And we're off!

Jocelyn is running. RUNNING. It’s very, very cute. Sure, she’s not very good at it. She falls down a whole lot. But she runs, and it’s awesome.

Her favorite place to run is toward one of us when she wants something. Is somebody slicing banana bread? Did she hear a truck run by and want somebody to take her outside to see it? But her second favorite place to run is away from us, namely when we catch her picking crud off of the floor and sticking it in her mouth.

She is also getting funnier and funnier. Her new game is to push us down. When one of us would sit on the floor with her, she used to ‘hide’ behind us and play peek-a-boo by sneaking her face around to the front of us. It was cute. She no longer finds this amusing. Now, when you sit on the floor, she pushes you. If you ‘fall’ and say ‘OOF!’ on your way down, well, that is just the funniest thing in the whole entire world! She cracks up at it.

Jocelyn had her first ‘real’ cake on her birthday. She had a nut-free, egg-free cupcake at her NJ birthday party, but she didn’t really seem to enjoy it much. But on her actual birthday we got a vanilla cake with white icing from Whole Foods. Yes, it was still nut-free. But it was just regular cake. Let me tell you – she liked that a whole lot. And she was HYPER after eating it. She buzzed around until about 10:30 p.m. But when she crashed she went down hard.

I am in the process of weaning her right now. We have introduced cow’s milk, and she likes it. She likes it better than formula, that’s for sure! She will take a bottle from me. I am still nursing morning and night, but I am no longer pumping during the day nor am I nursing her when I get home from work. Soon I will stop the bedtime nursing and only do the morning one. We should also wean from the bottle, but it seems like a lot of changes to do it all at once. So we will work on the boob first, then the bottle.

Then we need to do some formal sleep training. We tried twice, but I couldn’t get my MIL to commit to the system, so we were sending Jocelyn mixed messages. Mike wasn’t 100% behind it, either. And it was just easier at the time not to. Jocelyn liked to nurse to sleep. So it was fine. But she has enough teeth that we don’t want to have baby-bottle mouth issues. And she is old enough to give up the bottle. And clearly she is pretty fine without the boob. So we need a new sleep training method. It’s time to consult a few books. It also might be time for a tougher approach. Not a full cry-it-out or anything, but something tougher than Baby Whisperer (and easier on the back – yeeouch!).

I feel like there was more I wanted to share. But I can’t seem to remember it right now. I think I shared a lot in her birthday post – her mooing, her love of trucks, did I tell you how she loves dogs? Yes, she loves dogs. I mean LOVES them. When we were in Michigan she played with all sorts of dogs – she chased them, gave them pine cones, petted them, etc. It was adorable. It was like she had done it her whole life. And when we are out walking and somebody comes by with a dog, watch out! She shouts for it! It’s SO cute!

Oh, that reminds me, she is waving and pointing ALL THE TIME. It’s cute. And awesome. It’s a great means of communication – mostly. Sometimes it’s hard to know what she is pointing to, which frustrates her. And sometimes the answer is still no, you can’t have that, which pisses her off and makes her cry. She also requests inane things – like running the timer on the oven so it will beep. But it’s mostly cute :-P.

She is getting tricky, though. She is learning how to stall bedtime. It’s taking 45 minutes to get her to sleep. She reaches for her toys, she tries to wiggle out of our arms, she cries and carries on, she tries to steal the glasses off of my face, etc. The kid does NOT want to go to sleep. It’s not good. Mommy needs to get her butt to bed, thus Jocelyn needs to get her butt to bed :-P.