16 Months Old

Guess who is walking, talking, learning to climb, and trying to run?? Little Miss Isabella Jane is!



Bella just turned 16 months old, and she is truly a toddler now, but she is still a little sweetheart. Bella started walking at 14 months, and I was sure glad she waited as long as she did. I was really enjoying not having to chase her all over the place, but those days are long gone now! And she is learning words so fast that I can't even keep up with them all! At her last check-up, they asked if she could say three words yet... more like 30 or 40! Bella has a language all her own, but she isn't too hard to understand if you're around her 24/7 like I am. She will try saying some pretty big words, like pineapple (pa-pa) and watermelon (wa-mey). My favorite Bella word right now is butterfly (fu-fy). As you can probably guess, language is the area she has developed the most in. I don't know if it just comes more naturally to her than gross motor skills, or if we are encouraging it more than we do other areas of development, but reading has been her favorite activity for the last couple of months. I read her books so many times that I've already been to the library twice to check out a whole new collection for her! She absolutely loves to communicate with people. She says "hi" and "bye" to strangers, and has started telling us what she wants, like saying "ee" (eat) when she's hungry. When given a choice between two things, she will say which she wants. ("Nana" always wins when asked which fruit she wants!). And she has started making the connection between groups of people or objects. She will name off all of her grandparents together when she hears one of their names ("Gammy," "Papa," "Nana..."). It's the cutest thing to hear! She has also started humming a little tune that one of her toys plays. Bella also loves to go places. Every morning when I get her dressed, she asks if we're going to go bye-bye, and wants to know if we're going to see any babies ("Bye-bye? Baaaaby?") and she points to the door to help get her point across. We cannot put on her shoes anymore unless we are actually leaving, because she gets so excited thinking that she's going to go somewhere to see some babies. And, maybe for that reason, she loves her shoes! (Okay... this is the longest run-on paragraph in history, but I am too tired to organize it into smaller paragraphs... it's after 9:00 p.m., my brain is done for the day! I figure it's better to make a grammatically bad post than to wait until I have the time to make a better one, because that time will probably never come!)



Bella also amazes me with her tolerance for new foods. She will try almost anything! She has actually eaten tuna and asparagus. We are trying to give her foods with as many different tastes and textures as we can before she becomes super-picky. She is already turning her nose up to peas and beans, but we recently ate at an Indian restaurant, and she ate everything that went into her mouth! Her favorites, though, are bread, cheese, bananas, and potatoes. Those are the words we have to spell out if we say them in front of her!



Bella has also started giving the sweetest kisses on earth! She hasn't learned to close her mouth yet, so if you kiss her, you get a tooth kiss! (Speaking of teeth, Bella now has six of them, plus four molars coming in!) She has started to wrap her little arms around our necks when we carry her, too. Just makes your heart melt!



In other news, a new fall semester has begun, and Stephen is teaching four classes again. But this time, all four of his classes are on MWF, so he has two full days a week for grading and conferences, which should be a big improvement!

We recently took our summer vacation to Asheville, North Carolina, and had a great time, it just wasn't long enough! We were somewhat apprehensive about taking our first sight-seeing type of trip since Bella became mobile, but we tried to stick to her schedule and it all turned out pretty well, despite having to lie down in the dark hotel room when her bedtime came at 7:00! Bella absolutely loved going to all the new places and having both of us all to herself for four days. She was so cute every morning when she woke up-- she would pop her head up over the pack and play and say, "HI!" to us, and she was ready to get going with the day! Stephen and I learned a LOT about traveling with a toddler on this trip, and are looking forward to trying out our new techniques in the future.



We also just got back from a short trip to Alabama for my 10 year high school reunion, and that was NOT as easy as our Asheville trip. Our parents' houses are full of breakables and it was a lot of work to keep up with Bella!

