She's becoming verbose

Well not really, but she is learning a new word every few days. Her first words besides Dada, Dyna, and Mama was "hot", and then "tickle tickle". She pretty much had those around her 15th month birthday. Now she also can say "up", "hat", "woof" and I think she said "out" this evening. She loves to go outside. She also will sign when she needs a diaper change, and once she even said it before she went so those are the first steps to potty training.

She also is obsessed with shoes. Every time she meets someone she points at her shoes, then at theirs, then at mine. Whenever she finds her shoes around the house she needs to put them on. Whenever she finds adult shoes she puts them on and trys to walk around. Then she gets frustrated because it is hard to put on big shoes, and it is hard to walk in big shoes and crys. So then we have to hide them. She really is quite silly about them.

We took her to the diaper dash the other week. She was all ready to go, but then they took a while to start the "race" so she forgot what she was doing and watched all the other kids run. After most of them were done, then she ran to me. It was pretty cute. The picture of her is of her showing us after the race what she meant to do when they said go. :) Dyna (the dog) also ran in the Furry 5k recently. She got second overall for the dogs (Floyd got 3rd).

Well there are probably more cutie pie things she has done that I want to record for posterity, but it is late and I can't remember them right now. We are going to Hawaii in a few weeks. Hopefully she does well on the plane.

Oh and I'm never going to write about sleep again because she read it and decided to push her bedtime back. I think I jinxed myself.

It is time to play

Selena has been a lot of fun the past month. She is starting to have an imagination and a sense of humor and it is fun to see all the new things she can do. It's funny because most of the things really aren't that impressive to most people, but to me it is so fascinating to watch her doing things that she couldn't a month or two ago.

Some of these amazing feats include: playing cook in the kitchen by taking a spoon and mixing stuff up, wanting to help us sweep, vacuum and pick weeds. Reaching up for me to hold her hand when she is walking over a challenging surface or changing surface. Turning around and waving bye bye to me when I ask her where she is going. Reading a book in the car. Giving me zerberts. Refusing to give me or dad kisses, but always giving Dyna kisses. Playing ring-around-the-rosie. Dancing to the songs on American Idol - Seyesha is her favorite. Pointing and getting excited at animals and pictures of animals wherever we go.


She still isn't talking much. She pretty much uses 'da' for every thing. Dada - dada, Dyda - Dyna, Da - dog. She says Da da Dy da all the time. She has added bye bye and diaper change to her signing vocabulary but only uses the latter if I say it first.

She has also finally settled on a consistent bed and nap time. That doesn't mean she still doesn't wake up every 2 to 4 hours during the night but I don't have to guess when to start getting her ready for bed or a nap. All the sleep experts recommend getting your child to sleep at consistent times but this was really hard for me because I didn't know if I was supposed to wake her up in the morning if she slept "too late", and what was I supposed to do if she woke up too early? At night if I tried to force her (ie. rock or nurse her till she was comatose) to sleep when she didn't want to she would wake up every half-hour for the rest of the night--and that was just exhausting for me. And I really did not feel comfortable with letting herself cry herself to sleep.

So we usually would have a schedule for about 4 days and then something would mess it up, be it activities, her needing to fill her diaper, Dyna barking at invisible things, etc. So being a pretty go-with-the-flow parent I just decided that four day schedules are fine and we can create a new one whenever we needed to. But now (for the last two months) she has settled into a schedule all on her own and even if she does end up napping at a different time she still goes to bed around the same time. I also don't have to rock her or hold her while she falls asleep and she did that all on her own as well. I am hoping that since she has progressed in this respect, sleeping longer stretches will also happen soon.


I also figured a while back that rather than read books about how to get my baby to sleep I preferred reading about other babies that didn't sleep. I found this blog -- http://sleepisfortheweak.wordpress.com/ . I especially like their list of excuses for why your baby doesn't sleep and Sleep training - a baby's view.

What's for dinner?

So Floyd and I traditionally go back and forth with each other. "What do you want for dinner?", "What do YOU want for dinner?" et cetera, et cetera until we cave in and make frozen pizza or noodle-roni or something else that is quick, tastes okay, but is not exciting, and doesn't include many vegetables. This happened almost every day and maybe once a week I might get ambitious and plan something that actually involved cooking.

