl and love to play, dance, be tickled and give hugs to mama and dada.
Favorite moments:
At the very beginning of the month, all of the neighbors got together for National Night Out and it was so fun to just watch you run around and play with all of the other kids. It was one of the first times I felt like I had a small child and not a baby. You were happy and content playing with the kids and didn’t need mama or dada by your side. It was so nice to talk with other neighbors and just know you were OK playing without constantly worrying about what you were doing or where you were.
We headed up to the Tansey cabin for an evening to spend some time with Tara, Dan and their kids and I loved watching you play with Megan. You are about 4 months apart and both have blond hair and little pigtails and it was just too fun to watch you playing with your cousin! There was a couple of times where you were both in your diapers and standing on either side of a coffee table coloring. Melts my heart to see you start to develop relationships with your cousins as I have so many memories and much fun with mine.
Two little sayings you picked up from us and say on a regular basis are: A-dookie-dookie for okie-dokie and ‘up-e-go’ for up-we-go whenever you want to be picked up or are laying down and are getting up. So cute!
We regularly catch you having conversations with yourself. While dada was working he heard you playing on your slide downstairs and hears you tell yourself to ‘Sit-Down’, which you proceeded to do and than thanked yourself for doing so. It is funny to hear the stuff we say so often repeated back to us and fun to see you pick up on it.
You sit down and read to yourself on a regular basis, but there were two instances that were particulary cute. The first was while I was putting clothes away in your room and you were sitting on the rocking chair with your book ‘Things that go’ and you were flipping through the pages and pointing out the different pictures on the book. ‘Farmer, Ambu-ence (ambulance), doc-or-tor (doctor), boy, garbage truck. The other scenario was you had propped your pillow up against the side of the crib and were leaning against it with one of your blankets wrapped around your shoulders and reading your monster book. As we were spying on you doing this, we caught you adjusting your blanket to make sure it was wrapped around you just so. Just too darn funny!
For the first time this month, you started to sing along with me. We were in snuggling in the rocking chair before bed and I was singing Twinkle Twinkle and you slowly attempted to repeat the words after me. It literally melted my heart and recorded how sweet it was to hear your little voice singing a song with me. You’ve started to do this more often and will attempt to sing ‘Let it Go’ from Frozen even though you only say, Let go, you will tell me that ‘I singin’.
You also really love the song ‘Happy Birthday’ and soley refer to it as ‘Happy Daddy’ as you like to watch videos of the family singing happy birthday to dada for his birthday. As we sing the song over and over and over again, you request we sing it to different people, most commonly, Ashley and Courtney, but also very obscure things like eggs and the sky and different animals.
Hands down, one of my favorite things every day is an unprompted hug from you. We’ll be playing chalk outside or laying on the couch and you open your arms up really wide and run to us and squeeze extra tight and say ‘Huuug’. It is seriously the best!
Notes:
You continue to get better and better at puzzles. I would say you can get 90% of the pieces in by yourself. You do much better with animals as you are able to match up the feet. You ask to do puzzles almost every day.
Your Favorite toys: princess castle, chalk, reading books, playing with necklaces, slide
You attempt to say our last name and it usually comes out something like ‘Sam—pon’
Your bedtime routine has changed a bit over the month. After giving Dada hugs and kisses and saying good-night, you proceed to say bye-bye or nigh-nigh to everything in sight including your cars, your house, your babies, the trees—really anything that you can see, you try and say good-night to. In an effort to make it go faster and not have you need to fall asleep with me, we’ve been making changes. We have cut down on our songs and our books to one song and one book. You almost always ask/beg to snuggle with me before you go into your crib where you would like to fall asleep. While we’re snuggling you ask for me to hug you, which means you want me to wrap my arms tight around you. If you don’t fall asleep in my arms, which I try not to let you, there are epic screams when I put you into your crib and beg for more snuggle time and cling to my neck and wrap your legs around my body so you don’t have to go in. I’ve also been making a better effort to not threaten you that I’m going to put you in your crib if you don’t listen so it doesn’t feel so much like a punishment and it is just something that we do.
This month has brought some ups and downs of potty training. You were doing really good with telling us and going to the potty so we attempted potty training. We put you in under ware and had you going to the bathroom every 20 minutes and you were not having it. I think there was too much pressure for you to go and you started moving in the opposite direction and refusing to go into the bathroom. So we stopped doing that and rarely ask you if you need to go and you’ve started to come around the corner again and will go maybe once a day and will usually tell us when you need to go.
We also went to the State Fair for your first time. I was going there for work, and decided to have you and Dada meet me there. It didn’t turn out very well. You missed your nap and are not a fan of your stroller at the moment so there were some epic meltdowns to begin the day and quickly realized that visiting the animals wouldn’t be very fun as you pretty much need to be out of your stroller to see them and to put you back in is such a fight, it wasn’t worth it to take you in and out. So we ended up getting a few pieces of food, taking your to the tractor area to let you run around and then headed home. Hopefully we’ll have more success next time.
This month, I also started a new job at Best Buy which is going really well and I really like it. And so far, the commute is better than UHC and I feel more fulfilled and not so much as I was settling.
You also learned to open the fridge and pantry this month which has opened a new set of challenges as you regularly like to go into both and take things out, or pick out the food you want to eat. We’ve had to rubber-band them shut—which you really don’t like.
You’re starting to understand what the word ‘scared’ means and tell us you’re scared of everything, with thunder being the most prominent. You regularly ask us about thunder and tell us it is scary. When it actually is thundering, you want to snuggle or ask to hold our hands.
You’ve also started to like to play games on the i-pad and ask to play them on a regular basis, as well as watch shows and movies.
That’s it for now my sweet girl! We love you so much and can’t wait to watch you become a big sister, 6 months and counting!
Love,
Mama
Peanut Smiles 