This is why it can take a long time to get through Anya’s bedtime routine:

This is how Anya sits in her high chair, every time:

She’ll keep her feet like that for most of the meal.  I don’t see how that can possibly be comfortable, but it seems to work for her!

Someone in one of my December 2008 pregnancy groups inspired me to try making a fleece blanket for the baby.  I found some instructions online and got the material.  Then last night I started the blanket.  I finished it this morning!  I’m so excited about it.  I love to crochet but don’t have the patience to finish bigger projects like blankets - baby hats and sweaters are more my style.  Here’s how it turned out:

I am currently sitting next to an ever-growing list of Anya stories I’ve been meaning to blog about, so I thought I should get cracking.  I’ll try to keep each one brief, but that’s always a challenge for me!

1. A few weeks ago Anya mastered the French door lever handles the previous owners of our house seem to have loved so dearly, so we finally got around to putting a few child locks on certain doors and installed a baby gate at the top of the stairs. We’re working very hard on getting her big girl room set up, and sooner than later we’ll be posting about the process of moving her to the twin bed.

2. I was sitting on the twin bed reading There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly to Anya, when she suddenly exclaimed, “Two old ladies! One in the book and one over there!” as she pointed to the Old Lady doll that was sitting on the dresser.

3. We think this was probably Anya’s longest complete sentence to date: “I go to the hospital with Mommy and Daddy to see G.G.!” We had just told her that we were going to the hospital to visit our friends who had just had a baby, and she remembered that she had gone to the hospital to visit my grandmother weeks ago!

4. Anya is starting to ask a lot of questions, the most common being “Who’s that?” when she doesn’t know someone. I had taken her to daycare and she asked it when she didn’t recognize the dad of one of her classmates. She’ll also ask it about both characters and objects she doesn’t know in a book. A cute story: She was looking at a Huggies diaper (she usually wears Luvs or Pampers Pull-Ups), and was excited about the characters on the front. “Look!” she said, “There’s Mickey Mouse and…and…and…WHO’S THAT?” She didn’t know Pluto’s name, but at least she knew how to find out what it was!

5. Apparently Anya pays attention at daycare. One morning Lex and I were talking about how Anya had been repeating the Spanish words in her Dora book around the house, and she pipes in with, “Spanish words! Siete…Seis…Ocho!” They count to ten in Spanish every day at school, but we had no idea. She’s getting better now at counting in order in Spanish and saying all of the numbers.

6. There was one morning last week when Anya woke up VERY early. After listening to her crying, “Mommy come back!” over and over and begrudgingly accepting that she wasn’t going back to sleep, I finally went in around 5:45 am or so. The first thing she said when I walked in was, “I crying! I mad at Mommy. She go away!” I don’t remember much else about that morning, since I handed her some books in the crib and promptly conked out in the rocking chair until around 6:30.  I’m glad she’s trying to use emotion words, though.

7. Anya is SO affectionate, and we love it. In the morning when Lex gets her and brings her into our room, one of the first thing she does is climbs on top of us and give us each a big wet smooch. “Good morning, Mommy!” She loves to give kisses and hugs, and she has a preference for kisses smack on the lips. Sometimes if she asks to give me a kiss and I offer her my cheek, she’ll grab my face with her hands and turn it so she can get me on the mouth. She also feels it necessary to give or get kisses on both cheeks, not just one. How European of her!

8. I was playing a silly game with Anya where I’d point to two body parts of hers and label them correctly, and then say the wrong thing for a third. She thought this was hysterical. This was the funniest part of the game:

Me: That’s my Anya’s nose.  That’s my Anya’s leg.  [Points to Anya's cheek] That’s my Anya’s belly button!
Anya: [Cracks up]  NOOOO!  That’s Anya’s cheek.  Mommy forgot! [Lifts up her shirt]  That’s a belly button!”

I can’t believe it’s already August and the summer will soon be over!  How did it go so fast?  We still have a lot planned for the coming weeks, and we’ve been enjoying some fun family time, too.

Tonight we went out in the backyard after dinner. I got a real kick out of watching Anya just be a kid. She climbed up her slide and gleefully shouted, “I did it!” before swooshing down. She tried to run up the hill, fell, and giggled hysterically as she rolled around in the grass. That led to a fun game of being chased by Daddy, then a game of chasing Mommy, both of which seemed to require lots of Anya time on the ground. We were having so much fun, and it was a bummer to call it a night and head inside for bath and bedtime.

This past Sunday we spent some time at the township pool and had a blast. Here’s a video of Anya and Lex playing in the water:

I really like this picture of the two of them:

Oh, we also had visitors this weekend! Our friends Jake and Dana Rubin came up from Washington, DC, to visit us for a bit. Anya hasn’t seen them in a long time, but they came bearing gifts (always a smart move with a toddler) and she warmed up very quickly. She’s still talking about them two days later!

