Animal Eat Drum, Eat Drum

Ryanne loved smelling the sakura today, but by the time I got my camera out to snap a picture, she was ready to do something else.

Birthday present gone wrong

I woke to Ryanne stirring at 4:15 this morning. She was still in her crib. This is a new record. Since I had gotten to bed around 11pm, I was thinking how great it was that she had decided to let me sleep for 5 straight hours on my birthday. I had the blog entry all planned - how wonderful and sweet she was, how she was sleeping better, etc. Then she stayed up talking to me about "mayna"s and other stuff with some crying thrown in for flavor until 5:30am. I decided she was cruel and an evil temptress out to tease me. She did sleep again until 7:15, but it wasn't the same. Oh well...better luck next year.

In other news, she's trying to say milk now. It seems to be "mak". I'm down with that. I must confess that I'll miss the double fisted signing when she wants to nurse, but it might alleviate some of the cow feelings. I figure she's not long for nursing anyway. She's only nursing 4 times during the day - wake up, mid-morning, nap, bedtime. Last night, there were no night feedings so I think we're well on our way to night weaning. I don't know how long she'll keep day feedings up. I must confess some mixed emotions about this. Part of me doesn't want to lose the relationship we have there, even though we have so many other things we connect doing, because that's MY time. No one else can do that with her. At the same time, I'm ready to have my body back. Ready to see if my boobs get any smaller (PLEASE!!!!). I'm not ready for her to grow up, though. We'll see how I feel when it happens, but I'm trying to gear myself up.

Kisses

Ryanne has developed a new love of "ishes" (kisses). She loves to yell "ishes" and run over to me and plant a big one on - usually - my lips. Sometimes she gets nose or chin, every once in a while she nails my eye or forehead if she's really not paying attention.

Tonight, she blew her first kiss to me. I was leaving the bathroom during her bath and made sure to say "bye". She waved and then put her hand to her mouth. She's been doing it (sorta) on demand if I do it, but this was the first spontaneous one.

She's also working on hello (heh-o), bye, television (tevisin), alright (ai-ight, which she learned yesterday at bowling).

She's started grabbing my face to turn my head to her before she hugs me. Oh, and she loves to yell "mama" just to see me respond - sheesh.

Oh and saying "dider" then grabbing the wipes when she has to go wasn't a fluke. She's done it twice more and today she finished going (the bathroom was in use when she first did it and it's not much warning) on the potty.

Whee! The dentist.

Not necessarily in that order.

Ryanne loves "Whee!" now. She says it when we go down hills (or other random occasions, but mostly hills) in the car - I started that. She also uses it when I swing her up in the air or help her do back flips off my chest/legs. She even says it as she dismounts her high chair. It's a fun word and she has fun using it.

Oh, and the girl can eat. She has changed from her diet of mostly rice/bread to a diet of mostly proteins and veggies. She will happily down most (if not all) of a regular serving of whatever meat we're having for dinner or lunch. She'll gobble down most veggies (though not as many as we eat). She'll pick at the rice, but still eat 1/4 to 3/4 of an adult portion, averaging 1/2. Unless, of course, I'm serving spaghetti. That she'll eat til she should explode, even if she gets lots of meatballs first.

She also now asks for 'wa' instead of 'dat' (pointing at the cup) about 50% of the time. Slowly we cross of the 'dat's and life becomes easier on mama and dada.

Her latest thing (yesterday and today) is to grab her box of diaper wipes, say 'dida' and then fill her pants. Yesterday I had no idea what she was doing. Today, I didn't get enough time to react. Slowly, this may evolve into the early stages of potty training. *shhhhhh*

The other *shhhhhh* (which she says now, thanks to Silly Parts Elmo and his "Shhhhh, Elmo's in disguise") is that we're almost night weaned. Last night, she woke at 2a, but went back to sleep in my arms without issue and didn't want to nurse until 6ish and was up for the day at 6:30a after nursing and cuddling. This is tremendous progress as, with the move and travelling, we'd worked ourselves back up to 4 feedings a night.

Today was her first appointment with the dentist. At this age, they count teeth and watch us/her brush and talk about habits. He agreed she had 7 teeth, though we had to point out the 2 side top ones as they're not all the way down and she didn't like having her mouth pried open. We brushed and she brushed, all to the cooing of the dental techs (women). We talked about habits - she doesn't eat candy, she drinks only water and breastmilk, we brush 1x a day, she gets fluoride in her water. We were told that we were doing very well and that they will skip putting fluoride paste on her teeth for now. (Japan's water supply isn't flouridated so SOP is for the dentist to apply fluoride to emerging teeth. Since we talked to the ped/dentist in the US before getting here, we are super prepared compared to Japanese parents - thanks to B.I. for the head's up).

My little mimic

We are full on in the mimic stage, I believe. She is cracking me up!

Tonight, as we were getting her ready for bed, she grabbed her lotion and put the tube end to her hand and then started rubbing her hands together and up her arms. She watches me put lotion on my hands and feet (from a similar tube) every morning. Once I got a kick out of it, of course she had to keep doing it.

