She is now 26 (almost 27!) months old and is so incredible. If there was an award for "best sister" I'm pretty sure she would win it hands down. Every time she sees Jonah - she has to give him a kiss. It is the sweetest thing and she has been doing it for weeks without fail. If he is getting fussy, she will go and give him a toy! She also is really good about sharing. Occasionally I will see in her face that she doesn't want to share, but after she pushes through her initial hesitation... she will then gladly share as many toys as she can find. Watching her towards Jonah truly melts my heart. She is also now aware of the baby in mommy's belly. In fact, several times a day she will pat my belly and say, "mama, baby, belly." :)
She is a very active girl. I love her run, it is on her tip toes and she runs all around the house. Lately she has started learning how to do somersaults and she LOVES them. :) This girl is quite a good dancer as well. Every time she hears music she is up and dancing. I have to say, one of my favorite parts of the day is when we dance together in the living room. Her laughter is music to my ears.
She has become independent lately which is a nice change for me. She loves playing right next to me, but she will venture into other rooms and play by herself. It is fun to watch her imagination at work. She loves stuffed animals right now and no matter what she is doing: all her animals get to have a turn as well. It is funny to me how "real" those animals are to her. If you pass over one of their turns, she will let you know. :) Her new thing, however, is to go upstairs on her own. I'm somewhat okay with this, but confess that I'm a little nervous that while she is up there she will either lose her balance and fall down the stairs or attempt to come down the stairs on her own and also might trip. She is good about going down "on her bottom" when we are with her to remind her, but by herself, I'm not sure she would remember that rule. So, I never let her play too long unsupervised by herself. :) Her room time is going well - staying more than 40 minutes in there without a peep. Some days she even prompts it all on her own. Her independent streak is carrying over to the nursery at church! She is doing great! The past few weeks she hasn't even cried when we dropped her off, but instead just says "bye bye" as if going to the nursery was never a big deal. It makes church time so much better for us!
She is still a great sleeper. We put her to bed around 8 (sometimes 8:30) and she'll stay in her bed and talk until 10 or 10:30... and then she'll sleep in until 9:30 or 10 in the morning. She takes one nap in the afternoon which lately have been 3-5:30ish, but I'm going to try to move them a little bit earlier over the next few weeks. Ideally, 2-5ish is what i'm looking for, but I seem to be too busy playing at 2 to remember to put her down. :)
Her speech is improving. I love hearing her talk and communicate. She is still a signing machine and is also learning how to say more sounds. However, she is also becoming increasingly frustrated with herself. When we try to push her to say a word correctly (she says "bye bye" "gye gye") - she will cry and give us the "all done" sign. If we keep pushing her she will start screaming out sounds through the tears which is truly heartbreaking for me to watch. She is trying - she really is, but she simply can't say certain words. I will admit that my heart is still sad over her speech delay. The other night she asked to watch Curious George by making the monkey sounds "ahh ahh" and while Jason was setting it up, she did the sign for "candy" while saying "ahh ahh, andy." We were so excited! She was telling us she wanted to watch the episode where George eats candy. We celebrated her communication breakthrough! But then it hit me, all she said was "ahh ahh, andy" - she didn't say, "can I watch the Curious George where he eats candy. please?" She can't even say more than a word or two at a time. She is still so very far behind that my heart broke into pieces. I'm crying now just thinking about it. She "chatters" often: in the car, playing with her animals, etc.... but her actual clear sentences are never more than one or two words. I wonder if in her head they are clear. When she is playing with her dolls and having them talk so much...does she hear the clear words in her head? I think so because she understand every word you say to her and can follow several step commands. She knows words, but can speak them. I brought this up to Jason last night and he suggested that we be more proactive about praying for her. That certainly was a wake up for me because I have not been praying for her speech as often as I should be.
