19 months

Lily is changing by leaps and bounds lately--mostly in the language department. She's talking up a storm. We can understand a lot of what she says but some times we have no idea what she's trying to say. If she's pointing to something it makes it a lot easier. She's practicing talking a lot too. Most of the time she's blabbering about something. Sometimes she gets a little carried away and I have to tell her to quiet down a little because she's yelling. She really enjoys talking with us though and I love hearing what she's thinking about. Some of my favorite things she says are "Oh no!", "no way" and "back up, back up, back up".

We're attempting to teach her the alphabet, counting and colors. So far she really only likes to say "blue" and "two". If you ask her what color something she always says blue and if you ask her how many of something there are she'll always say two. She's beginning to learn the alphabet. When we sing the alphabet song, she sings every few letters or so.

She still loves Elmo. She knows she can watch Elmo videos on our iPhones and computers and she wants to do that all the time. She is pretty much attracted to all cartoons though, even ones not intended for little kids like the Simpsons.

Peekaboo

Lily as a Christmas

One of Lily's new best friends

Lily touching her first snow at exactly 19 months old.

Lily putting up Christmas decorations. Mr. Penguin did not survive.

Tunnel in the New Haven train station. On our way to New York City!

Taking a quick nap on our way.

Grand Central decked out for the holidays.

A slightly underwhelming Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree.

Prettier at night.

Back at Grand Central ready to head home.

Lily was beat after the busy day. She wasn't the only one.

Lily wanted to help Daddy tie the tree to the car.

First snow storm!

It's snowing in New Haven! We've been waiting all day and as soon as the sun started to set the rain turned to snow. So far the ground is too wet and it's not cold enough for anything to stick (except on cars). We'll see if there's anything on the ground in the morning. Lily is very excited about it. She keeps wanting to open the front door to see what's going on.

3,000 miles, a red eye, sleeping on an air mattress for a few nights

It was a long process and we're still not completely settled, but we're finally in Connecticut and things are starting to feel more familiar. We no longer need the GPS to find the grocery store or Target, so it feels almost like home.

We arrived on November 16th and the three of us, plus Charlie the rabbit moved in, without all of our stuff. We slept on a mattress until our truck full of belongings arrived on the 19th. Unfortunately for Grandpa Jim, if he wanted somewhere to sleep that night he had to help unload some furniture. So shortly after finishing his 3,000 mile drive, he got to carry heavy furniture. Luckily on this end of the trip the only stairs were the ones inside our townhouse, but there was still one flight up to the bedrooms and one flight down to the basement (where a large number of boxes still reside, unfortunately). By Saturday (the 21st), the truck was empty and our new house was full and ready to be organized.

We've begun to explore. We're found it's colder here! Surprise! Even after only a couple of weeks we've already begun to appreciate the nice and sunny days. Luckily there have been some. There's also rain. More rain than we saw in the last year in Los Angeles. And there may be snow soon, like Saturday. People have told us it's been a very mild fall. But it usually starts snowing in mid-December, which isn't far away.

Brr. But still trying to enjoy the park.

Unfortunately we've spent an unhealthy amount of time and money in the DMV. Who knew moving to CT would cost so much just to have the privilege of driving? Like $600!

2nd Pope baby!

So the main reason for the blog name change is that we've moved past "the first Pope baby". Number two is on the way! So already baby #2 is getting the short end of the stick, it doesn't even get it's own blog. Hopefully he or she will forgive me some day. Unfortunately I think that's the fate of the second (and subsequent) children.

Two lines!

And now for the back story. On September 29 I woke up feeling not so great. As soon as I stood up out of bed I knew that was a bad idea and wanted to immediately lay back down again. All of the sudden that feeling felt very familiar. My first trimester I was pregnant with Lily, I needed to eat something in the morning in bed before I got out of bed. That feeling was immediately familiar to me. I had other signs that had made be wonder before that too so I told Scott I thought it was time to buy a pregnancy test. So he ran to the store to get a test. And of course it came back positive immediately! I wasn't exactly sure what my due date was I thought I was either one month along or two, so I was pretty sure I'd have to get an ultrasound to date the pregnancy.

This time around I was a little wiser and knew I didn't need to see my regular doctor and just called up the midwifery group that delivered Lily. Unfortunately they didn't have an available appointment for over a month, but I took it.

