Month: November 2017

I’m pretty sure baby K has a cold coming on. 😪 She woke up with a stuffy nose and this afternoon it was runny. Oh joy!

The snot surely didn’t affect her appetite, though! K stuck to the 3 bottles today and asked for “more” food for lunch. Y’ALL. DO YOU JUST REALIZE WHAT I SAID?! MY TODDLER THAT BARELY EATS ASKED ME FOR MORE FOOD TODAY!!!!

I shared my chili with her (K loves her some ground beef and chili beans) and she signed more when it was gone. I made her a peanut butter sandwich (one slice of bread) and my nugget ate the WHOLE THING!!! I supervised to make sure – she only gave one piece of crust to Jack today. And then…MORE!!! What what!!! She ate 3 oz of yogurt and finally bowed out.

And her method of eating breakfast was way too entertaining to not share with you. 🤦🏼‍♀️

Kensie has also upgraded her signing communication. “All done” no longer means she’s done eating. It means she’s done eating that specific food. If all done is followed by a “point”, it becomes a game of what else does she want. Smart cookie does know pointing at the fridge gets her yogurt or milk and she knows RIGHT where the teething cookies are in the pantry. 😂

KB had an awesome morning nap but her afternoon nap was nonexistent. I laid her down and it went from laying there for a few minutes, to playing in her crib, to screaming bloody murder. I got her out and locked her baby gate to her playroom so I could go to the bathroom quick, and for the first time in what feels like forever, she was extremely content in there all by herself!

The playing continued at the gym and she was pretty stoked that her friend Enzo showed up and provided some entertainment!

KB was nonstop the entire 2 hours we were there which led to another “first time in a long time”…passed out before we made it home.

I know it’s a lost cause, but I’m really hoping this poor babe doesn’t wake up even stuffier tomorrow. A cold paired with the super awesome diaper rash we are currently dealing with does not sound like a fun way for KB to spend her weekend!

Kensie was an ANGEL baby today. Days like today is how they fool you into siblings.

Great news, folks: I wasn’t completely wrong about her naps. I put her down a few minutes after 9 and there was no partying involved. It was straight to sleep for 2 (much needed) hours. Not much needed as in she was driving me crazy, just much needed as in I had a lot of work to get done.

She woke up in the best mood and was ALL about sharing some snuggles with mama!!

We’ve got the sleeping through the night and napping part down – the eating is still a work in progress. I started K on a “bottle schedule” today. She had a morning, lunch and dinner bottle and did a lot better with her food in between! I’m still trying to figure out what she will and won’t eat, but we are making progress.

We’ve added bananas, black beans and peanut butter sandwiches to her pallet. I know it doesn’t sound like much, but since the previous list was basically turkey, yogurt, teething cookies and some pouches, it’s a big deal.

She finishes her bottles but she likes to take her time with it. It involves a lot of laps around the house and taking the lid on and off.

Once we got out of the house today, Kensie went into full ham mode. She waved at everyone, EVERYONE, she saw in the store. She even reached out to some lady to be picked up. 🤦🏼‍♀️🤦🏼‍♀️🤦🏼‍♀️ (But God forbid she sit next to Santa…)

I brought her cart cover in since she can escape the buckles in the normal cart. Fun fact, she can also escape the buckle in this now. This kid is the Houdini of buckles. High chairs. Carts. Strollers. I was joking before, but I might actually have to get her a helmet.

Her afternoon nap started off a little more exciting than her morning nap, but it didn’t take long for her to give in.

Kensie saved the rest of her energy to workout with the 5pm class today!! Of COURSE I only caught the tail end because she always stops right when I get the camera…but she did good mornings and squats with the class as they warmed up. She even showed them how to applaud her at the end. 🤷🏼‍♀️😂😂😂

This kid will be running the gym in no time!

This photo makes my heart so unbelievably happy. I was SO excited for Kens to wake up this morning and see our Christmas tree! In such a cynical, negative and overly sensitive world, her innocence and the excitement she finds in the smallest things are SO refreshing.

Today we went to visit Santa with Baby Henley! I always say I need Kensie to learn a lesson in “stranger danger”. She put that in to practice today.

Safe to say K was NOT a fan of sitting on the lap of a creepy old man. Or even being near him. 😂

Before and after our magical time with Santa (haaaa!) she was happy as could be.

K was a little extra tired today though. All last week I’m not sure if I was being fooled or if she actually hit a growth spurt and was napping. I never use her monitor because I can hear her when she wakes up. Over the weekend I checked it during a nap…to find her playing with her curtain and climbing her crib. So, now I watch it.

