a do-it-yourself-er

And feeding herself full-time with varied success.  Though she can pick up and eat pasta all on her own with minimal mess, her favorite food to consume with no adult assistance is applesauce.

On a related note, applesauce is extremely difficult to remove from carpeting.  It also sets up to a super-glue-like consistency if left sitting on a hard surface overnight.

Look at that cute little face ...

her very own, very independent, person

Very. She is very independent. And it's interesting that at one, she can assert this kind of independence with an astonishing will and regularity. Even more interesting that we-the-parents continue to be surprised by her clear determination and force of person.

Isla is one year, two months and fifteen days old, and refuses to sleep on anyone's terms but her own. She has been awake for nearly a month now seems to be able to survive and flourish on very little sleep. Meanwhile, we-the-parents become more haggard by the day, as the increasingly shorter periods of continuous sleep evade us.

It's not only the sleep department that receives her special directives. As previously mentioned, she is also the queen of her own plate. Isla only yesterday broke her recent carb-only diet regime with her first ever bites of "dino-chicken". The management award for this success goes to her Dadoo who was able to persuade the young gourmet to take that first taste. Until that amazing moment, she was, as that same daddy pondered, a candidate for scurvy, or possible rickets, as her diet was solely pasta of varying shapes, rice, and bread.

Today during lunch, she refused all of her mother's attempts to feed her pasta (what?), instead demanding with a firm 'uh, ahhhneee, uh, ahhhneee' and a finger point that what she must have, and indeed would eat, was the bowl of leftover jambalaya sitting in front of mama.

Will she wear socks? No. Or, maybe yes. It all depends on her mood. Will she wear her sister's underwear on each arm and her head? Yes, especially after her mother takes the first set away from her. Will she pour milk down the back of her booster seat? Yes. Will she cooperate during a diaper change or put her hand in all the yucky stuff? Yucky stuff, all the way. Should she climb up the ladder on the swing-set? No, but she will do it anyway, despite what her parents sternly command. Will she eat her cheerios or place them carefully down the front of her onesie? Depends. Sometimes the answer is both. Sometimes they end up on the floor. Will she like the same things tomorrow that she does today? Probably not, but then again, what kind of fun would that be for anyone?

It is certainly a benefit to her that she came out of the womb as adorably cute as she did. At the end of a long, night-turned-day-turned-night-again, it's those sweet little baby smiles and soft little baby giggles that help keep her more-than-exhausted parents smiling as well.

tall as a perfect hand is high

Yup. You knew it was coming. But it's true. Isla is twenty-nine inches tall (link is here if you don't feel like working that one out yourself. It is Friday, after all). Twenty-nine is a lot of things, but the best of them is currently in her crib*, quietly sleeping off last night's three hour jam session.

Our girl le deuxième has been off her game just a bit over these last days, but it is to be expected after her last check-up. Thirteen months and ten days after she was born, Isla had her first and only 1-year-well-visit. It was an informative visit for the we-the-parents and an unhappy one for the poor girl who once again endured five needles in the short span of two minutes. She really, really screamed this time. Really.**

Despite the horror of those long needles (which appear to be long enough to actually go through her tiny legs), our sweet one year old is doing great, standing tall and weighing a slight nineteen pounds. Heavy enough to wear your arm out after a short hike but not quite heavy enough to flip that car seat around. ***

The pediatrician did say she is the cutest one year old Isla in the entire state of Georgia, though, and that's enough for us. Ok, she didn't really say that, but we-the-parents are certain she was thinking it. Because we sure are.

Cute: 189 ounces fuller (that's 11.7 pounds) and 9 inches higher than her debut.

Isla eating her first french fry. It came from Five Guys Burgers and she thought it (and all those she tasted after), was delicious.
-----

*crib ... get it?

**Random thoughts: How do they honestly expect a child to be calm when they are jamming so many sharp things, filled with burning liquid no less, into their little bodies? And it seems remiss not to somehow protest the sheer length of those things. The needles could honestly go straight through a baby's leg. Isn't some agency supervising this kind of thing? What do we pay our government for anyway?

***Of course we aren't dreaming of relieving this tiny girl from the terrible plight of facing backwards when everyone else in the car is seeing life from the other direction. Because, really, what kind of parents would we be if we were thinking of doing that. We wouldn't even ponder it for a moment, the recommendation, I mean, since it's not law or anything. We wouldn't. And that is totally because we are such great parents who never, ever, ever mind the blood-curdling screams coming from the back seat when we're driving somewhere tedious after a year of no sleep.

deserving of a better blogger

She really is. Because she is way more interesting than the lack of updates on her blog relates. In fact, she could be *the* most interesting one-year-old Isla Mireille ever. Ever.

She is nearly a walker. Although she still chooses crawling - or 'crab-walking' depending on the surface - as her fastest means of ambulation, she can and does walk fairly well. We-the-family (and especially her big sis) love to applaud her short strolls from couch to table or ottoman to sliding glass doors or bed to dresser or toy to sister. And we-the-family are all of us truly amazed at how she manages to find her balance, even amid a near fall. It is incredible to us how she can stay herself, locate the center and then propel her tiny frame onward toward her current goal. The sweetest part of this entire process is the look of joy on her face, the smile of 'I did it' in her tiny eyes. She is so amazed and proud. So are her onlookers.