It is finally starting to feel "cool" out here (as in not 98 degrees), and we are very much looking forward to autumn. Our late summer vegetable garden is finally producing tomatoes, bell peppers, jalapenos, and eggplant, and the sweet potato plants are looking lovely. This has been our first garden in five years (I guess that's what happens when you move almost every summer!), so it was mostly just an experiment to get us back into the swing of growing vegetables. We tried interplanting in raised beds, and learned a lot about what works for us and what doesn't, and which vegetables are worth the work it takes to grow them. I am loving low-maintenance plants right now, and our moss rose, marigolds, and lantana have been the winners this year for annual color. You can just plant them and forget them, which is important for me right now because I might very well forget about watering and fertilizing them! (Bella is on my brain all day and there isn't much room for anything else!) Plus, Bella loves watching the butterflies and bees they attract.

Bella is all ready for fall and football!


I think that covers everything we've been up to lately and all of Bella's new developments. It looks like I am not going to be updating this blog very often (only a few posts so far this year... where has the time gone?!?!), but stay tuned, I'm not giving up on it yet!

The Last First Holiday

To continue my tradition of posting blogs two months late, I thought it an appropriate time to post some pictures from Easter, which was our last time to have a "first" annual holiday with Bella, and was also one of my favorite holidays that we've had since Bella was born. Instead of traveling out-of-state, and rushing from one family gathering to the next, we stayed home and hung out with just the three of us together. This was the first holiday we've gotten to just relax and enjoy each others' company, take a gazillion pictures, and play with Bella, and it feels like the first holiday we've actually gotten right since she was born. It was such a nice change from every other holiday we've had lately... At Christmas and Thanksgiving, we barely even had time to take pictures of Bella, much less play with her. Even on her birthday, which we did have at home, we were so busy entertaining company that we forgot to take a picture of her until she was already in her pajamas! But Easter this year was great. We had so much fun watching Bella play with her Easter basket and eggs, hanging out in the backyard while Stephen grilled, enjoying a nice meal together... just slowing down and taking the time to have a special, relaxing day together as a family.

Having a child has really made me rethink holidays. It's hard to find a balance between creating our own family traditions with our brand-new family at home, without completely abandoning our extended families' traditions out-of-state. Stephen and I have always traveled to see our families for holidays, but I have heard of families who don't like to travel for holidays when they have young children, and now I understand why. I don't want to become hermits, and I'm certainly thankful to live close enough to much of our family that we can drive out to their holiday gatherings, but I can see how nice it would be to stay at home for some of them. If holidays are supposed to be about family togetherness, making memories, and having quality time with one another, it's just much easier to attain those pleasant moments at home whenever there are little ones involved. So, here's to our first successful holiday at home!

Sonya, the fabulous Nana, sent these plastic Easter eggs to Bella in the mail. Each egg had coins inside that were wrapped in tissue paper. Bella LOVED taking each egg out of the basket, putting them back in, taking them out again, shaking them and hearing the coins inside, opening the eggs, and unwrapping the tissue paper, at which point we had to dive to remove the coins from her hands before they went into her mouth, then repeat the whole process. It was a perfect little game for her developmental stage. Super cute to watch!





My mom saved this white Easter basket from when I was little.





It looks like Bella is saying a little prayer!


Our budding musician! This piano was mine when I was little, and it survived the banging of me and my little brothers mostly intact, with only one key missing, but it's completely out of tune now. You can see where I wrote the notes on the keys when I was a kid... looks like the handwriting of a seven-year-old.



Learning how to use the walker.



And that pretty much sums up Bella's last first holiday, the best holiday I've had all year.

Bella's First Birthday

Bella turns 14 months old today, and that reminded me to make a post about her first birthday! She is now a big one-year-old, and we had a fun little party at home for her to celebrate. I decided to minimize the chances Bella having a meltdown before, during, or after the party, so we had a small family gathering with all the grandparents at our house (Dad and Sonya even got to join in via skype). I was so glad that we went for small and simple! I tried every trick to make it an enjoyable experience for Bella-- I even reversed the traditional party schedule in hopes that it would help our chances of a happy baby, and began the party right after her afternoon nap. We started with pictures, then sang happy birthday, did presents, ate cake, then I prepared the meal while Bella played with her presents, and we ate the meal last. Whew! I almost felt sacrilegious reversing the party schedule (cake before food...?), but was very glad we did. Bella was a little confused and overwhelmed at the beginning, but she really got into the swing of things halfway through, and was really hamming it up by the end.

