My one year old is finally teething!

And no, that is not an April fools day joke. I can feel one sharp little tiny bottom tooth just barely sticking out. Her gums are also swollen and she lets me know that they hurt! We tried pears in her mesh food eater and that soft texture seemed to be really soothing on her teeth: she ate an entire pear by herself!

No pictures of the little tooth yet, you can't see it, but you can feel it if you stick your finger in her mouth.

An Everz update

Eve just turned 10 months old. We took her to get her 9 month well baby check-up yesterday. Yes, I know, we are a month behind. Things kind of got hectic around the holiday season, not to mention it was also Jason's finals week. So we scheduled our appointment kind of late. No biggie. We didn't have any health concerns for this little girl. And I really do mean "little". She weighs 14 lbs. 4 oz and is 25.5 inches tall at 10 months. I really thought that she would at least on the growth chart by now. I mean, this girl eats so much food! I thought that maybe she would have reached the 3rd percentile or something. But no, she hasn't. Thankfully my doctor is no longer worried about her like he was in the first couple months of her life. I'm glad we don't have to make any extra appointments to track her weight like we used to. He just told me that since I'm small, she's small.

Well, there's no denying that she's healthy, this girl is very active. She is a very fast crawler, check out one of my favorite recent pictures:
Obviously not an action shot of her crawling, but still cute.

This isn't recent news, but she loves pulling up on everything. She can cruise around furniture, but she has figured out that crawling is much faster, so she prefers that method of getting where she wants to go. Here's a picture of her pulling up on her daddy's foot (I thought it was so funny that she was using his shoe to stand, so I had to take a picture)
So she's been pulling up for several months now, and now she has recently figured out how to stand without holding on to anything. I'm such a proud mother. Here are some pics (By the way, it's so hard to get a picture of her standing, because when I notice she's doing it, I have to run and get my camera. By then she has lost interest, and she will not do it for me "on command." She's stubborn.) The first picture was taken at Jason's mom's house right after Christmas-time, so she was 9 months. Jason snapped that picture and he was so excited to show me that he managed to take a picture after one try when I had been trying for a couple weeks! The second picture is one I took just recently. She was pushing the shopping cart (that her older sister had filled full of jeans from their dresser drawers by the way) and just decided to let go and hang out there for a minute. You can tell she was proud by the look on her face. Oh, how I love these milestones!
I'm wondering when she is going to walk. Not because I'm concerned at all, I do realize that she is still very young. I'm just a curious mother. If you would have asked me a couple months ago, I would have guessed by 9 months, like her older sister. She seemed to do everything else earlier than Kylie did, so I thought walking would be the same. Obviously that didn't happen. Which is perfectly alright, I'll be a proud mom regardless of when it happens! I don't even think at this point that it will be anytime soon. She just doesn't have any desire to take any steps. By the age of 4 months, Kylie used to love it when I would hold her hands and make her "practice" walk. Well at 10 months, Eve still hates it. She doesn't want any of it. She will force herself down and crawl off as fast as possible. Whatever. I'm just going to let it happen whenever it happens. No more practicing. Over Christmas, I did see her take 2 steps, completely unassisted. Then she fell down and giggled. Then she stood up again, fell down and giggled again. I guess falling is much more fun than walking. At least it is to Eve. My sister Rachel tried to "train" her while we were visiting for Christmas. She was determined to have her walking before she left to go study abroad in France. She left today by the way, so her strict program didn't work. So I guess I don't know when she'll be walking, but what I do know is that no matter when it is, I will be so excited to see my little girl toddling around.

There is another very important development that I should mention: I gave Eve her very first pigtails today. How adorable is this:
The naughty girl was putting a "hair pretty" in her mouth in that first picture, but what can you expect, she's 10 month old. Don't worry, I was obviously there to take it away (that and all the other "pretties" that a certain toddler dumped all over the floor).

Oh, something else fun? She loves to dance! When she hears music that she likes, she pulls up and bounces up and down. I have a video of her doing it for the first time back in October. I'll try to remember to post it sometime.

All about Kylie

Current Age: 22 months

Wow, I can't believe how much Kylie has grown up lately. I have to constantly remind myself that she is still only one year old (this helps especially when she is driving me NUTS :] ). She can now do so many things that I know I will not be able to put everything in this blog post. I'll do my best!

