Better late than never! Photobomb!!

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!!

Halloween Pics!

Some of my favorites of Avery's 1 year/our family pictures from Bfaithphotography.

Tis the season!!

More coming soon!!

My 1 Year Old!

It is hard to believe that it has been a year since this:

http://ourbabymercer.blogspot.com/2012/11/39-weeks-and-averys-birth-story.html

Going back and reading some of my old posts made me so emotional. I just love being Avery's mommy. I just wish I got even more time with her. Today was her 1 year check-up and I took off work to make a day out of it. It was fantastic to have some quality time together! We slept in, had breakfast with daddy, played and watched tv, then we went to her appointment. I had estimated on her birthday board for her pictures that she was 19 lbs and 29 inches. I was close! She weighed in at 18.8 lbs (back to the 33rd percentile, yeahhh) and was 30 inches tall (77th percentile). She is still tall and skinny, but is more proportioned than she was a few months ago. In fact, her percentiles are almost identical to where she was at birth, so that's pretty neat. She cut 2 more teeth this month, which brings her up to 8 now! And her doctor said her back gums are swollen where her molars are about to come through too. 

Her appointment went pretty well. She had to get a little blood prick, since she was borderline anemic at her 9 month appointment. Well her iron count was even lower today, so they had to get a full vial of blood to send to the lab, to see if she needs a prescription. Well…that was traumatic for her and me. They made ME hold and restrain her while they put a tourniquet around her arm and drew her blood. Well I don't even like getting my own blood work done, much less seeing my baby get stabbed with needles. I have never seen her cry so hard. And when that was over, it was time for the shots. Oh my goodness,  she screamed "Ma-ma!" while looking at me in despair. I almost started crying too. It was awful! Luckily she calmed down pretty quickly afterwards and I gave her lots of cuddles and kisses. We then met my sister and Jocelyn to go to the zoo for the afternoon. We had so much fun, but she was exhausted towards the end, since she didn't sleep on the way like I had hoped she would. She even fell asleep in the stroller for one of the only times, ever! She is a kid that pretty much only sleeps at home in her room or in the car when its quiet. So I had to document it. :)

This month, Avery has been cracking us up with saying new words almost every day. My favorite new word is Mama!! She finally calls me Mama, after many months of only saying Dada and Ab-dog! She has also said Desi, Jojo, Uh-Oh, bye-bye, yum yum, vroom vroom, all done, and stop it. The doctor was very impressed with her vocabulary! She said that average 12 month olds know about 3 words, so she is very advanced in this aspect, knowing 10-15 words. This makes the teacher and mommy in me so proud! Especially since my grandma kindly notified me that she is the only baby, ever, in our entire family to not be walking by 10 months. LOL She is getting very close to walking though!! She has taken a step here and there between the couch and table, or between Jon and me. She can FINALLY stand unsupported too! This has been the most exciting milestone since crawling to me. I was beginning to worry, because I have seen babies much younger than her standing alone and have tried to get her to practice nearly every night. We have learned though, that she does things on her own time, and it won't be any less exciting if she makes us wait a little longer before seeing those baby steps!

For Avery's birthday, we had a fun circus themed party. Most of our families came out as well as some friends and other babies, and the weather was beautiful!! Avery got so spoiled by tons of clothes and toys. She was so cute opening her gifts and hugging each one. When it was time to eat cake, she wasn't quite sure what to think. She was not making any mess until I squished her hands in it for her. She then went to town on her cake and fed some to me too.  :) She had such a blast, and was so sweet the whole time! It couldn't have been better. 

I am not sure if I will keep posting on here monthly, or just as new milestones and exciting things happen, but this is the last of the monthly belly stickers. I will keep posting though, that's for sure. Since I am not creative with scrap booking or anything like that, this is my virtual version of one. I want to be able to keep looking back on Avery's childhood, and I hope that she will enjoy reading it all one day too. 

Blowing kisses!

At the fair!