Struggling to keep up

The sun has finally returned after almost a straight month of rain.  We passed the rainy weeks by going to swim class, setting up our camping tent in the living room (she and the cats LOVE it - so it's now set up in the attic) and trying to do new things to keep her busy... her first trip to Ikea, heading to the outdoor outfitter in town to wander through their stuff, and playing with friends.  It's generally been working and she's been a busy girl - she eagerly climbs on furniture now (yikes, we have a climber!), her molars are still coming in (ouch), and she's trying just about any new word she hears in conversation (this week: thunder, disgusting, oopsie-doopsie, good girl).  She's close to putting words together and has been practicing her manners (please and thank you, and starting on excuse me) so everyday is a new adventure in communication with her.

We're continuing swim lessons through the fall (she's really enjoying it and getting the hang of it now) and have signed her up for a music class that starts next month (we did a trial class last week and there was no sign of terrible songs like The Wheels on the Bus, so we'll give it a try, lol).
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So that was all from a post from AUGUST - whoops, so much for staying on top of things, that draft was sitting in my folder waiting to be finished, but instead I'm just jumping to where we are now.  We've been camping, had our first family photos, visited the pumpkin patch, and are finally back to biking (hooray!).  C's a chatterbox now with easily over 100 words, adding new ones daily as she hears them and there is rarely a word she says we can't understand.  Said her first sentence last month as we were packing up to go camping at Oscar Scherer State Park: "Baby fall down" - she calls herself Baby and as we were doing chores in the yard she took a digger and announced it before picking herself up and going about her business - Wade and I were so surprised and it made us laugh.  She also regularly says "bless you" now when we cough or sneeze which is pretty funny because we didn't even try teaching it to her, she just picked it up on her own!

We also finally made time to wage war on taking back the yard.  It had become quite over grown and was in desperate need of mulching so we picked a weekend for Granzie and Poppi to stay with us to play with C for the weekend while Wade and I worked in the yard.  We hacked, weeded, planted, and mulched and the yard looks lovely again (we were starting to wonder if coyotes were nesting in our yard - true story, we have coyotes here!).  It's so nice to have it looking tidy and mulched again and all the weeding and trimming actually made the yard feel bigger so there's more room for C to run and explore - right now her favorite is picking flowers and eating mulberries right off the tree.  Our veggies beds are also looking good and full of plants and C's been enjoying the fresh lettuce.

We're still doing swim classes and I think she's almost ready to move up to the toddler group class (right now she and I swim together in class, but the group class is just with the teacher); she is enjoying music class and some of the songs have become good soothers when she has a hard time settling down to nap (she loves music).  She's also been working on potty training, and has it down pretty well, except when she's feeling lazy then she just goes in her diaper.  Otherwise she runs around mostly without a diaper (or any bottoms) and we haven't had an accident in weeks.  It'll be tough when it's finally cold and we can't let her run around without bottoms anymore!

She just finished getting her canine teeth (even worse than molars!) and having a growth spurt and some mental development too - she's running now, climbs all over and up on things, connecting lots of words, and remembers things from weeks ago (for instance if you ask her what she saw camping - she'll tell you about the Bald Eagle that buzzed the playground while she was on the slide).  She also recently just started toddler tantrums, so that's been a new development that took us by surprise.  She also is having fun making all sorts of faces to make us laugh and we like to make a game of it.  Her scowl face is sure to get a laugh out of everyone and she knows it.

I just uploaded a bunch of pictures, so check them out on our Picasa site.   Enjoy!

Trying to catch up...

On so many levels it feels like I am trying to catch up... to Clementine's speed, to my work, to our house chores...  I haven't even been taking as many pictures now that Clementine is mobile - she's fast and curious and determined (and teething - yikes, 3 molars at once right now)!  She keeps us on our toes and we're trying to capture her rapid changes as best as we can.  Check out our picture site for all of her adventures (pictures and video!).  Let's see if I can provide some quick recaps to bring everyone up to speed:

How silly is this girl?  She has lots of fun with Miss Lisa!

