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As Penny's first birthday approaches, I have gotten very introspective on my experience of this past year. This is a great article reprinted on the la leche league's website called "So I Nursed Him Every 45 Minutes". It is really good - and accurately sums up my experience with nursing thus far, although I never fed Penny every 45 minutes. Well, maybe the first two or three weeks. Mostly, she ate every hour. :) If anything I think I tried too hard to set up a schedule because I thought that was what I was supposed to do. I never let her go more than 10 minutes past the time she started letting me know she was hungry, but if we have another one, I will definitely not worry so much about how long it has been since the last feeding and just feed her when she gets hungry. I regret that I worried about schedules in early weeks with Penny and didn't listen to myself and do my research sooner. Funny how my introspection turns to things I feel guilty about. Perhaps later I will post about all the things that I feel good about.

Walking

Penny is really walking now. She can go across the room by herself, albeit slowly. What is really fun though is how she walks from person to person. She starts slow, but once she reaches a certain point, she just launches herself into your arms with a look of sheer joy on her face, and you have to be ready to catch her! She is so much fun these days. I've taken several videos recently, but haven't been able to post them. Here's one from last week before she was walking as well as she is now. This one just shows her being able to stand up on her own. She's obviously been doing that for awhile, but this is the first time I got it on camera. At the very end she looks at the camera and just after the 60 second time limit was reached and the video cut off she said, "Bop".



And here is the main event - Penny walking from me to Tray. You can see how excited she gets at the very end when she crashes into his arms.



Thursday and Friday, my mom and grandmother came down and visited. Here is a picture of Penny with my mom at her computer. The computer isn't actually on - Penny was just having fun pushing buttons. She does enjoy looking at pictures of ducks on the internet though.



And this is a picture of Penny disoriented after waking up from a world record 2 hour and 40 minute nap!!! Never in 11 months has she ever slept that long. It was amazing. I thought she must be sick or something. She didn't take a morning nap, so she "doubled up" on the afternoon one. BUT - today she didn't take a morning nap either and only slept 45 minutes in the afternoon despite circumstances being the same both days. So she only slept 45 minutes all day today, and was kind of grouchy at bedtime. It's never the same day twice with Penny - but I like the sponteneity. :)

Photo Catch-Up and Napping News

I may jinx us by saying so, but Penny has been taking nice naps the last week or so. Most days she takes two 45 minute naps - one in the morning and one in the afternoon, like a normal kid. Sometimes, she'll even sleep for 1.5 hours in the morning. A napping Penny is a bizarro Penny, but I for one am glad she's napping with a bit more regularity if only so people will quit telling me how much she "should" be sleeping. Man, I hate the "shoulds."

I mention the jinx possibility because of the car seat incident. Way back on March 23, I bragged on this blog about how she'd starting sleeping in the car seat sometimes. She hasn't slept in the car seat even once since I posted that. Oh well. And lest you think her inability to sleep in the car is something new, here is a photo of her on the way home from the hospital at 3 days old:



Her eyes were open most of the 30 minute ride home that day.

As promised in the title to this post - here are some photos to catch-up for the lack of them in the past few posts, including cloth diaper pics.

Father's Day and 11 Months Old

We celebrated a great first Father's Day today. I made Tray breakfast in bed - his usual Sunday morning grits, eggs, and sausage, plus coffee and a glass of chocolate milk. Then, after Penny's nap and lunch we went in to town and, among other things, took Penny to Borders. Today she turned 11 months old. We bought her two books...and a stuffed dog. We hadn't intended to buy a stuffed animal, but she picked it out and loved on it so much we just had to buy it for her. We had the cashier cut the tags off of it (I hope beanie babies don't come back into fashion b/c it is a ty brand), and she handed it back to Penny when she was done. Penny gave her the sweetest smile that melted everyone around and all the cashiers and everybody pretty much went, "awwww" in unison. Let's hope she only uses her powers for good. :)

Brush

Penny tried very hard to say "brush" last night and this morning. I tried to show her how to say it by exaggerating the sounds, and last night she attempted the "sh" part. This morning I was relating the story to Tray and we tried again. She tried to do the "b" part (b/c she can say bop), but that's as far as she got. You could tell she was trying sooo hard, but just couldn't get her mouth to do what she saw us doing. Her determination was very cute.