In the mean time I had some complications. I started bleeding, which was quite scary. When it didn't go away, I called the midwife emergency number. She suggested I go in to see a regular OB/GYN immediately. I got an appointment right away to see an OB in the same suite as my midwives. Thankfully, he was able to do an ultrasound and immediately saw the little flicker of a heartbeat. Due to the development we could see on the ultrasound it was clear that I was very early in my pregnancy--only about 5 weeks. Dr. Johnson said that seeing the heartbeat was a very good sign and pretty much meant we were out of the woods but he still wanted to see us back again in a week to make sure the baby continued to grow normally. Again, everything was fine in a week. And seeing the baby twice so early on was nice. We never saw Lily that early. Bleeding is actually pretty normal, but it's still very disconcerting.

We were also given a due date of May 28, 2010--about a month after Lily's 2nd birthday.

18 months

Lily is one and a half years old! The second year is definitely going by faster than the first.


This was an incredibly busy month for us. Daddy got his doctorate on the 27th, Mommy left her job of 6 years and became a stay at home mom on the 30th and Lily had her last day of daycare (also on the 30th). So this past month has been extremely busy for the whole family. Not to mention, we're preparing to move across the country in another week. We have a few things going on.

Lily is a crack up lately. She has such a personality. She's a lot like me which is both heartwarming and a little scary. She's already very opinionated and stubborn--which makes me worry about her teenage years. She's also talking all the time. We can understand a lot of what she says but there's still a lot of jibber-jabber that doesn't make sense to us. She's really trying to talk though. It makes me even more happy about teaching her sign language. She knows so many signs for words she just can't physically say yet. It's so nice to be able to communicate with her. Some of my favorite things she's saying right now are "mon" (come on) while pulling on your hand to get you to come with her (usually because she wants you to get something to her) and "no way" to pretty much everything.

She also loves animals like her mom. She can spot a dog before anyone else. She can hear a bird tweeting before anyone else. She just loves all animals. And her bunny makes her so happy and she loves him so much.

While Scott was finishing writing his thesis, Lily and I went on a lot of day trips just the two of us. We spent a lot of time at the children's museum that we're members of. We also took trips to the zoo and to a pumpkin patch to get pumpkins for Halloween.

Feeding a cow some hay at the pumpkin patch.

Mommy's a real slave-driver, she even makes the little girls help.

Lily wanted to go around and kiss all the pumpkins.

Lily wanted to put her head in the scarecrow cutout all by herself.

Lily looking in the tide pool with her grandma.

We had to go to the LA Zoo one last time to see the baby snow leopards that just got put out on display with their mom.

Lily and I at the flamingos at the LA Zoo.

Daddy getting his PhD.

Lily and her daycare provider, Noushi (or No-No).

Lily and her good friend, Marcus, on her last day at daycare.

Someone ended up swiping baby #2 pumpkin. :(

Our little cheerleader!

17 months

Repeats everything! She usually has a cup of milk in bed before we get up for the day. She knows that Daddy usually gets this for her, so she pushes his face if his eyes are closed and yells at him to wake up. Then she does the milk sign and points for the door to tell him to go get it. If he doesn't get up fast enough, she pushes him until he does. We're trying to teach her to say "please" but it hasn't caught on yet. She really is a motor mouth. She's pretty much always talking. We can't make out most of it but she is in constant conversation with us and herself. She has also started singing. Especially if she's listening to music or watching something with music by herself, she starts singing along. She's not saying the right words but she is singing along. It's very sweet.

We've been spending a lot of time together since Daddy has ben so busy finishing his work. We joined KidSpace museum a while back and we've been making use of that membership. We went to their Pumpkin Festival at the beginning of the weekend and they had age-appropriate carnival games for Lily to play and she won some prizes. Another weekend we went there was a dog event so we spent a lot of time outside just watching all the dogs walking by.

Another new activity that we're starting to enjoy together is singing songs that have hand or body motions. The first one she learned was Itsy-Bitsy Spider which she sings with her Bauby a lot (although not with the correct words!). In fact whenever she talks to her Bauby on the phone or Skype (video calling), she starts the hand motions because she wants to sing it. So far she can only do the spider part but she's getting better. She also likes when mommy sings "Popcorn popping on the apricot tree". Her favorite part is when you use your hands to make binoculars to look through. She tries to do this but she ends up just covering her eyes. She likes looking through mommy's though. She's also learning "Head, shoulders, knees and toes" and the "Hokey Pokey". We were surprised when she was able to put her right foot in and shake it all about. She was smart enough to know she couldn't balance on one foot and leaned against the couch to pick her foot up.

