Baby Led Weaning Progress

TS has become quite the eater. She's willing to sample just about anything at this point. More and more, we just give her pieces of whatever we are eating. For example, tonight Mike brought home mexican food. TS had a few beans, a couple of pieces of chicken picked out of a burrito, a little rice, and a grape tomato (cut into quarters). She was tired or she probably would have eaten more. She also loves to drink water out of her sippy cup. Part of it is the entertainment value. She can suck up a mouthful of water and then spray it back out so that it runs down her front. Most of the time, we use bibs with little catch-pockets at the bottom. Sometimes I have to dump out several tablespoons of water out at the end of the meal, but it's worth it for the amount that she enjoys herself.

I'm not sure what multi-colored food she's eating here, but it looks like she's enjoyed it with her entire face.

She and Mike like to eat dinner together.

We usually share a bowl of oatmeal in the morning. This is at my grandmother's house.

I love the devilish look she has while trying to bite into this pear. She wasn't successful, but we did share it later.

Here, she's having a quartered grape tomato.

Her eating isn't very consistent. Yesterday, she ate a TON of food. Today, she didn't want much breakfast, had some strawberries and pancake at lunch (we were out), and then had a bit of mexican food for dinner. Nothing like the quantity of food she consumed yesterday, though. Maybe she was still full. A surprise from yesterday's meal was orange. We were at a restaurant and had ordered her one scrambled egg, hashbrowns and fruit off the kids menu. The fruit was a sliced orange. I didn't think she'd go for it, but she ate it all (half an orange) including gnawing on the peel. Who knew that oranges would be such a hit?

Other current favorites include: avocado (a perennial favorite), apple, pear, all fruits really, bread, chicken, oatmeal, and banana.

Handprint ornaments

I really dropped the ball on Christmas this year. Normally, I'm ahead of the curve and have all my shopping done several weeks before. This year, I had hardly even thought about what I was going to do before the term of teaching ended. Based on some helpful posts in facebook groups I belong to, I came up with the ideas to make salt dough handprint ornaments. I looked at several different websites to find a recipe and inspiration.

This is the recipe I used for the first batch. I can't find the original website I used, but it said that the ornaments could be microwaved to harden them. I tried that (because I was short on time at that point) and discovered that microwaving them did indeed cook them and cause them to harden, but that they bubble a ton even if you poke lots of holes in them with a fork. The next day, I tried again. I ran out of regular salt, so I used Kosher salt. It works, but the dough is grainier than would be ideal. One blog I looked at recommended a 150 degree oven for an hour. 6 hours later, they still weren't dry. I turned the oven up to 200, then to 250. They did eventually dry out and they weren't discolored and didn't bubble, but it was a little inconvenient cooking them for the entire day. Next time, I think I'll cook them at 250 for a couple of hours, then turn them up to 350 to finish.

I painted the first set (the bubbly, microwaved ones). It emphasized the handprint that way, which was good because it was sort of hard to see on some of them because of the way it had bubbled. The second set were better, but I didn't have time to paint and shellac them before Christmas.

They were well received by the grandparents (and great grandparents). I think I'm going to make handprint ornaments a holiday tradition.

Christmas with a tiny squee

We all flew to my grandmother's for Christmas. It was a lot of people (me, Mike, Sterling, my mom, my brother, his wife, their 2 year old all stayed there and my aunt and uncle came for Christmas day). There were a few stressful moments. But overall, it was good to be there with everyone and to celebrate Christmas with family.

Sterling was an excellent flyer. She was a little rambunctious on the way down, but slept the entire flight back, which was awesome. She enjoyed looking out the windows of the plane. Unfortunately it was cloudy the whole way, so she couldn't see anything really cool.

My grandmother loved seeing her. Granny's house is not what one would term baby-proofed, so we had to watch our TS closely, but she was able to rampage about in the living room without too much damage. Granny had a lot of good toys: a few old watches, some necklaces, tupperwares, and all sorts of stuffed bears and dolls. TS enjoyed determining the merits of each of these. Her favorites were the watches and a large silver necklace. She also liked the TV remote controls.

Mike and I had headed down several days before Christmas so that we could go into San Francisco and wander about for a bit. We took BART in and TS fell asleep partway there. Here she is sleeping in the sourdough bakery that we ate lunch at (very tasty). Then we checked out the Cartoon Art Museum, which was "tiny, but interesting" (according to the review). After that, we headed to the Children's Creativity Museum, but got sidetracked at another museum where someone we knew was having an exhibit. By the time we made it to the Creativity Museum, it was closing. Oh well, next time.

 My brother and his family showed up a couple days after us. Their daughter is just over 2. She and Sterling had a good time together. Their Christmas present to everyone was to cook Christmas dinner. My brother had told Granny to buy a 7 pound roast (for 9 of us, including the two babies). She got an 18 pound roast. She wanted leftovers. Despite the excess roast, they pulled dinner off astonishingly well. Everything was very tasty.

My aunt makes cookies every Christmas. I look forward to them all year.


My mother flew in last. I wish she had been there a little earlier. It's always easier when she's around.

Santa!

Mike took Sterling to see Santa and get her picture taken. She wasn't thrilled initially, but it worked out ok.

Real crawling

In the past couple of days, Sterling has started doing authentic, belly-off-the-ground crawling nearly all the time. She's actually quite a bit slower crawling this way than she was doing the military crawl.

Christmas Revels

Every year, Mike works on the Christmas Revels. This year, he had a small helper.

She can read!

Well, not quite. But she's learned to turn pages in the book. It's awesome. She will grab the page of a board book and turn it in the right direction. She requires a little assistance (she has trouble getting a hold of just one page and will often just turn to the end of the book), but this is really the first grown-up thing that she's learned to do. I'm very proud.

She is also getting into feeling the books that have textures on the pages.