Well now that I am home during the day, and have a young toddler to feed, I felt like I should be making more nutritiously diverse meals. So I thought to myself, "Wouldn't it be cool if there was a website that just told you what to make every day and gave you a grocery list?" Then I figured there probably was, so off I went and started googling menu planning services. There are plenty. So being a frugally minded person, my idea was to try each websites sample menu, and since there were about 8-10 sites that would last me two months, and rotating menus every two months would work pretty well, and it wouldn't cost me anything.

Well after perusing the menus (on a side note look up the word peruse, I was very shocked at it's definition) some of the menus really didn't sound too good. So I did another search for whole food meal planning and found dinnerselect.com. Their sample menu looked really good and their philosophy behind diet seemed similar to mine--eat a wide variety of fresh foods. They aren't providing a weight loss service so they don't provide calorie counts or fat content and they don't sacrifice taste by trying to make a meal "light" (one of my pet peeves), they provide recipes made with fresh ingredients that taste good. So I decided to try their site first. It was very tasty. Their current sample menu is a little different now then it was when we tried it, but my favorites, the chicken strips, steak sandwhich, and the tomato salad are still there. The chicken strips have a side dish of zucchini and potatoes that is really yummy. I am not a fan of salads but the tomato salad was really good and I got to make my own croutons. So overall I was pretty happy, but I figured I should give another site a try.

So I tried relishrelish.com. Their sample menu seemed pretty good when you looked at it, unfortunately it seemed like noone actually tried the recipes out before providing them. A couple had really weird contrasting flavors that didn't seem to go together, and a meatball recipe's proportions were all wrong--it was supposed to be a recipe for four, but it said to put an entire bag of meatballs in and the meatball package served 14. So after that disappointment I decided to sign up for dinnerselect.com's service after all. It is only $15 for 3 months so it is a pretty good deal.

We have been using it for about 2 months and have been overall happy with it. Like I said before I am not a salad person, but their salad recipe's are really good. I am also not a very good cook, but I have only had screw ups with a few of the recipe's so overall most of the recipe's are pretty easy to make. Not every recipe has been a roaring success, but each week there is usually one that is really good, that you really would like to have again. I usually only use about 5 of the 7 recipe's a week and then do leftovers, go out, or do something easy the other days.

The one big thing that is annoying and I find inconvenient is when you print out the recipe's and the grocery list your recipe and grocery list often get split between pages , so that you are constantly flipping between two pages. However I know that technically this is easier said then done. As a web developer you have virtually no control over how html is printed so you are pretty much stuck with what you get-- however it seems like their should be a library out there somewhere that allows you to dynamically create pdf files... But I haven't seen it and that is totally off topic.

But I really recommend this service to anyone who has a hard time deciding what to make for dinner. I really think the chef in this family owned business is talented and I feel really good about recommending their site.

Life as a toddler

Selena is now 13 months and is an expert (well sort of) at walking and thinks life as a toddler is pretty cool. Now when we go shopping it is no longer fun to just sit in the shopping cart and smile at people, she needs to walk around, explore, and play peekaboo behind the fabric shelves at Joanns.

She now enjoys reading Jane Yolen's How Do Dinosaur's... Say Good Night, Eat Their Food, Go to School etc. Other books she gets about half way through and decides that they are over, but the Dinosaur books are pretty interesting.

So the "in" thing is to teach your baby sign language so that they can communicate before they can talk. But I haven't been too consistent about trying to teach her, but despite my inconsistencies Selena can sign, "all done", "eat", and "ice cream". She learned the ice cream sign the first time I showed it to her. She is her mother's daughter.


She also has started to torment poor Dyna by pulling her tail and stealing her dog food pebbles. I'm not sure why she thinks Dyna's food is so yummy, or why she would prefer it over garbanzo beans, but she does.