Milestones
Words: hi, bye, mama, dada (though sometimes dada is mama too), car, bird, blue, apple octopus, up, down, milk, more, no, yes, no-no (her daycare provider's nickname), baby, hat, shoes, pumpkin (but sometimes calls them apples), mine, bunny (can say this so clearly!), ball, papa, boom, uh-oh! (boom and uh-oh usually go together), one, two, five, a lot of the letters.
Wearing 24 months or 2T, a few 18 months here and there but those are getting pretty snug.
Wearing a size 5 diaper.
Wearing a size 6.5 shoe.

A visit to a farm.

She loved the donkey.

In a beautiful dress Grandma Sue made. She wore it to Rosh Hashanah services.

Lily looking at the fish at Kidspace.

Lily plays peekaboo with us every day. Her favorite spot to play is at the end of the couch.

Our little sailor!

It's quite shocking that it took until Lily's 17th month before she sailed in a sailboat. Especially since her grandpa has a sailboat--but life (and a nervous mommy) get in the way sometimes. She had sat on a sailboat before but I don't think it really counts if it's still tied to the dock.



She liked looking at everything. She liked waving at the boats passing by. But most of all she wanted to go swimming in the ocean.





But most of our time in San Diego Bay sailing around was actually spent down below. Sailing time overlapped with napping time and it didn't take too long to figure out that it was time to go to sleep.



I had hoped that it would be fairly easy for her to fall asleep due to the rocking. But if I'm with Lily she has a hard time falling asleep, she's just too distracted. So I had to hold her and rock her to sleep. At over 26 and half pounds, this is getting harder and harder to do. But somehow the things that are necessary just get done and eventually she did fall asleep.

We laid in the Captain's quarters in the bow of the boat. My foot is propped on the side of the boat because, although I requested a flat ride, when it comes to sailing, flat is relative and that port tack kept trying to throw me around the front of the boat. Now picture my foot on that wall rocking Lily back and forth for 20 minutes. And tell me why I don't have Angelina Jolie's arms yet? Thank goodness for Google Reader on the iPhone and that my mother-in-law keeps at least a dozen pillows on that boat at all times.





Lily steering us back home. No one told her we were aleady back at in the slip.

Lily with Bauby and Captain Grandpa.

Gymnastics class

Lily took a 5 week gymnastics class during the month of August. It was Friday mornings but I'm lucky that my bosses like me and are flexible and don't mind me coming in a little late for 5 Fridays.

And so Lily started her Foxes & Pups class Josephson Academy of Gymnastics. It was supposed to be a group class but only one other kid showed up and to only one of the classes, so Lily got a private class. She was a little hesitant about her teacher, Lindsay, for about 5 minutes and then loved her.

She loved running so fast she'd fall down on the trampoline.

She loved stacking the foam blocks and then knocking them all over.

Throwing blocks into the foam pit.

Jumping, jumping, jumping.

Lily loved gymnastics. All of the floors had mats on them so she could run and do crazy things without getting hurt. She learned a lot in her class actually. She learned how to jump! By the end of the class she was getting air on the trampoline. She also got a lot better at safely climbing down off things and just a better awareness of being near the edge of things. And she just had so much fun. Plus the end of class meant she got a stamp on each hand and the top of each foot and she found that incredibly exciting.

16 months

We are quickly approaching a year and a half--how did that happen? The first year went by fast but the second is going by even quicker.

Lily is a little animal lately. She has so many opinions and wants every single thing a certain way. She just told daddy last night that babies, mommies and daddies don't need to go to sleep. But puppies do and she gave daddy her puppy to put to bed instead of her.

At her 1-year checkup we told her doctor that she really only knew 2 words that she used a lot and we were sure she knew the meaning of. He said babies her age usually knew about 3-5 words and probably somewhere around 18 months-2 years she'd have a real word explosion. We can see now that this explosion is starting to happen. She understands basically everything we say. She responds appropriately to just about everything that's said to her. Sometimes she says "NO!" but she definitely knows what we're saying and that she doesn't want to do it. "Mine" has also crept into her vocabulary. She can't really say "bunny" or "Charlie" yet, so she just calls him "mine". She says this to basically everything else that she wants too, food, remotes, shoes, etc.

She's also becoming pickier about food (thanks Daddy!). If she has something in her mouth that she doesn't like she spits it out--like sticking her tongue out and spitting until it comes out. This happens several times during a meal. She's decided that she doesn't really like red meat any more, or really meat in general. Sometimes she'll eat a few bites of a kosher hot dog but she doesn't even really care for that. She would eat an entire watermelon and baskets of raspberries if you let her though. She has already figured out that food in season tastes so much better, at the height of their season those are her two current favorites. And always cheese. She usually does a pretty good job of grocery shopping with me at Whole Foods because they have a lot of cheese samples, we try at least one of each.