Home girl is slick. She plays very quietly. But when I put her down for a nap, she doesn’t actually go to sleep until 45 minutes after I think she does. 🤦🏼‍♀️

The lack of napping caught up to her today and when Chris brought her home from the gym she laid on the floor with her pacifier. Very subtle, KB.

What a fun (long) weekend we had! I don’t have too much to tell you guys, just lots of photos to share from Kensie’s Thanksgiving festivities. The highlighted development is KB’s photo posing. She’s nailed the “cheese” – we just have to work on where she’s looking. She looks at the camera unless someone walks by and distracts her. Or the wind blows. Or basically anything else happens.

The naps were sparse this weekend but the memories are worth it! Our weekend started on Wednesday with Thanksgiving at Grandma B’s.

Kens ate a dinner roll…and nothing else. 🙄 She also discovered that standing on tables is super fun and has proceeded to crawl on top of every table she can since.

Thursday we got to spend the day with lots of family!!! My Aunt, Uncle, Grandpa and Cousins all flew down from Wisconsin to spend Thanksgiving with us. We had so much fun hosting and K was loving all of the attention.

I was super excited to break out K’s “My First Christmas Tree 🎄”!! She finds it fun to put the ornaments on, then take them off and throw them.

It’s not actually her first Christmas tree since I got her a pink one for her room last year – but I’m thinking now that she’s walking and grabbing and throwing that I might have to keep that one packed up this year. 😔

On Friday, we headed to Epcot! Kensie didn’t take a single nap from 11a-8p. 😳 She was happy as could be, but I’m still racking my brain trying to figure out how she even managed that.

Northern fam took full advantage of our Florida “winter” and spent the day at the pool. My dad got us all these matching snowman shirts; we felt it only appropriate to take the photo outside with the palm trees.

We finished off the weekend by celebrating Baby Henley’s dedication at church, followed by brunching!

After nap time, Christmas tree shopping took up the rest of our afternoon. Kensie didn’t mind one bit, and daddy picked out the perfect tree!

…PHEW. And 5 days later, K is still sleeping through the night!

 

Kensington Brooke is 13 months old today! This picture is complete real life for us at this age. Wild hair. Milk on her dress. Food on her face. Bruise on her forehead. And had to be quick with the snap on this one because she gives you about 3 seconds of posing and all hopes of her holding still are out the window.

Regardless, and minus the falls that give me mild heart attacks, I am loving this age!!!

KB is officially a full night sleeper!!! We’re on night 7 of her sleeping completely through the night for 12-13 hours! 🤗 She still takes 2 naps a day and I am in no rush for her to graduate to 1.

K loves to dance, run (she just learned that one – pray for me), throw (more prayers needed), push things with wheels (like other people’s strollers), do squats and point. Pointing is her number one skill at the moment and she thinks it’s extra fun to trick people into giving her exactly what she wants with the power of that little finger.

Kensie has discovered how to get into the pantry, grab what she wants, and bring it to someone to open for her. She is drinking whole milk and finally starting to eat table food! Some days are better than others, but we are getting there! Lately she loves yogurt, oatmeal, peanut butter sandwiches and teething cookies.

She is mimicking sounds and motions more and more and some are pretty entertaining. I make an “oooo ooo ooo” sound before I give her raspberries or tickle her so now when she wants to play she starts saying “oooo ooo ooo” to the same tune I do it! She also copies Daddy when he whistles. Home girl whistles better than I do! (And how did she figure that out?!?) She tries to open doors by the handle, “type” on computers and scrolls the phone with her finger. 🤦🏼‍♀️ When she got a fever after her shots she watched me take her temperature and then kept grabbing the thermometer and putting it on her own head. She loves to “clean” and takes paper towels and napkins and starts wiping things with them.

Her favorite toys are…anything that isn’t actually a toy. Remotes. Coasters. The computer mouse. Cell phones. Bags. Oh my gosh she has this weird love for bags. She does climb in and out of her car on a daily basis. She likes to sit in it, swing her feet and drink her milk.

K is 18.12lb, just under 28″ long, has 2 teeth on the bottom and 4 on top. Teething or not, EVERYTHING always goes in this kids mouth. I have to completely disinfect the steering wheel on the cart at Publix because she always licks it.

I don’t think Kens added any words to her vocabulary this month, but it is getting easier to understand her and she’s got some very creative ways of communicating what she wants! She STILL isn’t saying mama but when I say “can you say mama” she does the sound where you move your finger up and down on your lips. Maybe that sounds like “mmm” to her. 🤔🤷🏼‍♀️

KB is the BEST sharer. Be careful with joking around while asking for her food. She will straight up put it in your mouth. Sometimes she takes it back, but she’ll at least pretend to offer it.