Not-so-happy overwhelmed baby at the beginning.


A lot of presents for a little girl!


Ready to eat the cake!


A friend told me about how her son reached out and touched the candle flame on his first birthday, so this is the closest Bella got to hers!


She ate half of her weight in cake!


Do I really have to stop now?


If you're interested in the party details, here they are: I made a cake out of cupcakes to resemble a flower, and there were lots of additional cupcakes with a "B" on them (for Bella, of course). We gave Bella the huge yellow cupcake in the center of the flower, and she devoured half of it! We couldn't believe how she kept eating more and more. We didn't do a theme exactly, just used pink and yellow for everything. But Bella loves flowers, hence the flower cake. For our meal, Stephen grilled some amazing chicken, and my Mom made a delicious potato salad and baked beans. We don't have many party pictures with the guests, because they were the ones taking the pictures, but you can imagine the grandparents all sitting around "oohing" over everything Bella did!

Decorating the cake with Mom's vintage frosting bags.



Bella's one-year-old stats: 31" long, 19.5 lbs. She is not walking yet, but is cruising well and does great with her walker. She is picking up lots of new words, which is super fun for us. Her newest word is hair (hauh). She feels of the hair on our heads, our eyebrows, and Stephen's beard while she's naming it! Some of her other recent words and phrases are banana (nana), bird (burh), bear (beah), bee, flower (fowah), bread (beh), dog (dah), kitty cat (kee-kah), thank you (kay-ku), zebra (zeba), ball (bah), tree (tee), squirrel (squh), daddy (a step up from dada), uh-oh, here you go (geh go), eye (ah), and baby. She has also started getting a Southern drawl already, drawing bye-bye out into three syllables and making a higher note at the end!

And, in other news... We started the summer out with a bang, with a week-long visit from Dad, Sonya, and my sisters Jennifer and Emily. It was so much fun, and we miss them so much already! I would include pictures from the visit, but I only took a few, so I'm waiting to get the rest... which could take a while! Stephen is teaching a seven-week long multicultural comp 102 class this summer, which only 12 students are enrolled in, so he is getting a much-needed break from his normal hoards of students, and also enjoying his first time teaching the multicultural class. Bella has become a very friendly (and flirty) baby lately (as long as she stays in my arms or in my lap!), so we have been taking advantage of all the kid-friendly events around town and she is loving every minute of it. Stephen and I have also been steadily working on the to-do list for the house and yard... which is slow going since we can't really work on that stuff until Bella is in bed. We've been spending every evening working in the yard after Bella goes to bed, which is really enjoyable, almost zen-like (despite the mosquitoes). So far we've given one bathroom a makeover, we're working on our curb appeal, and also planting a late veggie garden. (And I haven't forgotten about those pics of Bella's room... they'll be posted one day!) So there's plenty to do around here!

A Year Later

Bella's first birthday is almost here, and lately I've been thinking about what was happening at this time a year ago, but apparently I have blocked a lot of it out. Everyone says that's Mother Nature's way of encouraging further procreation, and I think she had a good idea. It just doesn't seem like it could have been me who spent those awful nights in the hospital with early labor, had those long stressful days on bedrest trying to will contractions away, and endured the painful and emotional days after birth. They seem more like scenes from a movie, not scenes from my life. One of my friends is at 35 weeks right now, almost exactly where I was at this time last year, and is going through the whole early labor nightmare I went through... Another friend just had a baby girl at only 31 weeks because of preeclampsia. I don't know why pregnancy and birth have to be so difficult, but I do know that we are unbelievably fortunate to live in a time and place where good health care saves many of the women and babies who would not have been so lucky without it. Even so, it's hard to imagine going through all of that again anytime soon...

