13 Months with Ellie

So I am a day late...I wasn't sure how long I would be doing these updates...but I figured I would keep posting them as long as I can so that I remember when Ellie does everything! 

 

Development

Big month - Ellie is now walking!  It started a few months ago with her pulling herself up on things, then that turned into cruising on furniture which turned into walking around holding our hands to eventually letting go and walking on her own.  She is still a little hesitant to walk without holding on to things, but she can do about 20 steps in a row without holding on to anything.  It is so funny to see her little body walking on its own.  

She currently has 6 teeth and I think she is starting to get the other ones on the bottom.  I am amazed at how much she can understand now. I will tell her to "go get a book to read" or "give Winnie that toy" and she will go ahead and do it.  We are working on teaching her where her nose, head, eyes, etc are.  

Ellie is really into books now. Like read me 10 books in a row or else I will freak out.  Her favorites are The Very Hungry Caterpillar and anything with Sophie the Giraffe in it!

Feeding

She is totally off "baby food" as of a month or so ago.  She eats almost anything we eat.  Her favorites are cheese, raspberries, and peanut butter toast. We started giving her whole milk this month in sippy cups and she seems to like it.  It is tough getting her to eat vegetables at meals so I usually try to give those to her first before anything else.  She sure does love to feed her food to Winnie and food has started flying off the high chair!

Since we started to introduce whole milk she has stopped nursing as much.  Right now she is only nursing when she gets up and usually a little bit before naps and then right before bed.  I have stopped pumping in the morning and I am down to 1 pumping session at work and plan to phase that out in a week or so.  I have noticed my breasts are not nearly as full feeling in the morning when I wake up, so that is nice.   It seems like my period returning coincided with the introduction of cow's milk.  I still send 2 servings of breast milk with Ellie to my mom's house and I will continue to do that until my freezer stash is gone.  I think I have about 100 ozs left.  

Vacation

We took Ellie to Puerto Rico this month!  My cousin and his wife moved there recently and we couldn't pass up the free lodging and free (with points) flights.  It was tricky keeping Ellie happy on the flight because she did not want to nap and was so overstimulated by everything.  She had to reach "freak out status" before she essentially passed out on me.  Luckily freak out status only lasted about 15 minutes.  

It wasn't easy vacationing with a 1 year old, but it was a lot easier since my cousin's wife used to nanny and doesn't currently have a  job or kids so all she wanted to do was play with Ellie!  It was so nice having an extra set of hands!  She watched Ellie 2 nights while Brian and I got to go out to eat alone together - such a nice treat!  It was also fun to play with Ellie in the pool and at the beach.  I was nervous about how naps on the go would be, but with the warm weather she just fell asleep in her stroller whenever she was tired. 

We drove up to the rain forest and took a hike through it and that was a lot of fun.
All in all I am glad we went, but it wasn't the easiest age to travel with!   It is tough because she doesn't understand reasoning yet like "no Ellie we can't move out of our airplane seat because we are taking off" stuff like that.  

Christmas
Christmas was a lot different this year!  Last year Ellie was only 1 month old and it was all sort of a daze. This year we were still busy, but at least we were getting some sleep!  We drove down to Brian's family in Pennsylvania then celebrated with my family when we were back up in Mass.  

We didn't buy Ellie many gifts because she just had her birthday and we knew she would get gifts from others.  Our house is now jam packed with toys!  It is a good thing, but I quickly took half of them up to the attic so that we can introduce them through out the year.  Half of them were a little too advanced for her at this point anyway.  

Overall it was a great Christmas.  It was nice having some more days off to spend time with Ellie.