In other news, my laptop died. I didn't really lose much, although there were some very recent pictures that I hadn't backed up. I've got two weeks until my final dissertation has to be in to the university (with all the changes made that were suggested at my defense), so it's a pain to have it die now. I'm typing this on Tray's computer. I don't feel comfortable downloading a bunch of photos to this computer since it is technically his work computer, so even though I took some photos of P in her new diapers I'll have to wait to post them. However, here's a link to the brand I bought. I love the company I bought them from. They give "reward points" for purchases and 500 points gets you a $30 gift card. The cool thing is I wrote a guest blog post for their blog and they "paid" me with 75 points! Next month I am thinking I might try some of the FuzziBunz. They are almost as popular as the bumGenius and would probably be moreso, but bumGenius definitely has better marketing and distribution. I'd love to try to sew one of my own, but I think putting elastic on the leg holes is beyond my current capabilities.

The cloth diapering world in Tallahassee is so funny to me. Anybody who is anybody in town cloth diapers. It is almost like a status symbol to them, so there are many, many people who cloth diaper. On the other hand, anybody in El Salvador the neighborhood we live in would look at you like, "You do what now?" if you mentioned cloth diapers. However, it would be really nice to meet some moms who fall in the middle ground between the ones who push the $1,000 strollers but carry their kids in this anyway, and the moms who live out here.

Bop

Today's new word is "bop" for the boppy pillow we use for nursing. Tray also sometimes uses it to give her her bottle. I've always called it the boppy, but he's been calling it the bop-bop and she picked that up. As with other words she says, I'm not entirely sure she always means it when she says it, but I know sometimes she does and sometimes she's just practicing the word. She's also been saying something like "ubum" for awhile now, but we can't figure it out.

With walking, she's now taking up to 4 steps before having to sit down, and she'll walk towards things other than Tray or me. She's now standing up inside quite frequently too, so we don't have to go outside to get the same effect (which is good since it was 100 degrees with an even higher heat index here today).

And finally, I leave this as food for thought. Disposable diapers take between 200 - 250 years to decompose in the landfill. Which means - wait for it - every single disposable diaper ever used is still in a landfill somewhere (provided it made it there in the first place). Mind-blowing, right? I got Penny a couple of new pocket diapers recently and once I get them washed up I'll post a pic. They are super cute.

Junior Museum

Today, we went to the Junior Museum (aka Tallahassee Museum of Natural History. We really wanted Penny to see some ducks because she loves them so much. Sometimes we will pull up a picture of a duck on the computer, and she gets so excited and starts exclaiming, "duck! duck!" (which sounds more like "dutch! dutch!") and she'll stare so intently at the screen. The museum has a zoo of native species, and always one visiting "exotic" animal - an ocelot this time. All of the animals are unreleasable; they would not survive in the wild. Penny had a good time and very humorously categorized every animal as either "duck," "cat," or "dog." I don't think she recognized the alligator or the turtles as animals, so her classification scheme held. Sadly, we did not see any of the albino squirrels this trip. There are several populations in the area and one lives in and around the museum. Maybe next time.

The museum also has a model 1880s farm with reenactors. In one building a lady was canning tomatoes and we stayed to watch. P was very funny about not wanting to go inside. She sat down right in the doorway and would go no further until she felt comfortable and then came in. I am proud to say that I learned nothing from the canning exhibit that I didn't already know. It did however make me want to grow some more tomatoes.

I'm trying something new. Here is a link to a Snapfish album of our trip. These are just a few of the animals we saw and places we went.