Not Feeling so Well

Before we left to go to Six Flags we noticed that Alyce had a runny nose. Apparently she has picked up a cold from another child from her early childhood development class. This cold is hitting her differently than others. This time around she seems knocked out of it. Sunday afternoon she took a nap for over three hours and was out of it the rest of the evening. Today she took another three hour nap. Her nose hasn't been runny, she hasn't been sneezing, and isn't running a fever. She is being a fit fussy which is driving mom a bit crazy, but throw on a three hour nap and it is a bit easier to get things back under control.

Update: We are thinking we might need to update Alyce's diagnosis. Instead of her having a cold we think she might be teething again. We are changing this because she is starting to stick her fingers back in her mouth. This is her version of a teething ring. We think her unusually long naps might be the result of not sleeping well because of mouth pain. We've started giving her some Children's Tylenol to help with the pain. Luckily she only has 4 teeth left until she has a full set.

Six Flags

Today we went to Six Flags. We had a lot of fun, although the weather wasn't perfect. It was nice and cool, but it drizzled on us a few times. Alyce went on a few rides. She rode the carousel, the train (the big one and the little one) and Colossus (the big ferris wheel). She also played in the treehouse playground in Bugs Bunny's National Park. That was the most fun, she kept going back for more. She and I tried one ride, but as soon as we got on it, it started to rock and she was not a big fan, started crying and holding her arms out for Daddy who was waiting on the other side of the fence. Once those arms came up, we knew she wasn't up for it. Here are a few pictures of our adventures!

Mommy

A few nights ago after dinner with some friends mom and I had to split up. I took Alyce home to get her ready for bed. When we walked in the door I put Alyce down and then she started looking around and asking for mommy in the cutest/saddest tone you've ever heard. She looked out into the garage and in the living room saying mommy all the while. She never got upset that mom wasn't there, she just wanted her mommy.

She's a gift every day of her life.

Sleep Regression

Lately Alyce has been having some trouble going to sleep. It started earlier this week Monday I believe. We put her down like we normally do and she started crying, but it wasn't her normal cry. This cry was more of a scream. We went up, checked on her, and got her settled back down only to hear more crying after we back down stairs. In all it took about an hour and a half for her to go to sleep. This is a large departure from the 5 minutes or less it usually takes. Over the three other days in the week she has had trouble going to bed two more times. While it wasn't as dramatic as the first night you have to ask the question what has changed?

The only changes we can think of is that she isn't as tired. Alyce is starting to take her naps later in the day. When mom puts her down around 1:00 p.m. she isn't falling asleep. If she puts her down around 2:00 or later she has much more success. Well throw in a 2 hour nap and that gets her waking up around 4:00 - 4:30. With bed time only 4 hours or less away I guess we can say she isn't tired yet. So perhaps we should try putting her to bed at 8:30 or 9:00. That won't make us happy because we enjoy our "off" time, but it is a worth it if she goes down easier. It is hard for a parent to hear their child cry and do nothing about it. It might be for their own good, but it is still hard.

Alyce's Words

Daddy and I decided to come up with a list of all the words that Alyce says. The list is as follows:

Clock (comes out as glock or gock), I Love You (comes out as I dub du), cracker, bubble, apple, please, doggie, Jakie, woof-woof (comes out as woo-woo), meow (comes out as eow), baby, me, thank you, Mommy and Daddy. And this morning she said book while picking up Mommy's book.

She even uses some words at the appropriate times like hello, hi, bye-bye, all gone, no, ah oh and weee! For example, yesterday Alyce was playing with her Chatty Telephone (you know the one that everyone had when they were little) and she was saying hello into it and then right before she hung up she said bye-bye. It was super cute!

She has also had a developmental breakthrough. She now knows who me and Alyce are. When we ask her who is me she points to herself. In addition when we ask her who Alyce is she points to herself again.