After Easter we went to visit Wade's family in PA - which was great since C finally got to meet her Uncle Seth, Aunt Tracy, and cousins (Sydney, Zane, and Cole) and the rest of the extended family.  It was absolutely freezing when we were there, but we bundled her up and she enjoyed herself quite a bit.  She had lots of fun with her cousins, taking wagon rides with Grammie, and playing with Grampie in her Dada's old toys.  She also added a few words to her newly developing vocabulary: "flower" and "buh-buh" for butterfly.  We also tied the trip into a work trip for me, so it was nice to see an old friend and her family while we were in Philly for my meeting.

Practicing her walking skills with Dada and Grammie - she was so close but not quite ready to let go.

Towards the end of April a dear friend from college, Sarah, came to visit with her toddler, Elliott, who's about 6 months older than Clementine.  We had a lot of fun being moms together and watching the kids play and get to know each other.  They got along really great and it was clear Clementine was trying to pick up walking tips from Elliott!

Just shy of turning 13 months Clementine finally started walking.  It was clear by her 1st birthday she could have walked if she wanted to (her standing and squatting balance was good) but she apparently was in no hurry to walk.  Our sitter Lisa was able to get her to take her first steps and get it on video and not to long after that she was officially walking like a drunken sailor.  We were sad to see her fast-crawl go - it looked like she was trying to run and practically bounced off the floor with excitement when she did it!  She made for one adorable crawling baby.

For Mother's Day we hosted brunch for my Mom, then Poppi treated us all to a trip to the art museum to see a special Impressionist collection which was really nice and fun to see which paintings C reacted to (she's a fan of Picasso!).  For Father's Day we went to the aquarium (Dads got in free!) since Wade loves how much C enjoys the aquarium.  It was a fun morning followed by playing in the sprinkler in the yard for the afternoon.

For Memorial Day we spent the traditional weekend on the beach with Granzie and Poppi.  We had a lot of fun and C really got into playing in the sand this time, rather than just wandering.  She also started her conversion to a once a day nap schedule kind of by accident.  The first day we were there our friend Michelle and her son Gus came to visit.  We played in the pool and had so much fun we lost track of time. After some hurried snacks we tried to get Clementine down for a very late morning nap - and it was the easiest she's ever fallen asleep.  lol  It was unprecedented (normally she would have had a complete meltdown when she's that tired and demand to be nursed to sleep).  So for the rest of the weekend we kept pushing her naptime back with lots of fun in the sun at the beach and the pool which kept her awake and distracted (also teething) until we could get her down for a nice solid midday nap.  It was a really nice weekend and the change to a nap nap system was life changing.

This girl loves the beach and the water!

Ever since C's birthday I've been working quite a bit which has been nice, but also stressful.  With all of her developmental changes and teething, she was an extremely unpredictable sleeper so I was not getting work done at night and not sleeping much either.  Finally she got back on schedule towards early June and I spent most afternoons working then again late into the night once she went to bed.  It's made for long days, but it's been a relief to have some money coming in and I was able to finish up all my projects just before we took a little summer vacation.

The rest of June largely passed in a blur as I spent mornings trying to keep C busy and distracted (we started parent & baby swim lessons) to keep her awake and not focused on her teething during the days, while working nights and prepping for our visit to see Poppi and Granzie.  I managed to finish all my work just in time for us to tend to a sick C just before packing up to leave for NC.

We spent 10 days in NC having a lovely visit with Poppi and Granzie, as well as Aunt Janis, Uncle Miles, and her cousins, Sammy, Noah, and Jamie.  They were able to stay the night for the Fourth of July weekend so we were able to enjoy lots of playtime, fireworks, and homemade pancakes.  We were going to go camping with them but the rain didn't cooperate and we had to go with plan B which was one night at Cataloochee Campground in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.  It was a lot of fun and so wonderful to C how much of a trooper C was - she loved it despite the rain.  I've dying to go camping for the past few years we've visited but the rain foiled us both times, so I'm so happy we pushed through to take C camping for the first time.  She loved splashing in the puddles, looking up at the "huuuuge" trees, playing in the tent, and reminding us that the fire was hot.  I'm so excited we'll get to take her camping with us now that we know she likes it.  Now we just need to save up for a family size tent and mattress because our little backpacking tent and single sleep pads won't cut it! lol  We've already decided to revive my birthday tradition of camping (hooray!) and found something close to home we're excited about - Ft. Desoto where Aunt Jen and Uncle Bob stayed this past spring and we enjoyed visiting them at their site.