But babies are the best, and I feel incredibly lucky to have Bella in my life. And I have to say that it's funny how much changes when you become a parent. You finally get to find out what other parents mean when they try to describe the indescribable-- how much they love their children. You get to laugh every day at your own little creation. You find that regurgitated food is not in the least bit disgusting when it spews out of your own little creation, and even stinky breath doesn't really stink when it's your sweet little baby's breath. I love watching all the exciting little triumphs Bella makes each day, and to me they are more exciting than anything else I was doing before Bella was born. It's funny to think that something as simple as curling up with Stephen and Bella to read her a story before bed is often my favorite part of the day, and that many of the things that mattered before Bella was born don't matter at all now.

It's unbelievable that Bella is already practically a year old. I feel like we are finally getting into a productive groove, on a daily basis, and I can't believe that it has taken this long to do that. Little by little, I'm finding ways to get more and more things done while I'm watching Bella, and I feel like I'm finally starting to climb back on top of things again. I don't expect to ever be completely back on top of things like I used to be before Bella, and that's okay. One of the most important lessons I've learned as a mom is to learn to let go and to accept that being halfway up that mountain is okay-- no need to be on top of it anymore. I feel no pressure whatsoever to be Supermom (many thanks for that to the honest and supportive group of mom friends I have). Simply maintaining sanity is good enough for me right now. Maintaining sanity is a real accomplishment, actually, and it feels pretty fabulous whenever it happens.

I have finally started exercising again on most days, and that feels fabulous, too. Doing yoga and pilates while a baby is crawling all over and under me is a new experience. It's absolutely NOT the peaceful, pristine environment you're supposed to have while practicing, but so what?! It still gets the job done, and it works the abs with the extra laughs I get from watching Bella gleefully prop up on me (like I need the extra resistance) and crawl through my downward dog.

(Letting go= happiness. I repeat: Letting go= happiness.)



Yes, she is totally worth it. Worth the sleepless nights, the shrill cries, the soon-to-be sagging boobs, the monstrous surgical scar, the loss of extra income, privacy, personal time, and brainpower. That sounds like an awful lot to give up, but it's nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to the happiness and the immeasurable amount of love that this sweet soul brings into our lives each and every day.

11 Months Old!

I've officially earned The Worst Blogger of the Year Award. It has been a ridiculously long time since my last blog, and I know you are all anxious to see what my little girl is up to and what she's looking like these days. Apparently, I haven't made a Bella update since she was six months old. (The decrease in blogging has coincided with the increase of mobility... and the increase in my exhaustion, and decrease in free time... lots of increases and decreases going on around here.) We're busy, and when we aren't busy, we're tired! But we are also enjoying every day with Bella and loving watching all the advancements she's making! So to bring you up to speed, this is what's been going on in the life of Bella for the last few months:

Seven months old: This is when the babbling really began! ("Babble" has truly lived up to her uterine nickname. People often comment about how "vocal" she is... And she's also an expert at making crowing and growling noises. We know she's displeased whenever she starts growling!) Bella's first tooth came through (on the bottom) and she learned to sit well unsupported. She also went to the polls to vote for the very first time (she was definitely the cutest voter there).

Learning to sit up all by herself!


The first tooth!


Eight months: Three more teeth came in, the pincer grasp developed (we are now vacuuming a LOT more), she started drinking from a sippy cup by herself (for the longest time she liked to turn it upside down more than she liked to turn it up into her mouth), she began feeding herself finger foods, and she started saying dada! (And dadadadada...) Bella also went to her first Christmas concert, and met Santa for the first time (no tears involved!). Then there was the first Christmas, New Years, and National Championship game!

"Look ma, one hand!" (Yes, there was a lid on that cup!)


Santa's little helper.


Bella wearing my old Christmas dress, from 1983, when I was 13 months old. And Loucille with all her descendants. She's just a little proud...


