Um.....April 1, 2008?

In my defense, most of these pictures were taken on or around April 1. (Guess which one was mid-month!) Missed the picture of the house (I need to trespass on the neighbour's property to get that shot and just didn't get around to it.

May 1 coming soon....

Happy Birthday Baby Girl

So, in one short year, we've gone from this...


to this....



and this....



and of course some cake too...

March 1, 2008

Energizer Baby

Last night, Laurel went to sleep at about 6.

She had napped for all of 10 minutes yesterday afternoon, so she was a little tired.

Despite a bit of an ear infection, she's been sleeping fairly well for the last week or so, since her second upper tooth came in. (note: no, not through the night, but fairly well).

So, we thought that MAYBE, just maybe she'd have a really good sleep last night.

Or not...



Laurel's Evening Schedule:

6:00 - Sleep

7:00 - Wake up. Nurse. Try to smack mommy in the face when done nursing. Get put in crib. Voice displeasure. Spend an hour screaming at daddy when he's not picking me up, screaming at him when he does pick me up. Also, scream at daddy.

8:30 - Get taken out of sleep sack and (gently) dumped on the floor of the living room. Roll around looking tired, then scream at mommy when she tries to cuddle me.

9:00 - Take mommy's hat off of her head (score!) Spend the next half hour putting hat on, taking hat off.

9:30 - Find a ball. Spend the next half hour throwing ball around and crawling after it like a maniac.

10:00 - Learn about the theory of magnetism. Sometimes magnets stick to the fridge, sometimes they don't. It's more fun when they don't because it's noisy. Also, they don't stick to the dishcloth hanging on the fridge, or mommy.

10:30 - Daddy comes home with pizza! (whole 'nother story) Mooch pizza crusts.

11:00 - Hey! The kitchen floor is slippery! Slide around the kitchen floor on stomach.

11:30 - I'm not tired, I'm just resting my head on this nice blanket while pouncing on it.

12:00 - Back to sleep.


She's now having a nice, hopefully long nap. Just to add to the fun, it was Oli and Tina's last night with us, and we discovered part way through cooking the pizza that the oven wasn't working right - friends that would normally be on top of the list for oven-mooching are currently in Mexico, and the oven that we did end up mooching was small and heated up inconsistently, resulting in a burned crust.

So we'll see how tonight goes. The ear doesn't seem to be bugging her anymore, but there are always teeth. Plus she has learned how to stand up all on her own now, and seems to have hit a whole new developmental level, as demonstrated with the hat and magnet (shifting from automatically tearing apart everything in her path to sometimes trying to put them back together again).

Comprehension

Laurel is now 10.5 months old (I know!) and well into the phase of letting us know her likes and dislikes.

She is VERY good at this. A bit too good.

For one thing, she now understands "NO", which usually generates one of two responses:

But I WANTED to throw my food on the floor!

or

This is what I think of THAT idea (look close, that is a raspberry)

In other words, I think we're in trouble. The crying happens when she has no control over the situation (in this case, we took away the food she was throwing on the floor). The non-crying raspberry/grin-of-evilness is the more usual response. She'll actually get up to the gate, give it a little shake to get our attention, and then really shake it while laughing at us.

Bwah ha ha ha! Look what I'm doing!

All in all, its kind of new territory. Ben was BUSY. Insanely busy. We used to joke about how we could hire him out to check out other people's babyproofing. If we stopped him from doing one thing, he'd just move on to another (and another and another). Laurel, to put it mildly, is more persistent.

So, yeah, looking forward to her adolescence.