She can answer questions... so our dinner conversations are usually me asking her one question after another so we can talk. She also LOVES to sing. Her new favorites are "Bingo" and "The Wheels on the Bus" - she can spell B-I-N-G-O on her own and she knows all the "happenings" on the bus. I'll ask her: what do the wheels do? She'll reply, "round and round (she signs it and says rou and rou). So I sing that verse and then ask her, "what's next?" And she knows what the wipers, horn, doors, money, mommies, driver, people, and babies all do. It is fun to watch her enjoy singing that with me. She also loves "Rock a Bye Baby" but only if she is holding one of her stuffed animals in her arms like a baby and rocking it in front of the fireplace (so she can see herself).
Her first sight word was "Chick-Fil-A" -- she can stop that word anywhere: the building, a billboard, or on toys that we have taken home for their kid's meals. It is very fun to watch her get excited whenever she sees it. She knows all her alphabet letters and when you ask her what the letter says, she knows about 50%. She can also spell Baby (along with Bingo, but that's only in the song :). She can count to 15 on her own! She still knows all her colors, animals, and shapes. She is even good about picking up what I ask her to... if I tell her to get me two purple triangles from a puzzle. She will scour through them and find two purple triangles. She is very, very smart.
She is getting into games, which is helping pass the winter. She loves to play memory and my favorite part about that is we have a Bible version of the game and so she is now learning the Bible characters. By sight, she can pick out Noah, Adam and Eve (she just calls them Eve), David, Daniel, and Jonah. At first I always placed the matches right next to each other, but now she's so good that I have to mix them up! :) She also really loves to play CandyLand. I make her tell me what she sees "two purple" and then we move the people to the correct square. She loves playing this game so much that we use it as a reward after we work on saying our sounds.
I have a few bags set up with different toys on the inside. A "B" bag, a "M" bag, and a "P" bag. We have to do one of those bags before we can play Candyland. I let her pick out the toys in the bag and she has to try to say them. For example, the "B" bag has a bunny, a bear, a baby, and a boat. She can say boat and baby just fine, but bunny is more of a gunny and bear is gear. So I make her say the "b" sound and if she throws in a "g" or "c" sound I tell her no and make her do it again. This is where she'll get frustrated because she'll say, "b,b,b gear" and I'll say, no... b, b, b ear. And we can't move on until she makes her best effort to say it correctly, but even then I've never gotten a clear "bear" or "bunny" out of her.
Anyway, she is still a very funny girl. She makes me laugh a lot with her expressions and her imagination. The other day she was eating lunch and I put down a bowl of green beans and told her she had to blow on them because they were hot. I turned around and kept hearing her say, "baby, (blowing sound)" - I look over and she has her baby doll's face in the bowl and she was pretending to have the baby blow of her food. So clever. :) She is always very fun to watch and play with.
Jason and I believe in heart motivated discipline. That sounds complicated, but the bottom line is that it is "easy" to get a child to act like a Christian. It is easy for parents to enforce first time obedience and then leave it there. It is not as easy, however, to train your child to think like a Christian. To not worry so much about the first time obedience as about why did they disobey? What in their heart do they need to correct?
This isn't a parenting post, but it leads me to my next humorous Havana story. When she disobeys, we talk about it. I correct her with Scripture, but I also tell her what she needs to do to make it right (again this is done with Scripture). You can't correct the child without then giving them the tools they need to know what the right choice is. Anyway, then we always pray about it together. Well, the past two days whenever I start to correct her, she begins praying immediately. She claps her hands together and squeezes her hands tight. It is hard not to bust out laughing. She's funny, but don't worry, while I do pray with her, I make sure we finish our conversation and that she has a chance to "do it again" - which is make the right choice. More than Babywise, I strongly recommend Don't Make Me Count to Three as a must read for all parents. It is similar is practice to Shepherding a Child's Heart but it is a much easier read with clear examples!
My little 8.5 month old man has to be the happiest child in the world. I have never met a more content and chilled little baby in my life. He makes having two kids easy. I can sit him on the floor and he'll play by himself all day. I don't leave him alone that long, but it is nice to know he is that content if I need him to be. :)
He began sitting up on his own and rolling over back in November. He is just now starting to rock forward a little bit, but I think crawling is still a little ways away. He is getting very quick with his rolling abilities and the other day he even rolled himself into Havana's play tunnel. How he got himself into that little opening I still don't know, but the smile on his face was HUGE.