Anya had a blast walking around in Dana’s heels. Too bad Mommy only wears sandals and sneakers!

Hopefully we’ll be able to make a trip down to DC sometime soon to see them again (Maybe in September???).  It had been too long!

Last Friday we took Anya to the dentist to the first time.  Knowing how she feels about going to the pediatrician, we did our best to prep her for the dentist.  We talked about it for a whole week and I took a book out of the library about the dentist (and then decided that book was useless and bought her a book about Dora going to the dentist instead).  She loved hanging out in the waiting room:

Once we were called in, she started to get a little clingy and didn’t want to sit in the chair by herself.  She eventually agreed to sit in Lex’s lap and had fun admiring everything in the room (especially the TV).  I thought maybe the visit was going to go smoothly after all, and then the dentist came into the room.  To her credit, the dentist was wonderful with Anya.  I’m not quite sure how she managed to think straight, let alone get Anya’s teeth examined, cleaned, and treated with fluoride, given how loud Anya screamed.  The dentist had Lex put Anya’s head in her lap while he held her body on his.   When the dentist was done, I held Anya while she calmed down as the dentist gave some follow-up information to Lex.  The assistant came in with a new toothbrush and a Dora sticker for Anya, and suddenly the dentist’s office was a pretty awesome place to be.  THEN they let her pick out a PRIZE!  Two bracelets!  Oh boy!  If you ask Anya now, going to the dentist was great and she loved it.  She still wants us to read her the Dora book several times a day.  I guess we’ve got about 6 months to get her ready for the next visit.

Tantrums and fits of crying are on the rise here - not surprising, as Anya nears her second birthday.  We’re trying to use a lot of the techniques you might read about when approaching these kinds of behaviors, including reflecting what we see and labeling emotions.  Tonight when I was helping Anya brush her teeth she got pretty upset because when she wouldn’t cooperate I made her lie down on my lap.  She kept fighting me while screaming, “Sit up!  SIT UP!”  When I finished, she was still crying, so I said to her, “You didn’t like it when I made you lie down.  You were mad at me!  Mad mad mad!”  She calmed down and we talked a little about how if she doesn’t open her mouth, I can’t brush her teeth, and then she can’t have a turn to do it herself like a big girl, blah blah blah.

Later, as I was putting her to bed, we went through our usual back and forth about how many books I was going to read (because if she had it her way, I’d read every book she owns - TWICE).  When I said that we were not going to read But Not the Hippopatomus because we’d already read two books and that it was time for her goodnight songs, she started to cry and tried to grab the book.  I told her she could go into the crib right now instead of music, so she yelled, “NO!” and sat back down but continued to cry.  Then she turns to me and says, “I crying.  I MAD!  Anya’s mad!” 

OHHHHHH, so hard not to laugh!

It’s good to know that she listens, though, and I was then able to go through the whole “You wanted to read another book and I said no, so that made you mad, that made you angry” thing.  She did finally go to bed easily and without tears after one more quick run to the bathroom.

Anya is 21 months old today! I’m not going to post a complete update since I wrote one fairly recently. Here’s just a few things I’ve noticed:

Potty - There has been a definite increase in the frequency with which Anya tells me she needs to go to the bathroom just to pee, and sometimes when we get there, we discover she had a dry diaper! However, she’s had at least four or five poop accidents in the last two months, all of which occurred at playdates. I figure she was having so much fun that she didn’t want to stop to go to the bathroom.

Books - Anya has been able (and eager) to sit for longer stories these days. We don’t let her have free access to her paper books because she’s a little to rough with the pages, but at naptime and bedtime, she only wants one of the big books from her shelf instead of her baby board books. Some of her current favorites are If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Joffe Numeroff, Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss, and Good-bye Mommy by Bruce King Doman (the last one is an old book that belonged to me when I was little). Anya can be cute when she’s being read to - she often has a comment to make about the pictures, and I enjoy when she does because it shows that she’s really paying attention. On the other hand, she’s been a bit of a pain in the tush at bedtime lately because once we’re finished she wants to hold every book herself, shouting, “I read it!”

Naps - Naptime has been a little frustrating for all of us here. Well, it’s really post-naptime that is the problem. Regardless of whether she goes down at 12:30 or 2:30 and whether she naps for 45 minutes or 2 1/2 hours, Anya tends to wake up in a miserable mood. Screaming, crying, whining…it generally lasts for 30 to 60 minutes until she snaps out of it, and it’s very difficult to get her past it. She absolutely still needs the nap (yesterday afternoon she fell asleep in her carseat before I even started driving!). If anyone out there has advice, we’d love to hear it!

There’s no doubt I’m feeling movement now, because last night Lex got to feel the baby kick!  Just before bedtime, I felt some jabs and told him to put his hand on my belly, and the little newbie gave him three strong jabs.  Thanks, baby!