Life has changed a lot this month as we finished breastfeeding and she’s made her official entrance to toddler hood. It’s a whole new adventure and this little lady adds a lot more fun to each day!

The force was strong with this one this weekend; that force being gravity. Just shy of 13 months in and we had our first trip to urgent care today. 🤦🏼‍♀️ I’ll start this off by letting you all know that Kensie is a-ok. 👌🏼 She’s got quite the hard head. Or maybe a soft head that cushion the falls. 🤷🏼‍♀️ You get the idea.

Saturday night was Chris’ company anniversary party. Kensie had a BLAST. She stood in her chair and ate tortilla chips for almost an hour. By ate I mean played with them in her mouth for a while and took them back out. She did swallow some of them. It was a huge mess but hey, she was happy!

K was also loving the tunes and kept dancing in her seat. After a while a few of the little girls were running around on the dance floor and Kens really wanted to play with them. She started strutting her stuff all over and watched them run back and forth. The floor had a tiny little ramp on the sides.

While Kensie was busy cheesing and making friends, she took a stumble and her head hit the side of the chair. 😦

Half of me thought “of all places of course it’s the one part sticking out”. The other half of me was so thankful she didn’t completely split her head open.

Kensie recovered quicker than I did. I still feel bad for her. Poor babe. She wouldn’t let me hold an ice pack to her head but luckily the swelling went down rather quickly and now she’s just got a pretty little bruise.

Today she decided to top her goose egg from last night. K was playing on the couch like she always does. She knows how to get down by sliding on her belly until her feet touch. She does not know how to get down by falling backwards. Kensie had crawled over to the chaise part of the couch where there’s no armrest. She lost her balance, fell backwards and hit her head on the corner of the wall. Introduce: goose egg number 2. She cried for a minute and I checked her pupils and she seemed fine. No more than 60 seconds later she wanted to get down and play again. I sat down with her for a second to see if i could tell where she hit and that’s when I discovered the huge knot on the side of her head. 😔

It’s hard to tell in the photo, but there was a little blood line from where the corner hit and the rest was swollen and blue. She wasn’t bleeding. Even though she was acting normal, the lump looked pretty bad and paired with the face smack from last night, we felt a little uneasy.

So, yeah. That’s how we ended up taking our first trip to Children’s Urgent Care. Sunday Funday!!! Kensie checked out perfectly fine and was cleared to go run around and fall some more. 🙄 Will it affect her head shape if I make her wear a helmet all day? I’m considering it.

As for some good news…on Friday I figured out why Kensie wouldn’t take her bottles and we are back in action! She was using a size 2 nipple and it was coming out kind of slow, so I bought the next size up. Mistake. I should’ve known. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”

The new ones were too fast and she didn’t like how much came out so she wouldn’t drink it. I put the size 2 nipple back on and boom – she’s chugging her bottles again. Even 100% whole milk, while it’s cold! Score!!! Back to the chug life.

Kensie even ate a whole normal breakfast for me Saturday morning. We had oatmeal and a banana and applesauce and guess what?! WE MADE IT THROUGH OUR FIRST MEAL WITHOUT HER THROWING ANYTHING ON THE FLOOR! K was a great eater this weekend for all of her meals. She’s finally starting to figure it out! And for my momma friends still breastfeeding – oh man it’s a whole new world. 13 months later I had forgotten what freedom felt like! I was able to go get my nails done and run some errands and take some alone time Saturday afternoon while Chris hung out with K. It was worth every second of the last year, but since I’ve been feeling guilty about stopping it was nice to feel one of the “perks” to being done!

Before all the drama of the weekend kicked in, Harper and Riley came to play with us Friday morning! They had so much fun playing together and Riley even took Kensie for a ride in her car. Since she’s too small to drive it she just gets her boyfriend to drive her around…foreshadowing? 😯😜

Overall we’ve had a pretty good weekend, despite the Great Fall(s) of 2017. At least I hope it’s the great ones. I’d really appreciate her not outdoing herself on this one. As you can tell, K was still happy as could be and barely phased by her lumps and bruises and has no intentions of slowing down!

 

Sleep training. Such an ironic name since little sleep actually happens. At least that was the case for us last night. It didn’t go nearly as smoothly as the last time we did this! K yelled/cried on and off for almost 2 hours from 9:20-11ish.

It would be 5 minutes at a time then she’d be silent. Put that on repeat. 😫 She woke up again around 2am and did the same on and off fussing for another 30 minutes.