He loves playing. He has a little basketball goal that he loves and Havana has a weeble set that he thinks is the coolest thing on earth. Just today he started learning how to turn the wheel in order to move the weebles up the slide. I have to say I was impressed that he knew how to do that. He also has a rainforest music thing in his crib that he has now learned how to kick on by himself. :) Clever boy.
He is saying "mama" "nana" and his new favorite word is "oh" - we literally will have a 20 minute conversation where we are simply saying "oh" to each other in different inflections. He enjoys using his voice. :) When he wakes up in the mornings (usually around 9-9:30am) I am greeted not with crying, but by his voice going "oh" "Oh" "Oooohhhh" - followed by his laughter. I'll walk in and he's holding a stuffed animal. :)
His sleeping habits are incredible. he takes a short hour to an hour in a half nap in the AM and then a longer 3-4 hour nap in the afternoon. He sleeps about 13 hours at night. For a while he was waking up in the middle of the night (started out with a cold and then he just thought it was fun) but after Christmas Jason and I simply stopped going in there and now he's back to his 13 hour stretch - although we did hear him about 5am this morning doing his "oh" speech, but we went back to bed and so did he. :)
He is eating a lot these days. Of course he gets the full run of pureed fruits and veggies (made at home, of course :) and now that he's 8 months we give him yogurt too. But he also eats so much table food it isn't funny. The basics like cheerios, puffs, and mum-mums are okay, and even though he only has two teeth he loves actual table food: garlic bread and pizza are his favorites. He has eaten lunch meat, hamburger, cheese, cut up fruit, bread, pasta, chicken pot pie... pretty much whatever we eat we give to him. The other night we ordered a pizza so I thought I would see how he would do with it... the kid ate more pizza than I did! I could not put it on his tray fast enough! :) No wonder he is wearing 18 month clothing!!!!!
Jonah things Havana is funny and laughs at everything she does. He always wants to be in the middle of what she is doing. He thinks his daddy is pretty funny too. He is also getting really into being thrown into the air, spinning and dancing with us, and he started playing a game on his own that Havana played when she was a baby and that she still plays. He will touch one of our arms or our back and when we look at him he'll laugh so hard. We will look away and then he'll do it again and when we look at him, again so much laughter.
Havana did that when she was little and she still loves to play that game where she will touch our backs and now we tickle her when she does. I don't know why my kids enjoy that, but now that they both have it is kind of a fun Dugger Family game.
Doing well! We had a "scare" last week. For about a week we could not find the heartbeat on our dopplar. We had been able to find it before and for a solid week we couldn't find it. It was to the point that even Jason was nervous and he even said, "we might be having a miscarriage." If you know my husband, he doesn't normally jump to that conclusion... so that is how scary it was for both of us. Finally, we agreed that we would call the doctor on Monday and try to get in. I was nervous as I was at the 13 week mark and I didn't feel pregnant nor was my belly expanding at all. It wasn't firm like it usually is by this time. However, Monday morning we tried again before calling the doctor and what do you know... a rapid little heart beat was there to greet us. I was so relieved and kept Thanking the Lord for His grace. Jason said, "where have you been?" to the baby and I laughed and thought perhaps this will be our problem child. :) However, I know that I will be thankful for every "problem" he/she gives us because I am so thankful for his/her little life.
I will be 14 weeks on Monday and I'm still leaning towards not wanting to find out the gender. Jason has his doubts that I will stay strong, but I have things for each and who knows, perhaps this will be our last biological child and it may be our last time to have to true surprise. :) I think it will be fun. Coming up with two names, on the other hand, won't be as much fun since Jason and I struggle with coming up with names we agree on. It is a miracle we've named the children we have!
Other than that one scare, I'm feeling great. Not sick, not gaining weight, no food aversions or cravings, no needing to eat often... nope, it is hard for me to remember sometimes that I am pregnant because this one has been so easy. Other than hiding from the Doppler.. this kid is perfect. :) Hoping my second trimester shapes up to be as good as the first.