Dinner with Grandma

Sunday night we had dinner with Grandma. She was returning from a flight to Minneapolis to see my brother, his wife, and his son Jack. Alyce was in a great mood the all evening and through dinner which lasted until almost 9:00. To top the whole evening off Alyce even gave Grandma a big kiss. Mom and I were very proud of her.

Jack, Alyce's cousin just had his first birthday up in Minneapolis. He is growing big and fast. At one year he already weighs more than Alyce. He is a really great kid. Too bad he lives so far away.

Big News in Potty Training

A big milestone has been hit tonight. Alyce used a potty. It was more by accident then us starting training. She is only 20 months old, not like she is ready for that stuff yet. Anyway, we were giving her a bath tonight and right as we were finishing up we got that grunt. Any parent out there knows 'that' grunt. Well I wasn't going to let her do her business in the tub, and I don't think I was going to make it to a diaper so I plopped her on the toilet and well she did her business. WooHoo big girl potty time! I can't really say that this is the first in a string of toilet episodes, but it makes for a nice first step.

Race for the Cure

Here we are at the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure. Alyce is all geared up in her pink shirt and pig tails. The weather was perfect and there were thousands of people there. This is our second year doing the event. Last year Alyce was only 8 months old and really didn't have much of an opinion other than it was hot. This year she noticed a helicopter in the sky, an ant on the ground, and a pink balloon we tied her stroller. It was a great day and lots of fun.

Noooo

Alyce has a new favorite word, no. She says it a lot these days. She uses where you are supposed to use it I guess. In situations such as "Alyce can you please eat some sandwich?" the answer might be No. It might also be yes, but she doesn't say yes, she just does whatever it is we are wanting her to do or what she wants to do. What is kind of funny about her saying no is that she has so many ways of saying it. Sometimes it will be short quiet no, other times it will be a long drawn out melodic nooooo. One of my favorites and the most frustrating at the same time is that when we are sitting down for dinner and she doesn't want to eat what we are offering. She says no and proceeds to pull down on her face so that we can see the backs of her lower eye lids. How can you make eat when they are showing you the backs of their eyelids?

I figure this is all part of her developing as an individual. It would be nice to know what she would like rather than us guessing. I think a lot of issues we are having is that she can't vocalize what she wants, she can only vocalize what she doesn't want. I am hoping this will blow over like changing her diapers did. In the past she used to fight and squirm every time we tried to change a diaper. Now we can just ask her to lay down and 90% of the time she does it.

Baby Gideon

We had dinner last night with some friends Josh, Tammy, and baby Gideon. What made this dinner so much different than any other dinner Alyce has been to in that this was Alyce's first interaction with a true baby. Most of the time she plays with other kids her age at mom's Jazzercise class. Alyce did about as well as you would expect a toddler to do around a newborn. She was interested and mostly gentle. It will be interesting to see how she reacts when the baby doesn't go away after dinner.

Also, Alyce also got her first taste of being behind the wheel. They grow up so fast.

Vacation Odds and Ends

Well the vacation is all over. We made it back home yesterday around 2:00 and we were glad to get back. There is only so much time away from home a person can take. Back to that wonderful routine. I figured I would paste in a few odds and ends of pictures taken during the trip.

A favorite movie I captured via my cell phone is of Alyce at a Children's Place store. I think she has her mother's and grandmother's shopping genes.



This picture is from our first and best day at the pool. The weather cooperated the best and there were lots of water toys to play with. The pink ring pictured was one of her favorites.

Golf, Ur Doing it Wrong

So today our last full day out here at the Lake of the Ozarks we decided to go play some minature golf. Alyce has never seen a golf ball, golf club, or a golf game. Even if she had she is only 19 months old and doesn't grasp the concept of minature golf. So when we set to tee off on the first hole Alyce had other plans in mind. She bent down and picked up all of our golf balls and proceeded to walk off with them. It was cute the first time, and maybe even the second, but the third time when she threw a tantrum on the wet fake grass we had enough. We pulled out the stroller, an apple juice, and gave her a golf ball. So in the end, she did get golf right; Sit down, drink something, and watch the game go by.