These past few months have also seen an explosion in C's communication skills - she can't always say a whole word, but it's very clear she's trying and knows what she's trying to say.  In fact, she is game to try just about every word you throw at her and her picture books in particular have been great for this (she also likes pointing at things in the books if you ask her where something is).  It's also a challenge grocery shopping with her now that she wants to tell you everything she recognizes. I should have started a list sooner, but here are some of her favorite words off the top of my head: avocado, broccoli, cat/kitty, dog, Dada, Mama, Poppi, Granzie, Sammy, Noah, baby, sloth, butterfly, flower, water, more, food, please, hot, cold, huge, heavy, peas, crackers, cheese, sauerkraut, hummus, beans, berries, banana, ball, tree, bird, chicken, almost all of her body parts, shoes, happy, sad, up, down, sit, diaper, poop, pee, potty, done, drink, bottle, thank you, nap, bee, dragonfly, fish, no, yes, boob, fuzz, yuck/icky, everywhere, swim, pool, bubble, turtle, mermaid, help, whaaaat?.... and I'm sure I'm missing some.  Some of these words she uses signs with too (more, please, thank you, drink, food, all done), and some she uses hand gestures that just make us laugh (everywhere, huge, whaaaa?).  She also clearly understands waaaaay more than she can tell us which keeps things interesting. :)

Hopefully now that I've caught up on the backlog I can get back to regular updates!!  My laptop just told me I've filled up my harddrive with pictures and video - oops!  So I need to get back to the project I've been putting off of printing some photo books to ensure C's first year doesn't get lost in the digital world.

A beach bunny she will be

For Easter we headed down to the beach to stay with Poppi and Granzie.  It was finally warm enough for her first time playing in the sand (she also seems past the intense mouthing of everything).  She's been in the water before and LOVES it, but the sand was something new.  She loved it and seemed to want to crawl all day long.  We managed to get a video of her crawling down to the water for the first time and she let the water rush right over her without a hint of fear.  It's so fun to watch her fearlessly discover the world.

Look who loves the sand!

One of her Easter presents was a pop-up kiddie pool which was really handy and she loved splashing in it.  It was a nice alternative to the big pool which was still just a bit too chilly to get in to and she likes doing things on her own already which gets difficult since we have to hold her in the big pool (that didn't stop her from trying to climb in all weekend!).  On Easter we spent the day on the patio splashing and blowing bubbles.  Wade was sick so he had stayed home for the weekend and just came down for the day on Easter for brunch and to play - thankfully it was sunny and warm, a perfect day!

See more photos from her 12 month album here.

Our little sunshine Clementine turned one

The day before Clementine's birthday we were thinking about what we were doing prior to her birth and telling her along the way about her birth story.  I also made observations about what the garden was doing - the citrus trees were blooming filling the yard with the smell of orange and Meyer lemon blossoms, robins were migrating through singing their lovely songs (in addition to nesting mocking birds, brown thrashers, downy and red-bellied woodpeckers, and cardinals), the mulberry tree was leafing out and starting to bloom, and the garden was bursting with kale. It was a fun way to do it, but also a little surreal - my, how different life looks from one year to the next!