She also loves to steal the broom and dustpan and run the broom along the floor. They're almost her size so I may need to get a (clean) set to take home with us for her to play with. She's not supposed to play with these as they're pretty dirty and she knows it, but she still makes a run for them every day.

Oh, and speaking of things she knows not to do. She'll run to X and then stand there as I tell her not to play with X. She'll look at me and grin, almost evilly, and then reach for it. At that point she gets pulled away, and she'll cry/whine for extra emphasis at her displeasure.

She has also discovered a love of flipping. She comes to me and stands in front and reaches for my hands. Once she gets them, she 'walks' up my body until her butt is above her hands. At that point, she leans back and I help her flip over. Squeals and laughter every time.

She's starting to work on the word water. We've heard 'wawa' and 'wa' when she's pointing at the glass. Ah...the end of another 'dat' would be so nice.

She helped her dada sort laundry today, even. She was in her post-nap not quite awake phase. He put her on the bed in the midst of the pile and she would pick a piece to hand to him for folding. He says she gave him one piece at a time and was very helpful.

She's really fighting her nap these days. She's not ready for no nap. I'm not really sure she's ready for just one nap, but she's closer to that than 2 naps. I think in her ideal world, she would take a nap at 10am. The problem I have with this is that by dinner time she's a royal crank and I can't convince her to take (even a short) nap in the afternoon. Thus, I keep her awake until noon. At that point, I think she's a little too tired and so naptime is a struggle. Right now, we're working on a routine because that has SAVED us at night. Hopefully we can get something implemented so she knows when it's time to go down and stops the fits.

I hadn't even realized how valuable the nighttime routine was until she started battling naps. Nighttime is so easy for us these days. Even in Phoenix when her schedule was SHOT, she went down pretty easily at bedtime becaus she knew it was coming. These days, we eat dinner, play if there's time (which there usually isn't), take a bath, nurse and then go to bed. At the end, she is always reaching for bed and goes down without even a whimper. Even a day like today where she put her nap off until almost 3p, she went to bed easily at night. It's just glorious. It really makes me believe in the value of repetition for kids.

In case you wondered, she's still on her banana kick. Now they're 'mayna' and she still demands one every day at snacktime.

More teeth

I forgot to mention, tooth #6 (upper left eye tooth) popped up while we were in Phoenix. Thank goodness it wasn't during the plane ride over the Pacific.

Tooth #7 (upper right eye tooth) came in sometime this last week. I didn't notice anything until Chrys said he could feel it on Thursday.

We thought we saw a little blister mark near where a molar would come in, but looking again today, I don't see it anymore.

I'm still wondering where that lower right eye tooth is. Maybe the pediatric dentist on 1/21 can offer some insight (if we can get through the language barrier). We're just going for a routine check-up to get her used to dentists, etc. I think they're just going to count her teeth and put on some fluoride.

"Mana"

This was Ryanne's word of the day - her version of banana. At her morning snack, she asked for one. To my horror, I had run out. I tried strawberries, but she wasn't interested so I got to enjoy them myself. We settled on strawberry yogurt with her asking for 'mana' after every bite.

This afternoon, we went to the store and she spotted some 'mana' in the produce section. We got home with a nice size bunch that should last a couple of days. I was told about them at the first store, and the second store, and the car ride until we got home and she got one.

I'm actually very impressed. She can bite them pretty well, if I hold the whole thing. She normally will eat about half of one, but I've seen her put away a whole one at least once. I guess this is the beginning of the toddler food non-variety dance. It will be interesting to see how long this love lasts and what we move on to.

"Melmo"

Given Ryanne's love of Elmo and my love of warm, cozy pajamas, I couldn't resist the Elmo PJs I found at Target. They're light blue and have Elmo on the shirt behind the text "That Tickles" (which Chrys finds terribly amusing). There's an Elmo head on the left hip of the bottoms, which are snuggly fleece. I put them on for the first time tonight and pointed at my chest to the picture of Elmo and asked Ryanne who that was. She looked at me like I was stupid and said "mama". D'oh! Then, I pointed at the Elmo head on the pants and asked who that was. "Dada" D'oh^2! Third time's a charm...I asked who was on my shirt. "Melmo" Sheesh...this is getting complicated.

I guess that interaction is an indicator of how much she's understanding these days. She had the start of the language explosion while we were in Phoenix. We had at least 1 new word a day. It was simply amazing to hear her utter new things. I lost track of all of the words, though. The highlights of my memory - "brace-et peas" (while trying to get my LiveStrong band off of my wrist) and "doe maaaaow" (to grandma's dogs...we realized later that she'd never seen a black dog, but all of our cats are black so maybe that's confusing). She's got shoes and diaper pretty well down and I understand "tantoo" more times than not. There are dozens more, but I won't try to list them.

She's really getting some mileage out of "tantoo", too, which is very nice to hear. Most times she uses it right, but it's pretty funny when she asks for something by holding out her hand and saying "tantoo". We've got some work to do on dada's "tantoo" identification, though he's getting better already.