She also got her first fever. It was very sad, but luckily it only lasted a day. She also had a few molars pop through and that made her very upset for 2 days. Previous teeth might have caused her to be a little cranky, but it might also have been coincidence, but these teeth definitely affected her and it was no fun for anyone.

One Year of Selena

Click to see a bigger view.

One Year!!!!

Selena has had her first birthday. I don't know where the year went. She has definitely changed in the last month in that she is walking and asserting herself. She has taken to going to the snack cupboard and taking out what she wants to eat -- usually cookies and raisins. We are going to need to put a baby lock on that door.

She isn't making quite as many messes as she was a month ago. Now putting things away is entertaining as well.

She got lots of fun toys for her birthday from her generous family and friends, including a powerwheel car from grandpa which she immediately starting doing "tricks" on, like standing on the seat and pushing the button. I think I need to find a baby helmet.



Selena, my mother and I also took a trip to Texas to visit her great great grandpa, and her great grandmother. She was a really good traveler, and did excellent on the plane rides.

11 months

Selena's first birthday is fast approaching and sometimes it makes me want to cry. I can't believe my little baby is already growing up. She is starting to toddle which means she will soon be a toddler! (BTW I love the word toddler, it is so appropriate.) The most steps I have seen her take is 6.

She is the queen of chaos, a child of entropy. By the end of every day all the books are off all the bookshelves. All the clothes are removed from all the baskets. All the toys are removed from all the toy bins. All the lids and towels are removed from all the drawers. The only time I bother to put stuff back is to give her something to do.

She loves to point. Sometimes she points to communicate, for instance I want that (point) ice cream instead of the crackers you are trying to give me. Sometimes she points to tell you where to take her, for instance she points at the stairs because she wants to go downstairs and play with dad rather than go to bed. Other times she just points for the sake of pointing.

She really is at a cute stage and I just love to squeeze her and kiss her. I love her!

Free Crochet Longies Pattern

Pattern for Crochet Longies

Wool pants for use over cloth diapers

This is a pseudo-pattern for a pair of crochet longies. I have made these in roughly a size 12 months for my daughter. They are very thick and have a lot of stretch to them. They would probably be very good to go over a cloth diaper at night. I don't have a lot of experience crocheting and I just made the pattern up as I went along so it isn't perfect. You can do whatever you want with the pattern, but if you want to give me some credit I would appreciate a link to this page. If you have any suggestions, comments, questions, corrections, or if you make a pair and want to show me the pictures please leave some comments on my blog. Good luck.

I used 2 ½ skiens of cascade 220 wool yarn. This was about 550yards or 250 grams. This is a worsted weight yarn. (For thinner pants a thinner yarn might be good). I also used a size G hook.

I'll tell you what I did and try to give you the stitch count in parenthesis for the size 12 month longies I made. I hope the counts are accurate…

STITCHES:
Chain:
Double Crochet
Front Post Double Crochet
Triple Crochet
Front Post Triple Crochet
Videos explaining crochet stitches

FRONT OF 1st PANT LEG:
Row 1: Chain the length you want your pants (60) chain 2 turn
Row 2: double crochet till 6 from the end (54) and triple crochet the last 6 ch 3 turn
Row 3: front post triple crochet next 5, front post double crochet till 6 from the end (49), front post half double crochet last 6, ch 2 turn
Row 4: front post double crochet next 5, front post double crochet till 6 from the end (49), front post triple crochet last 6, chain 3 turn.
Repeat rows 3 and 4 till you get the width of a pant leg. I used a pair of stretch pants to compare. (19 total rows)

CROTCH:
You should end at the top of the pants (the half double crochets) and do 4 short rows ending where you want the crotch to end (33). Once again I used a pair of knit pants to measure. Still do the front post half double crochets at the top, but don't do the triple crotchets at the bottom. You should end at the top and now you are going to start the second pant leg.


SECOND PANT LEG and BACK OF SECOND PANT LEG:
Row1: Front post half double crochet the first 5 stitches, continue with front post double crochet's (28) till the end of the crotch, then chain till the end of the leg (27). Chain 3 turn.
Row2: triple crochet the next 5 stitches and continue with double crochet's until you get to the laurabangerter.servehttp.com body (22), then do front post double crochets till you get to 6 till the end (27) and do front post half double crochets for the next 6. Chain 2 turn.
Repeat rows 3 and 4 from the front pant leg until you get the same 2 times the same # of rows as the first pant leg.