Bella on Christmas day, wearing her gorgeous Christmas dress from Sonya and Dad.


New Year's Eve hike


Bella cheering Auburn on to victory! Auburn won the college football National Championship in January!!!! War eagle!!!!


Nine months: Bella started crawling, pushing herself into a sitting position, waving bye-bye, clapping her hands, and saying mama! She started differentiating between mama and dada, looking at the right person when I ask her where daddy is and where mommy is. She also started recognizing her own name! It's so cute when she stops everything to turn around and see who's saying "Bella." And this milestone is not on the charts, but Bella also learned how to do semi-headstands, kinda like downward-facing dog, if you're familiar with yoga. It's one of her favorite things to do! I think we may have a little gymnast in the making. She started losing interest in many of her toys at this point and became much more intrigued by exploring her surroundings: licking tile floors, scooting herself across linoleum, pulling up air vents, opening cabinet doors, and chewing furniture.



Bella went to her first jazz concert, and her first music store, where she played on a Baldwin grand piano and a drum kit for the first time. (We are in hot debate over what her first instrument should be. I say piano, Stephen says drums, but my guess is that she will want to play guitar like her Daddy. She loves to play with her toy xylophone, her miniature out-of-tune piano, our miniature keyboard, djembe, shaker, and anything else that makes a sound.) She also went to her first art museum, where she saw her first Picasso, Warhol, O'Keeffe, and silverware made by Paul Revere. AND she picked up a bug for the first time, a dead cockroach (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!). I got it before she put it in her mouth and promptly washed her hands with antibacterial dish soap. Thankfully, we were out in public when this happened. The ear-splitting scream I would have given if we'd been at home would have probably traumatized her.

The results from her Bella's nine-month check-up: 18 lbs., 28", growing in the same percentiles she's been in. I was very proud when she impressed the pediatrician by following my directions to "look at Mommy" during the ear exam so the doctor could get a better view inside her ear!

10 Months old: Bella said "bye" when waving a few times, began saying "hi" to greet us and other people we see, and "kitty" when she sees a cat. Of course these words are not completely discernible to the untrained ear, but it's so exciting to us when she learns new words! She also started pointing with her finger, and pulling herself up, but she's not too interested in cruising just yet.

Isaac and Bella on a playdate. Next time, we are going to take the picture before they get tired and hungry!


11 Months: Bella is starting to lose a little of the need to automatically put EVERYTHING in her mouth, so now we can introduce her little hands to lots of new objects, like flowers. It's so cute to watch her hold a little flower in her hand for 30 minutes at a time while we're taking walks! She is also developing a definite opinion of her own, and is not afraid to express it.



Being introduced to sea shells at Lake Guntersville. She loved them!


And as far as everything else goes, we are doing well. The holidays were nice, and Bella had snow for her very first Christmas! That was neat, because we've never had a white Christmas before. Stephen is more than halfway through the new semester, and he's teaching three classes this time, which means that life is much more manageable than it was last semester. His band, Junker, is still playing shows around town, and they are recording three songs for their first E.P. at the pedal steel player's home studio. I'm doing a part-time job once a week right now, while Stephen is Mr. Mom at home. Bella and I are also going to the local mother's center once a week. Bella loves watching the other kids there and she also enjoys taking their toys. We've finally almost finished Bella's room, and I promise to post pictures when it's done. (One room almost done, six more to go! HOLY COW!) The rest of our house still looks like we just moved in two weeks ago, because we still haven't unpacked anything besides the necessities. I think all those boxes of extra stuff in the garage may have a future at the Goodwill, because it feels so good not to have all that stuff that we don't need cluttering up our space, and it's so much easier to keep the house clean!

In other news, we are expecting some very special company in May: Dad, Sonya, and my sisters Jennifer and Emily, who Bella is soooooo excited about meeting!!!

Hopefully, you will not have to wait four more months for another blog. In the meanwhile, we are just enjoying playing with our little girl and watching her grow. It's the most awesome experience I've ever had!