She has definitely reached her language explosion. There is no possible way for me to write down everything that she says now. She also puts words together in sentences and it's fun that we can have conversations. Besides common everyday vocabulary, here is a sampling of words/concepts she knows:
* She can count to eleven. Why stop at eleven? She gets it confused with seven so when she gets to eleven, she says eight next. So she gets stuck in a circle: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,8,9,10,11,8,9,10,11... You get the idea :) As we were driving to church once Jason and I could hear: "8,9,10,11,8,9,10,11" the whole entire drive there.
*She knows lots of animal sounds. It was so funny that she refused to say them for the longest time and then at 18 months, she all of a sudden knew all of them. I'm not going to list all the sounds she knows because she knows lots of random ones like fish and turkey. (I love hearing her version of gobble gobble).
*She knows the words for different colors but she doesn't identify them correctly yet. I wasn't even working on colors with her, so imagine my surprise when we looked at a magazine and she pointed at a car and said "yellow car mommy!" and then a different car and said "Look, blue car mommy!" I told Jason about it and he told me that he had been working on colors with her. I had no idea he was doing that. So ever since then, I've been working with her too but she thinks almost everything is "blue." It's kind of hard teaching her though because she hates to be corrected even if you do it with a positive voice. It's made her cry before when I've told her that something was really green, not blue. So, I'm not really working that hard on the color concept with her. She'll learn eventually, it's not worth making her upset.
*She calls herself "Kytie" which is weird because she used to be able to say her name correctly.
*She can sing lots of songs: The alphabet song is her absolute favorite and she has lately been singing each letter very clearly. When she sees words/letters anywhere (billboards, someone's shirt, books, store signs...) she says: "Look, ABCs!" And they are everywhere, so we hear that a lot. She can identify O and Q and the rest are all hit and miss although she thinks most of them are the letter "E." She also sings "Row row your boat", "Old MacDonald", "Jesus Loves Me", "I love you- Barney song" and "If you're happy and you know it" pretty well but none are as perfectly clear as the alphabet song.
*She tells me when she has a "stinky" but that's what she says also if she's just wet. It pretty much means that she wants a diaper change. I really haven't started potty training yet, I'm waiting to get some absorbable panties but she's really interested in the potty. She will ask to go sit on the potty but she just thinks it's fun to sit on her little potty chair. I always tell her when I'm going potty because I want her to come follow me so I can keep an eye on her (I don't always trust her being alone with Eve. She's usually sweet, but she has some moments) and she will usually reply: "I go potty too mommy!" and she will come sit on her potty. So I pretty much have no privacy!
*She has definitely learned the word "mine". Not only is she in a "mine" stage but she's also very interested in figuring out to whom everything belongs. For example if there are some shoes in the room, she will put mine together and say "mommy's shoes" and put Jason's together and say "daddy's shoes." What's funny is I love to drink my Coca Cola and whatever I'm drinking (even if it's coffee or something else) Kylie will point to and say "Mommy's coke". It's pretty embarrassing when we are in the grocery store and my one year old is yelling "coke! coke! coke!" in the pop aisle. I hope people don't think I'm giving her any soda drinks!
*I have also heard many times the infamous phrase "Look at me mommy!" The first time I heard it, Kylie had dragged one of the chairs from the kitchen into the living room and was climbing up, standing up and jumping off. We have a little dare devil on our hands.
* Every time she sees a big book, she calls it a "bubble" meaning "bible."
She learns so many new words every day and she has become an expert at repeating things, so I think I will stop here before I get carried away :). On to other things besides language.

She is a pretty good dancer and can copy different dance moves which is lots of fun. Sometimes she doesn't want an audience and will stop if we are watching her, so Jason and I will put music on the computer or TV and sneak around the corner to spy on her dancing. There are sometimes, however, that she enjoys being the center of attention. She's so funny. If ever we have extra income I will sign her up for toddler dance class. I think that if she had one talent it would involve music or dancing. I have had nursery workers tell me how impressed they are with the way she copies music. She really does copy tunes very easily. We will see if this continues to be a trend as she grows up. I am NOT musically talented at all, in fact I am quite the opposite. I didn't have any interest in it either growing up, so I know that I'm not forcing Kylie to follow some childhood dream of mine if I get her involved in music/dancing, because it was never a dream of mine in the first place. I just see that she really enjoys it, so I would like to keep her interested as long as she continues to enjoy it.