The good news is we made it through the night without a bottle, and she was nice and tired today which led to lots of hugs and extra long naps. 🙌🏼As you can see, she somehow woke up super happy. Maybe it was because I finally gave her what she wanted and took her out of bed. Ha! This morning was one of those mornings I went back to considering daycare. Kensie was a screeching banchee that wanted to be held the whole time.

It was probably the combo of her crying all night that had me over it. KB has this new game where she wants you to carry her around and she points at different things and wants you to walk there so she can grab it. The catch is she doesn’t actually know what she wants so she points and then you go and then she just gets pissed. 🤦🏼‍♀️ Today she wanted to grab the candle. Sorry about your luck, kiddo.

Oh. And I can’t leave this out. This happened at least 4 separate times while Kensie tried to get past Jack…

We had out at swim today and Kensie did AMAZING!!! She had to wear her PJs and a normal diaper to make sure she would perform her rollover to float with the added weight. Success!

Tonight is at least starting off better than last night. She woke up about an hour ago and made a few “eh eh” fuss noises for a second and went right back to sleep. 🤞🏼

She wouldn’t finish her bottle but she crushed a pouch with chicken in it (she never eats the meat ones. Always throws them after one taste…🤷🏼‍♀️) and kept asking me for bites of my burger so I️m hoping she’s nice and full…and tired enough to sleep 12 hours. 😆

I️ really need to go back to my daily posts because this one is way too long. First off, I’ve got a bone to pick with all the mamas that have gone through weaning before me. WHY DID NO ONE TELL ME HOW BAD THE POOP WOULD START TO SMELL?! To all my friends who have yet to experience this, I️’m going to be a good friend and warn you. I mean I’ve heard their poop smells worse when you stop breastfeeding, but I am not sure why it is just briefly mentioned so nonchalantly. I feel like the order is backward. Babies need to be potty trained and THEN weaned so us moms can make it out alive.

Okay I won’t make this post 100% about poop, but I felt a responsibility to you all. Start practicing breathing through your mouth now. Or holding your breath all together. Is 13 months too early to start potty training? That’s a rhetorical question. Because we are about to. I’ll report back. ✌🏼

On to the rest of our day: I️ got cheated out of a nap, but I did get to sleep in so I️ guess I’ll accept the trade off and be happy with it! K slept about 90 minutes later than normal this morning which meant her morning nap became nonexistent. Her naps are about the only time I️ can get work done during the day anymore, so losing one of them is not ideal.

Also, we are officially weaned AND I AM DONE PUMPING! While I was a little sad to end the breastfeeding I was ELATED to stop pumping. I absolutely hated it. Props to those mamas that pump exclusively. I couldn’t do it!!!

On to K…where to even start?! I feel like every day she does something new. This age is so much fun. I️ feel like a few things happened overnight – or maybe over the weekend and I️ just notice a ton of change after 3 days of being away from her? She’s starting to speak much clearer (more clearly? 🤷🏼‍♀️) and you can understand all of her words extremely well now! K has also discovered running. My mom informed me they played lots of “chase” this weekend so I️m guessing that’s where she figured it out. It might also explain why she randomly starts running and laughing at nothing. 😂

As she was eating breakfast today, Jack kept trying to take her food (never fails) so I️ kept saying “no, Jack!” After a few times of that, K spent the rest of the morning saying “no Jack” every time she saw him. 🤦🏼‍♀️ Pretty sure she thinks that’s his name now. Sorry, Jack. (Stop being a thief and I won’t have to tell you no).

Kensie started whistling last week. Today, I did it and she copied me. Home girl has a better whistle than I do! She also copied Aunt Shell on FaceTime! We were talking and she started playing with a toy that sings and dancing. We started going “dance, dance, dance” and Kensie started saying “dance, dance, dance” and shaking her legs. She’s a natural.

We ran some errands this morning and met up with Casey, Riley and Harper at Target! Ohhhh how our Target trips have changed. We turned Casey’s cart into the party cart and let the 3 of them have at it.

Then, I found the best thing of all. Christmas headbands. The 12 days of K-mas is coming, y’all. Get excited. 😜

Kensie has been doing AMAZING at swim test out this week. Heidi has been so patient with us and added extra lessons to make sure we got it right once K was done teething. OF COURSE the one fall in I didn’t video today was the one she went around the whole pool in the currents and told Heidi she was “all done” mid float. 😂

Tonight, it’s back to sleep training. Since teething threw off her good sleep patterns, we have to start over. Kensie had plenty of food & milk today, especially this evening, so I’m certain she’s not hungry. We just have to break the habit again. Oye. She’s woken up 3 times in the last hour so far so I’d say we’re off to a great start…