She's also testing out her vocal chords. She can't make all the sounds yet but she tries so hard to repeat what we're saying. It's so cute to see her trying so hard and she's so proud of herself when she gets it. A lot of words sound the same right now because she doesn't have all the consonant sounds down yet. So "baa" might mean "ball", "bath", "bird" and any other number of things.

We also have some of Lily's favorite books that we read frequently (usually daily) where we do certain actions during the book. Like she has a "first words" book that has a picture of an item with the word underneath it (ball, shoes, hat, face, hands, etc). She'll sit and go through the book on her own now and say the words she knows, or the signs if she can't say the word and she'll even do the action on her own. So in this book, for all the body parts, you have to touch the book with that body part, so you smash your face in the book for "face", slap your hands on the book for "hands" and put your feet in the book for "feet". She does all this on her own (if she doesn't just skip to the feet page because that's her favorite part).

She has a bit of an obsession with her feet. I think she gets that a little bit from her mommy, my toes are a bit more dexterous than most and I've been known to pick things up with my toes. But Lily as taken it to a whole new level. She's always doing something with her feet, she's always washing them with paper towels and holding onto her blanket with her feet. It's quite funny. And of course she prefers to be barefoot.

She's also learning how to count. She likes to walk up the stairs on her own just holding onto mommy or daddy's hand. When we do this we count each step (just 1-5 and then start over). She'll now say "two" and "five" with us (and before we even say it).

We went on another trip on a plane this month. I swore I wasn't going to fly again alone with her until we were forced by FAA regulations to buy her a seat (at 2 years old) but I did it anyway. Somehow I convince myself that it won't be that bad. We just flew to Redding, which isn't that long of a flight but on our way there we had a brief stop in Arcata (turning a 2 hour flight into 3 hours). On that flight we actually got a nice flight attendant that asked the woman seated next to us if she'd move to another seat so we could have more room (since there were a couple extra seats). That made the flight a lot more bearable. Lily had her own space to squirm, throw toys, etc. She looked like such a big girl in the seat buckled in.

She wasn't so sure about the seat belt keeping her in place but unlatching it 800 times was fun.

On the way back we weren't so lucky (even though there were extra seats). Lily of course did not want to sleep. She also did not want to sit still. At least it was a direct flight on the way back though. And she had a fun time with her Grandma and Papa, all her Aunts, Uncle Dusty, and her cousin Bella. She was a little clingy on this trip and didn't really want anyone except Aunt Kellie to pick her up. I think she might have been a little uneasy since her daddy wasn't there and she wasn't sure why. She was QUITE happy when she saw him at the airport and sprinted down the sidewalk to greet him. She does love her cousin Bella though. They are at the stage when they only want to play with whatever the other one has and they get very jealous if one of them is getting more attention, gets the snacks first, etc. But they also want to hold hands and give each other kisses; it's very sweet.

A few milestones:
Wearing a size 6 or 6.5 shoe.
Still wearing 18 month or 24 month clothes and 2T shirts.
Wearing a size 5 diaper.
Knows a lot of body parts: eyes, nose, mouth, teeth, ears, head, hair, cheeks, belly button, hands feet, toes and probably a couple more
Starting to play games like Simon says. She'll play along with me if I say "put your hands up!" then "put your hands down!".
Words: up, hi, baby, ball, bird, bath, hat, hot, mine, mama, dada, papa, octopus (opt-o), two, five, down, boom, shoes, bye.
Still knows a lot of signs and signs a lot. Baby and bye are the only words that she can say and sign.
Knows a lot of animal sounds: dog, cat, cow, sheep, fish, monkey, duck, snake.
Two new teeth, she got two new molars, one on each side, so she has 3 of 4 1st year molars.
She will try and repeat anything you say to her.
Favorite toy: a stroller from Bauby, you could definitely say that she's obsessed with it. We have to hide it sometimes.
Favorite books: One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish; Where is baby's belly button and First Words.

Riding in the grocery cart car at Ralph's.

She must carry one of her bags to daycare each morning.

Refusing the admit the diaper bag was too big for her to carry.

In a park in downtown LA walking to the Central library.

Reading books at the library. She loves books!

She's getting so good at eating with a fork. She still switches between using her right and left hand.

Snack time on the plane. This was right before she ripped the napkin into a million little pieces sending cheese everywhere.



Waiting for our bag to come off the plane. Lily knows the drill.

She can swim just like Aunt Kellie.


This is an old picture, but it was just too funny. Grandpa had the lawnmower out and Lily thought it was like her push toy, so she told Grandpa to go get it and they pushed their toys together down the street.