Our Baby Mercer: December 2013

Avery is already 13 and a half months old! She is walking and a talking up a storm! She learns new words every day and is insanely smart. I can understand why she is now classified as a toddler rather than an infant. She has had a huge mental leap at 13 months. It blows my mind with how much she understands. Some of my favorite new things she does are, blowing on her hot food and attempting to blow out candles around the house, "shhhh"ing and whispering, discovering and identifying her body, calling for Abby to come here, and finally walking!!

She can follow simple directions such as pointing to her nose, eyes, mouth, ears, bellybutton, and stinky feet. This kid seriously has the smelliest feet of any baby, ever! She lifts them to her nose and sniffs them and chuckles, knowing they smell horrible, and it's hysterical. She is fascinated by bellybuttons too, thanks to a Pete the Cat book. She will lift my shirt up to ~~scratch~~ poke and tickle my bellybutton while laughing uncontrollably.

Avery took her first steps on November 6th, so she's been at it for about a month now. At first she didn't know how to stand up after falling, besides crawling to pull back up on something, but she's figured it out now. She is walking further and further each day and I have no doubt that she'll be running by Christmas!

She is off of the bottle and loving drinking real milk out of her sippy cups. I was so worried about weaning her, but the Doctor told us to just pack them up one night and switch to cups. She was a little hesitant at first, but after a couple of days she had no problem with it. Now the only problem is she wants to drink from all the cups in the house, and an unattended beverage on the coffee table will be knocked over in no time. Adult beverages are a no go until bed time and coffee, if not iced, definitely requires a lid.

My smart little cookie is making lots of cause and effect connections and it is so neat to see her brain at work. Our ceiling fans have remotes and she loves turning the lights on and off and on again. and again. She loves dumping toys out and picking them back up. She got some big Legos for her birthday and although she isn't building things yet, she loves to connect them and snap them apart.

She knows too many words to list and echos us like crazy. Some of my favorite things she says are "Dop!" (stop) "Bayee" (baby) "Dayee" (Daddy) "no, no, no" (while shaking her finger at you) "Aye yi yi" (while holding her head and shaking it") "Beyebut" (bellybutton) "All done" (while dusting her hands off) and "Ayye" (Abby, while patting her leg and making kiss noises to call her).

She does a great dog impression by panting with her tongue out. I taught her this around Halloween, because she had a puppy costume but she didn't really catch on until afterwards. She is still working on her bark, but has a pretty good "meow!" when you ask her what a cat says.

She loves her books more and more too. She likes to point to the pictures and have me name the objects while she tries to repeat me. She is getting pretty good at turning the pages too. :) This makes her teacher Momma very happy. She learns so much from her books, and story time is kind of our special thing at the end of the day so I love it as much as she does, too.

Just when I thought she couldn't be more perfect, she has started slapping me in the face and faking me out when giving kisses, just to bite my lip or cheek. She's also bitten my finger with her 10 little teeth a couple of times and holy moly…that's nothing to play about! So..I am struggling a bit with discipline. I never thought I would have a problem with spanking, and I know some kids at school that could use a few spankins, but I can't imagine harming Avery on purpose and she is way too little anyway. Plus teaching her not to hit by hitting her isn't very logical. She is also too young to understand rewards and consequences like I teach my students. For now we are sternly telling her "No! We don't hit/bite. That is not nice." then giving her a hug and kiss and telling her to have nice hands while turning the focus to a new activity. She doesn't seem to understand quite yet, but she does tend to do it when she is starting to get sleepy and cranky, so hopefully this doesn't start making a habit out of this. I don't want to raise a bully! LOL

We have had so much fun being locked in for this "Icepocolypse 2013". No school again today. Woohooo!!

Here is a long overdue post of pictures from the past couple of months.

In October- my sister was able to take Avery and Jocelyn to "bump into" me on my field trip to the Arboretum. Hence my cute outfit of jeans and tennies… We had so much fun seeing all the pumpkins!!