22 Months Of Mabel!

I seriously can’t believe how close we are getting to a certain someone’s 2nd birthday! I suppose it’s time to actually start planning her birthday party(particularly since it was at least a month ago now that Jim said…isn’t it about the time that you usually start party planning?) I’ve tossed around all sorts of theme ideas for the Mabes but I think I’ve finally settled on “Oh TWO-dles!” since we have a die hard Mickey Mouse Club House fan up in the house. But I’ll get to that later on in this post.

This month’s stats!

Size: Still wearing 2t clothes and recently moved into size 7 shoes. I feel like that’s huge??? But I was having a hard time getting her feet into her 6’s and when we were at Target recently both girls spent a huge chunk of time trying on all sorts of new shoes(and LOVING it) and I learned that they had both gone up a size!

Eating: Basically wanting to do exactly what big sister is doing and having. She begs to sit and eat her lunch on the bar stools just like Abigail, uses a plate and utensils, requests a napkin to wipe her hands and face, and eats the same foods we’re all having. Her favorite food is still probably peanut butter and honey sandwiches, but she also loves eggs, cereal(with milk! so grown up!), pizza, macaroni and cheese(she eats more pasta than I do), and deli turkey meat.

Favorite Fruit: Berries! Blueberries and strawberries are definite favorites right now!

Favorite Vegetable: Raw carrots and frozen peas are the big winners of the month.

Sleep: Fantastic nighttime sleep! We’ve worked to push her bedtime back a little, so instead of 7 it’s more like 7:30. I try to push it past that but she’s usually ready by then. She gets her pacis, blanket, and giraffe. We run a humidifier and her sound machine. Then it’s lights out and we don’t see her again until close to 8 the next morning.

For naps, she still goes down immediately after lunch. I try to push her to 1, but again, she’s usually ready by 12:30 or so. She sleeps for about 2 hours!

A word about the pacis: The paci addiction seriously ramped up this month and I didn’t have it in me to fight it. She’d spend excessive amounts of time in her bed just so she could use them or she would find ways to weasel her arms into the crib slats to sneak them out and would be so proud of herself for nabbing them I couldn’t force her to put them back. Sooo I decided we were going to do away with the pacifiers. Because, the thing was, she wasn’t becoming less attached to them- she was becoming more. So I was going to go with a cold turkey approach. But my softy of a husband convinced me to go a more “gentle” route instead.

So, what ended up happening is we have completely cut her off from them any time except nap and bedtime. We put them away as soon as she wakes up and only give them to her once she’s down in her crib for sleep. The first day she was not a fan(obviously) but once she figured out what was going on she has been great about it. When we walk into her room she is standing in her bed holding her pacis out to us for them to be put away, and she gets so happy and excited to get to go to bed because she knows her pacis will be there. Win win!

We’ll tackle taking away the pacis for sleep at some point within the next few months, but we’re going with this for a while because it is a massive improvement over what we were dealing with!

Words: SO many new words! Talking Mabel is so much fun. The biggest event was a few days ago we had a big thunderstorm and she was completely obsessed with it. I don’t know if it was because she was enthralled or terrified, but she kept saying “raining!” and “boom! boom!” and “splat splat!” (That’s for lightning for any Mr. Brown Can Moo readers out there) over and over and over. Days later and she is still talking about the storm!

She still calls Jim “nana” and it’s like my favorite thing ever. She calls Mickey “Pi-Pat!” which I think is a form of saying, iPad? Maybe? because they usually watch it on the Disney Jr. app I have(we don’t have cable). She says cup like “pup” and can ask for a bar or goldfish. She says good night and I love you before bed and has added an entire new slew of food words that she tries to request throughout the day.

Anytime she wants to go outside she starts asking for her coat and shoes, still requests to use my “hone”, and tries to read me her favorite books: Noah’s Ark, This Little Bunny, The Very Busy Spider, and The Very Hungry Caterpillar(every time she turns the page she says, “there he is!”)

A big thing she does right now is she’ll take you(me) by the hand and say, “Go! Go!” and lead you to whatever it is she wants you to do. Whether that is go upstairs and play, go to the kitchen to get a snack, or go outside. She is a determined little thing to let you know what she wants 😉

Loves: Mabel has officially been a stage 5 clinger this month, so I’d say Mama is a big love at the moment. Along with Sissy and “Nana”. She loves to watch her favorite shows, reading her favorite books, dancing around the living room to Abigail’s CC timeline, play doh, coloring, painting, snacks, bubbles, going outside, going for walks in front of our house(seriously, her FAVORITE), playing “tent” in our bed, wearing my sunglasses, listening to music in the car.

This age is SO much fun. Seriously I can’t get enough. I’m pretty sure I tell Jim that like every day. She’s just constantly saying and doing adorable things and it is so much fun watching her learn and grow. The baby years are so wonderful, but I had forgotten how much fun the toddler years are too! It has been so much fun remembering all of the precious things Abigail used to say and do at this age, and now getting to go through them again with Mabel has been just as much fun!