Last time I posted about her favorite TV show it was Barney (gag!). Well now it has changed. She absolutely LOVES Dora the Explorer, or "Rera and Boots" as she calls it. I don't even know when she first saw it, she never watched it before. I think I must have left the TV on once when it came on. I was surprised when she asked me one day to watch "Rera and Boots". I didn't even know what she was talking about until she added "Map" and "Backpack." In fact right now the only reason I'm able to write this blog post is because we DVRed the new Dora movie that was on yesterday and I'm showing it to Kylie now (and Eve is taking a nap.) She loves it, she interacts with it too. She will repeat the things the map tells and answer the questions Dora asks. Jason even bought her a real Dora backpack toy. It's kind of annoying because if anything else is on TV, she will whine "Rera... Boots...". Seriously, she's crazy if she thinks that all we are going to do is watch it all day. She can dream all she wants.

It's a good thing Kylie also loves books or I would be worried by how much she is obsessed with a TV show. I remember last year, I was worried because she didn't enjoy sitting for more than a minute to look at a book. But that was just her personality, she was enjoying exploring and being mobile and now she is finally content to sit and read books for long periods of time. She is also pretending to read books herself with lots of babbling as she flips through the pages. Her new favorite thing to do is to bring me a book for me to read outloud while she sits next to me "reading" another book outloud. She gets mad at me if I'm not reading mine outloud, what a weirdo :).

My little Kylie Bear is such a fun little girl! She does throw some tantrums and has earned some time outs when she decides to hit her sister, but overall she is a very obedient and loveable sweetheart. I also think she is starting to look more like me when I was her age. She still looks a lot like Jason but now she is also resembling me as well, finally! I will post some pictures when we get the charger to our other computer. I never thought I would have a blonde and blue eyed daughter, that is definitely not the part that looks like me :) I think she might have my facial structure though. Well whoever she got her looks from, she is absolutely a doll baby. The only thing is that she is not very photogenic and I think I take more "blooper" pictures of her than normal ones. Those bloopers are pretty funny though...

All about Eve

It's been way too long since I've posted! Oops! I'm going to try and write a post about each family member so I can get this blog updated, starting with my baby. I know this is going to be very long, but it's more for me to remember than anything else, so I won't be offended if you, as the reader, do not want to read everything. I love this age and I want to look back and remember everything about this stage in her life. My little Evie (or "Evie Stevie" or "Everz" as we call her) is my sweet little doll baby and I absolutely love her to pieces in a way I could never quite explain in just this blog.


Current Age: 7 months


Eve is my tiny little girl. When she was last weighed at the Doctor's office for her 6 month appointment, they tried to tell me she was only 11 lbs. 3 oz. I was very worried about this because I knew she has gained more than that since her 4 month appointment. So, I weighed her myself and showed the doctor. And she did weigh more by a whole pound! I knew it. The doctor told me that it was hard to weigh her because she's so wiggly, but I'm just really good at those old fashioned scales. But that's not the point of this story, the point is that she barely weighed 12 lbs at her 6 month appointment, which is in the 1%, not even on the charts. I think her length was 24.5 inches which put her in the 20th percentile for length, but I'm not sure about that. It's so strange to me because her sister was always average or just a little less on weight and in the 90s% for length. But Eve is very healthy and there's absolutely nothing to worry about. She's still in 3-6 months clothes but the good news is that they fit her pretty well. I always struggled dressing Kylie because she was always so much longer than she should have been based on her height so everything fell off of her. Eve on the other hand, even though she's small, her weight and length percentiles are closer together so the fit of baby clothes is much better (even if the size itself is much smaller than what she should wear based on age).


It's funny that she's so small because she loves to eat. Within the last week I have stopped breastfeeding her and she's now taking bottles (That's a whole entire story coming up later). She loves bottles and eats them at least every 3 hours. In addition to that, she loves solid food and eats a couple baby jars a day and lots of table food. She loves mashed potatoes, scrambled eggs, potato soup, yogurt... pretty much anything that I feel is safe to give her she will gobble up. It is exhausting trying to feed her but I have so much more energy now due to not breastfeeding/pumping around the clock. Did you know that breastfeeding takes on average 500 extra calories? Not to mention if the baby wakes up at night, guess who gets to wake up EVERY TIME with her? That's right, me, the mommy.