Out in the Lake

For our second day of vacation we decided to go swimming at the lake. Alyce was not as big of a fan of the lake as she was of the pool. The lapping of the waves and the initial coolness of the water was enough to turn her opinion of the lake sour. However, she did have a lot of fun out of the water. Mom brought a new pail and shovel to the beach and Alyce was enthralled with simple act of shoveling sand into her bucket.

Dinner at the lake

Grams and Grandpa are here at the lake with us. Here we are out to dinner at Camp Bagnell

Lake of the Ozarks Edition

For the next few days our updates will be flowing from the Lake of the Ozarks. That's right the family decided to take a little vacation. A trip away to recharge the batteries. Yeah right. We have an 19 month old whole just found that going to the pool is awesome. There will be no recharging here.

The car trip to the lake went rather well. Alyce slept for little over an hour as we took back roads to the lake rather than an interstate. Missouri has a lot of beautiful places and taking an interstate is a good way to miss them.

Getting back to pool. Alyce hasn't been to a pool since last summer and now that she is older she is better equipped to enjoy herself. And enjoy she did. At the resort we are staying at they have a baby pool where the water is only one foot deep. Alyce took to it without any hesitation. She wasn't sure how to move around through water, but quickly got her water legs. There was a little scare Alyce tripped and fell face first into the water. She is still a bit your to right herself in the water so we had to put her back on her feet. Her face was in the water for a second as we were closer than arms length but it drove home the point of how dangerous pools without parental supervision can be.

The Vocabulary Keeps Growing

Alyce's vocabulary continues to grow. Yesterday on the way back form running some errands she said "Thank You". Well it was really more of an "Ank You", but we got the drift. A lot of her words are coming from parroting off of us. In this particular instance we were asking her to say thank you and she replied. That interactive style of learning words is how she is doing most of her speech. Very rarely has she picked up a word from our conversation and used them back at us without prompting. The only word coming to mind that falls into the on her own category is apple.

Roller Hockey

Tonight we all went to our neighbor Jeff's hockey game. As you can tell Alyce is really interested in the game. She did say the word hockey so that's a plus.

Jeff and his wife Liz are our next door neighbors. We hang out with them quite a bit and they are our babysitters of choice when Grams and Grandpa aren't available. Liz is Alyce's favorite adult on the block. Every time Alyce sees Liz outside she walks over and gives Liz a big hug. If they are at our house when Alyce is going to bed she also blesses them with another hug. If they really rate they even get a kiss.

Liz always has to keep her cellphone hidden because Alyce loves to play with it. Alyce will rummage through Liz's purse looking for it unless we stop her.

Hello Spoon

Alyce ate breakfast all by herself yesterday. Mmm Fruit Loops. Nom nom nom.

Picnic

Mom and Alyce met me for lunch today. I picked up some St. Louis Bread Company (Panera) and met them at the park. The weather was surprisingly nice and Alyce behaved rather well. One downside was that there were no tomatoes on our sandwiches. Currently there is a Salmonella outbreak in the tomato industry so all restaurants are nixing the tomatoes for now.

One highlight during lunch was that Alyce met her first lady bug. It landed on our table right in front of her stroller. Alyce started pointing at it and she focused in real close. We tried to get her to say bug but all that came out of bissh. Now that Alyce had something to look at she completely forgot about her grilled cheese sandwich. No big loss, she had eaten half the sandwich, some chips, and milk.

Once lunch was done we headed over to the playground equipment for a few trips on the slides until I had to get back to work. Alyce was a big fan of the bridges you had to take to get to the slides. She went down her biggest slide to date. She was a bit leery of the big slides so mom had to go down with her.

Grams and Grandpa Time

On Saturday mom and I both went to the hospital to see our friend's new baby Gideon. He is a cutie and we hope that 30 years from now he and Alyce will get married (hey you never know).