This year her birthday fell on a Friday so Wade had to work.  I got up with C and we had a nice breakfast then opened her card and present from her Grandpa John and Grandmama Susie (fun sand toys for the beach!).  After strutting around on her walker wagon we settled in for a nap and snuggle.  Once she got up, Granzie and Poppi arrived for lunch and to hang out for the day.  We had lunch, opened presents from them, then played before she settled in for another afternoon nap.  When she got up, Wade had come home early from work so we could open the rest of her presents from us and from Wade's family.  We had a lot of fun watching her and when she was done we did her fun activity for the day (it was rainy and yuck that day so we couldn't do anything fun outside) - we let her finger paint and use crayons for the first time.  It was pretty funny - we stripped her down to a diaper and just let her go at it with baby-safe food-based paints and crayons.  We got lots of good video and pictures.  After that we had dinner and sang to her while she ate her birthday "cake" (homemade peach blueberry cobbler). She went down for bed after a peaceful bath with Dada and Granzie, and we all followed not long after since we had a party to prep for early in the morning.

Birthday girl ready for her presents!

Dada painted a heart on the birthday girl's chest. :)

For her first birthday party we wanted to keep it pretty small and low key so she wouldn't feel too overwhelmed by it all.  It was a team effort as Dada and Poppi prepped the yard while Granzie and I prepped the food.  Poppi was on baby play duty in the morning and let the birthday girl get into all sorts of mischief in the yard - she came back in covered in dirt and the biggest smile I've ever seen.  Thankfully it tired her out and she took a wonderfully long nap right before her party and got up refreshed just in time for it to start.  We went with a "You are My Sunshine" theme since that's been one of her favorite songs to go to sleep to and the song I used to sing to her during my prenatal yoga classes (my teacher suggested it as a way to connect with her before she was born and she changed the words to the song so the last verse goes "We're so happy you came our way" instead of "Please don't take my sunshine away").  The party was a lot of fun, but a bit harried since I spent the morning baking her banana spice buckwheat cupcakes (with Dada's honey cream cheese icing) and double chocolate teff brownies from scratch (these and the cobbler recipe are from one of my favorite food blogs, Nourishing Meals.com).  We also made quiche for lunch for everyone and everything we served was something Clementine could (and did) eat.  She grazed on hummus, fruit, cheese, veggie quiche, and eventually stuffed her face with a cupcake after the requisite singing.  Entertainment for the party included a bubble machine and bubble wands (one of her early words: "buhbuhl"), picking mulberries (another one of her favorites), and splashing in a bucket of water for her ("wa").  We also had pinwheels for the kids, leis for everybody, and everyone took multiple trips over to visit the chickens. :)

Enjoying her first icing covered muffin (she eats them plain for breakfast)

The birthday girl in her birthday onesie and tutu.

It wasn't until after we were cleaning everything up that I realized I didn't take any pictures of decorations so I tried to capture a few things while C took her afternoon nap.  We got the themed decorations from a great Etsy store and I hope we can use them again sometime they're so cute I don't want to put them away!  Granzie found and adorable polka dot name banner and hat on this Etsy store, which we'll also have to reuse every year - in fact I'm going leave up the name banner in her room all year!

Her felt party hat - she didn't like wearing it but loved the puff ball on top!

For more pictures and video from her birthday, go here.

11 months

We officially live with a little hurricane now... she leaves destruction in her wake, is constantly in motion, splashes water everywhere at any chance, and makes quite the dramatic display when she doesn't get her way.  It's hard to believe she'll soon be a year old.  She's trying to climb all over everything (she is constantly hitching her leg up to see if she can get up on something), loves to clap, give kisses, wave good-bye (never on cue of course), push her walker-wagon around the house, and unpacking anything we give her access to (dishwasher, baking drawer, washer, diaper bins, laundry baskets, etc).  She also is entering into the developmental phase where she will throw a cry fest if she doesn't get her way and her ability to muster so much drama for someone so little is at this point, hilarious.  (Except on the days when that's all she does, then it's exhausting)  Otherwise we finally feel like we're having fun with parenting rather than just  having endless days of feeding and changing diapers.  