BOTTOM:
From the top of the pants (the half double crochets) do 6 short rows, but this time make them about an inch and a half longer than the crotch short rows (40).

BACK OF 1st Pant Leg
Do the same thing you did for the second pant leg but only do the # of rows you did for the front pant leg (19)


SEW THE SIDE SEAM:
I did a slip stich down the side of the leg only picking up the front loops, to give it a sort of ribbed effect. It works ok unstretched but stretched it is kind of noticable. If someone has a better idea I'd love to know it. Tie the end and weave the extra yarn in the pants.

SEW THE PANT AND CROTCH SEAMS:
This part is kind of difficult because you have more rows in the back than the front. On the pant legs I used a slip stich picking up only the front loops to give it a ribbed effect. I just tried to gather the crotch parts together evenly. It might help to start at the top and work down one leg and then start at the top and work down the second leg. I'm not sure. I just kind of sewed it together. Sorry I'm not more help.

WAIST BAND:
Make a chain long enough to go around your baby and tie a bow. Then using a yarn needle weave the chain around the waist 5 stiches from the top. I put the bow in back so she would play with it, but in front would work too.

Ta da!!!!

Sorry the pattern isn't more exact, but I'm not a very detailed oriented person…

SUGGESTIONS:
If you don't want the flared legs just ignore the triple crochet stitches and do double instead.

Like I said the resulting longies are very thick. The ribbing is what makes them so thick, so if you only did the front post stitches every other row I think it might work out well. I'm not sure if you should only do them going up, or going down. Doing this you would have to think about where the ribs are in relation to the seams etc. If I make another pair I'm going to try it.

10 months

Oops I didn't get a chance to post for a few months partly because Selena has become mobile and I've been busy chasing her around. She started with an inch worm crawl where she would get up on all fours lean forward and fall to her tummy and then start the whole process over. She did that for a few weeks and then she figured out the "cross" crawl and has become pretty fast. She also has become very proficient at crusing along the furniture. I am sure her first steps will be coming shortly.

She is also babbling a lot. Ma ma ma, da da da, ba ba ba, etc. Sometimes I think she might be meaning to say mama and dada, but I'm not sure. In addition to her babbling she loves to growl. I thought she would out grow that habit quickly but she has been growling for a few months now.

She is growing so quickly and it is so fun to be around her while she is learning and exploring the world. We love her so much.

7 months

Selena is now 7 months old and the last month has been filled with trying new foods and trying to crawl. It is very hard for her and she gets quite frustrated, but she is getting the hang of it and I am sure any day now she will be cruising all over.

Her other great adventure is eating real food. Of course, like anything else, there are lots of "philosophies" on how to feed your baby. The traditional American way is to start with rice cereal and progress through the various jars of baby food. At first I thought I would make my own baby food, pureeing it in a blender. I checked out some books at the library on how to make baby food and how to freeze and store it. I even bought a food mill to chop up stuff on the go.



However my mom said that I didn't need baby food and I should just give her anything that you can smash with a fork and she'd be fine. Then some ladies on Babycenter said you didn't even need to cut up the food into small pieces you could just give them a big chunk and see what they did with it. So I've done a little bit of everything. I started with the purees for about 3 weeks and then I started giving her small bites, but she had a hard time grabbing them, so I gave her a few whole pieces of food, like broccoli, a banana, and an apple. She like the first two, but the apple was frustrating for her. Now her pinchy pinchers are working better so she can handle the small bites again. So I've pretty much given up on the purees and just try to make sure that we eat something she can have too.
She enjoys it, and will object when I don't give her the same thing we are having. It is amazing how she'll put the food in her mouth and "chew" it with her gums and swallow it. Sometimes she will stuff A LOT of food in her mouth and I get worried she'll choke. She may gag a little, but she ends up handling it by swallowing or spitting it back out. It is very impressive, well at least to me it is. :)