While we were at the hospital Alyce was hanging out with Grams and Grandpa. Grams doesn't like being called Grandma because she thinks is sounds old. Even though she isn't "Grandma" she still gets the joy that comes with being one. Alyce spent most of the time playing in the water on their deck or watching animals on the deck. I know Alyce is having a good time at their house because whenever we drop her off for babysitting she is never sad to see us go and doesn't come running to us when we get back. Grams and Grandpa are going to be big help next weekend as we go on a mini vacation for 4 days. I can't wait!

Chatterbox

Alyce is being quite the chatterbox. Just today alone she started saying four new words. She said Grandpa, cookie, jakie, and bitsy. Bitsy is our cute name for her. It started off at little bits, but we eventually shortened it to Bitsy. Jakie is what we call our dog Jake.

Jake is our pet dog. He is half lab and half Staffordshire Terrier. Some people would call that a Pit Bull, but that sounds so negative. He is a great dog, loyal, and very patient with Alyce. His one flaw is that he will never back down from another dog. We have that under control by using some of the Dog Whisperer's techniques.

Grrr.

Sooo Big!

I say Alyce is Sooo Big because at her 18 month checkup in April we got her updated height and weight. And she is Sooo Big because her height of 33.5 inches puts her in the 90th percentile. Her weight of 24lbs 7oz puts her in the 50th percentile in that category. Ever since she started walking at 10 months she hasn't really put on a whole lot of weight. Between her 15th and 18th month she only put on half a pound. She is a picky eater (which kid isn't) and she gets a quasi rounded diet, but the quantity is surprising. For instance last night we gave her half of a turkey and cheese sandwich. She probably ate about two thirds of half of a sandwich. Toss on a few carrots, some apple juice, and that sums up dinner. Maybe it is enough to sustain her and keep bones growing, but won't put pounds on her. In any case the doctor wasn't worried about her weight so I guess I shouldn't be either.

One extra thing that was interesting about this turkey sandwich (again with the sandwich). If we were holding the sandwich she wouldn't have anything to do with it. If we put it on her feeding table (thanks Babee Tenda) she was all over it. All over it is usually good, but in her case she keeps jamming in food, not finishing a bite, and not swallowing until she has a mouth full of food. What does the community think? How can we get her to slow down her eating?

How She Looked at 18 Months Old.

Here is a picture of Alyce around 18 months old. She is surrounded by some of her favorite toys. The bricks on the right side are her 1 year birthday present from me. We picked them up from Amazon and quite possibly the best gift ever. The bench was a Christmas gift from her grandfather. It is hand made with her name carved into the seat. The last item of note is the yellow door outside. That is to her slide which was a hand me down from our friends T&L. She goes in through the back door, closes the door behind her, climbs up, slides down, and the process repeats about twenty times before something else gets her attention. The sliding down part is usually accompanied by a "Weee!"

New Words

Yesterday Alyce had two new words. Bubble and Apple. We aren't really sure where she got apple from. We said apple the day before, but didn't really reinforce the word. Bubble on the other hand we did reinforce by saying bubble and playing with bubbles. Her bubble gun specifically. She is quite the fan of bubble gun. It is now broken as she dropped it and broke the bottle of bubbles.

Also yesterday Alyce was hit by another toddler on purpose. She is in daycare for a little over an hour on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday while mom is in her Jazzercise class. I don't think it bothered her all that much, but she did have a mark on her face. The mother of the toddler apologized, but what are you supposed to say? That's alright? You can't say that, because it isn't alright.

She has also been under the weather lately. Over the weekend she had a fever of 102 degrees. We weren't that worried because her attitude and appetite were still really good. Since then her fever has gone down and she now has a runny nose and occasional cough.

19 Months Old

I am creating this blog on behalf of my daughter. Her name is Alyce. She is only 19 months old at the moment and doesn't read blogs. She doesn't read anything really. She doesn't even really talk. But I figure this would be a good place to document her life until she is capable of documenting it herself.

I kind of wish I had done this earlier as she has already done so much in her life. I will post more about her past in the future.