That brings me to my next update: nights with Eve. Everything started out fine with her. The first couple months really didn't seem that bad. I was able to sometimes get 4 straight hours of sleep which is more than I expected since Kylie had her nights mixed up as a baby so I was ready for the worse with Eve. So waking up every 3 to 4 hours didn't seem that bad with Eve at first. However, she never really started to sleep longer and it became convenient for me to just let her sleep in bed with me and I would breastfeed her in my sleep. This was great until she became so attached to me that many nights she wouldn't sleep unless she was cuddled up to me and using me as her personal pacifier, if you get what I mean. Jason eventually moved to the couch to sleep because I wanted as much room as possible with her by my side on our small full size bed. So, at about 6 and a half months we started sleep training... which included giving her bottles instead of breastfeeding... and letting her do some crying it out. We moved her bed out into the hallway and plan to move it into Kylie's room whenever we trust Eve not to wake her up in the middle of the night. So far it's been a whole week that she has slept through the night and I feel like a whole new person! It's amazing what an uninterrupted night's sleep can do for a person :).

Eve is a very active little girl. She is crawling everywhere. She does a combination of real crawling, the inch worm (where she gets up on all fours really high and lunges forward) and the bear crawl (where she stays up really high with her bottom up in the air and crawls that way.) She's a momma's girl so she follows me around everywhere. When I'm cooking in the kitchen, she's hanging out at my feet. When I'm in the laundry room, there she is. You get the idea. She can easily pull herself up to a sitting position and tries really hard to stand up on her own without any success yet. We don't have much in our apartment for her to use to pull up on, so she might not be cruising anytime soon. I'll see what I can find for her to use. I might have to pull out some of Kylie's toy boxes. Eve is a very happy baby (most of the time :] )and makes some pretty funny happy sounds, usually very loud squealing or loud "ba ba ba" talk. Oh, and I'm reluctant to admit this, because I'm not proud of it, but she LOVES TV, unlike Kylie at this age who would usually ignore it if it was on. If the TV is on, Eve will twist around until she can see it... not good. Thank goodness, she also loves books and playing with her sister as long as she is being nice to her :).

She never lost her hair, so she has lots of long honey brown hair sitting on top of brand new baby hair that's growing in. It looks pretty funny, but also adorable. She has very defined and beautiful bone structure and chin and the same dimples as her big sister. I love dimples! I truly think she is a gorgeous little baby. Everyone tells me that she looks like me, but based on my baby pictures, I don't really see that much resemblance. I'll put up some of my pictures sometime in the future, right now they are all at my parent's house. I had a long face, long forehead and ears that stuck out. Eve's face is more angular and more "compact" and her eyes are almond shaped which makes her look like she might have some Asian ancestry. I was also bald, so I'm sure that makes me look a lot different just looking at the pictures. I do see some of me in her, and I also see some of Jason in her especially in the facial expressions. I also had very dark brown eyes and Eve's eyes are a mixture of many different colors. I'm not disagreeing 100% when people say she looks like me, I just don't think she is a clone of me like a lot of people tell me. I think she's cuter than I was :). We'll see who we are comparing her to as she gets older. It's weird how it can all change in a couple years.

Eve is a very friendly little girl. I've called her my "little flirt" because she loves smiling at strangers and very coyly looking away. Kylie, as a baby, went through a period where she was scared of strangers, especially men and if the man had a beard, he had NO CHANCE of winning her affection. Eve never went through that. She smiles and squeals at any new face who looks her way. She loves other babies and young children the most. I have caught her giving huge slobbery kisses to other babies her age. However she's still a mommy's girl and she won't be friendly with anyone until she has gotten in enough "mommy's cuddles" for the day. This really can drive me nuts sometimes, but I'm trying to remember that someday I will long for these fun cuddles when she wants nothing to do with her dear mommy.

I will post pictures later. Right now all our pictures are on the other (faster and better) laptop and we are waiting for a new charger to come in the mail before we can get on it. I might take some pictures and upload them to this computer, but it doesn't have any great editing options like the other one, so it might be a while before I upload any pictures. So stay tuned ;)