Now it feels a little more real - she watches everything we do and sometimes tries to imitate us, which is reminding me to examine how I do things to see what she's learning.  For instance - she learned to give kisses by watching me kiss the cats, which was pretty funny, and tells me that she'll learn to love animals because I do too (she'll definitely be a cat lover - just the sight of them makes her giggle).  So I'm finding myself evaluating what I want her to learn and remember of me when she's grown and how I want to teach her about what's important in life - how to actually show her rather than tell her.  It's one thing to teach your ideals to someone, it's another to actually live and model them.  Every morning I silently remind myself to have the patience, the strength, and the wisdom to do things the right way the first time so that Clementine learns right from wrong, but that she also learns that even if doing the right thing take more time and energy, it's still worth doing it that way.  She's clearly eager to talk and babbles at us fairly constantly now, so I'm eager to be able to hear her take on the world and see what questions bubble up in her little busy mind.

I started her 11 month photo file - there's a video snippet in there of her giving Amelie a kiss...  hilarious and gross.

9 years for Team Cooper

This week we celebrated our 9 year wedding anniversary for Team Cooper.  And since this year there was one more member of the team, we accommodated her needs for the celebration.  It was forecast to be the coldest day of the year (and set some records, a high in the upper 40s and low in the lower 30s) so our plans to go hiking were scrapped in favor of doing something a little warmer.  We decided to take Clementine to the Florida Aquarium for her first visit.  

We got up, Wade made us french toast for breakfast, then headed to Tampa (thankfully C took a short morning nap in the car).  We nearly froze waiting in line to get in, but once we were in, we warmed up and headed in the the surprisingly full galleries to see what C made of them.  And she LOVED the aquarium - the ducks and wading birds made her giggle, the huge red drum fish made her smile hugely, and the large main coral reef tank left her standing up against it in awe.  It was pretty fun to witness and made our day.  

We always do an anniversary selfie - this year we had a new participant :)

Afterwards we headed to Whole Foods for lunch where she proceed to charm the lunch time crowd in an unusually sociable manner like she was holding court.  She was a bit testy on the way home, but finally fell asleep just as we got back into town so we had to drive around for and hour to let her sleep.  At this point, I was getting a pretty bad sinus headache and our big dinner we had planned (we loaded up the slow cooker before leaving so we'd have chili waiting for us when we got home) did not sound remotely good to me.  Wade ended up eating dinner with Clementine while I slunk into the bathroom to throw up and succumb to my sinus headache misery for the rest of the night (wild party eh, 7:30pm bedtime!).  Needless to say, we had to plan for a make up night this weekend since we didn't get to the chocolate fondue we'd also planned.

For more pictures from the aquarium and her 10th month antics, including videos of her using her walker and clapping, go to our Picasa site.

10 months

Time seems to be slipping by faster each day.  Before we knew it, C was pulling up and cruising on the furniture, sprouting more teeth (current total is 4.5 with another one on the way), eating more new foods, and trying to climb in and on things.  She also caught her first cold (which she handled pretty stoically) so that kind of made things go by in a blur.  She's been to her first art festival and a kite festival and continues to enjoy our trips to the Farmer's Market every weekend.  I've added some more photos to her 9 month folder, and started her 10 month folder - both of which include some videos.  Her latest hobbies include climbing into the dishwasher, trying to climb into the washing machine, laughing at the cats, and emptying things (the washing machine of dirty diapers, the drawers in the kitchen, her dirty laundry basket, her sock basket, any box left on the floor, you get the idea).  

We also received a new hiking backpack to celebrate Clementine's 10 month birthday and to help Wade and I get outside more since we're both feeling pretty cooped up (thank you Granzie!).  She seems to get a real kick out of riding up high and she turns quite a few heads in it.  So far we've tested it out at the farmer's market and and art festival, and it was a hit - especially since it has a built in sun shade that can pop up over her head to protect her.  We've also found it to be incredibly helpful around the house for chores too - tending the yard, doing laundry, dishes, cooking, etc.  Now that she's so big, having a large supportive pack is also MUCH more comfortable than the smaller soft carriers we have for her.  Considering Wade's mom had to wear him around quite a bit like this when he was a baby, it shouldn't be a surprise she likes it. :)