Isla continues her streak of independence by demanding to feed herself. She does not, repeat does not like to be fed. She wants pieces she can pick up with her fingers. She wants to hold her own cup. She wants to use the spoon on her own. She does not want any food that prevents her from doing it all by herself. Conversely, she does want almost all foods that allow this self-feeding style, though bananas are recently not one of those foods. This we find strange, since it is one of the few 'baby' foods she will still consume.

Her spoken vocabulary is growing, but it is easy to see that she understands far more than she can say. "Isla, sit down" is a constant phrase during the day - one that follows the two-footer around from chair to chair, box to box, shelf to shelf. And she knows what it means, because she always stops her climb, bends her legs and turns her head to see if the command giver is actually watching. "No!", also heard with regularity, brings her to tears. "Isla, come here" is the phrase that surprises Mama the most, because the strong-willed girl actually does it. She will also "dance" on command (or at the sound of any music she likes) and most of the time, we-the-fam can get her to clap as well with an encouraging, "Good job, Isla!" or a "Yay!"

The bitty babe only has two teeth. Still. Two small, white pearls neatly lining her bottom gums. We await the arrival of more, but alas, so far there are no signs of comrades.

She just turned one. And here she is, after lunch on her birthday, playing with her sister's hairbrush in her car seat. Cutie-pants.

is one year old.

Right now. One year ago, now, our bitty baby Isla was born.

We love her.

Happy 1st birthday, sweet Isla.

cuter and cuter

by the moment. She's cute when she crawls, especially as she performs her crab-crawl over any surface she doesn't want her knees to touch. There is a kind of funny-every-time comedy that happens to all of us as she plants her feet flat and lifts her bum high on anything harder than carpet.

She's cute when she 'walks', cruising around the couch or the table or pushing her little green walker toy around the living room or sliding along the window, leaving tiny and sticky little hand prints and tongue prints along the glass.

She's cute when she climbs up on her sister's art box, or when she finally manages to get into the child-size rocking chair that used to belong to her dadoo, or when she balances her way into her carseat, the same carseat, mind you, that she abhors any other time of life.

She's cute when she sings back to her sister and when she laughs at all of us and when she gurgles at the cat. She's cute when she dances to her own music on the kitty-cat piano, and when she waves bye-bye (a recent skill) and when she clears her throat to get us to notice she's ready to play "where's Isla?".

She's even cute when she fights going to sleep, rubbing her eyes with her tiny fists, grunting at herself to say awake, pushing her small eyes back open when they start to close.

She is not, however, at the same level of cuteness around three a.m. when she wakes up screaming and refuses to sleep until she's fed. Again. And Again. And A.Gain.

But other than that, yeah, she's pretty much cuter and cuter and cuter by the second. Here she is being cuter and even cuter while she waits patiently for some lunch.

eleven months and one day old

And for the first time since her birth, she spent the night in her very own room. She's 'napped' in her crib for quite some time during the daylight hours, but last night she went solo and did a great job. She woke three times, but each time was able to soothe herself right back into slumber.

It was a strange night for we-the-parents, or at least it was for she-the-mother. It took Mama quite some time to drift off, and then, right on queue, her body awakened for that three a.m. feed ... only to find the baby didn't want it. Sleep was not easy for a body so used to waking and going without. Here's hoping this night is even better than the last.

Eleven months seems like an impossibility, especially considering that in only a few weeks, this baby will celebrate one full year of life outside the womb. She still feels like a bitty little baby to us, and it is hard to wrap our minds around the idea of counting her age in years instead of weeks and months.

She loves to play with her sister, and is almost always happy if she can sit near her and play with some of the big girl toys. Isla, like her older sis, loves dinosaurs and hotwheels. She likes to follow sister around, and especially loves crawling in and out of the forts that Mama makes in the living room.

Though she said a form of it long ago, she has near perfected the word "Mama" and adds to her vocabulary 'kih-kah' and 'ah-da', for 'kitty cat' and 'dadoo' respectively.

Here she is, cute'n it up outside Fort Adorable. Check out those teef.

not a sleeper but still a sweetie-pants

Bitty baby Isla wore her favorite 0-3 size onesie two days ago. She was pushing the limits of its length, but still fitting right into the middle part with a bit of room to spare. Her clothes have not changed much since birth, as she fits into all but three of her newborn dresses and a few onesies. Her jammies, though, are another story. Those legs of hers are long, long, long, and at night, she swims in the excess fabric of her size-six-to-nine sleepers.

Speaking of sleepers, we-the-very-tired-parents find it amazing that our Bun-baby is not one. She sleeps, true. Short, random bits of rest - in the car, mostly - and sometimes, on a great day, she'll take a nap in the afternoon for two hours. Last night, out of the clear blue, she slept an incredible - oh, so incredible - seven hours, from ten-thirty to five-oh-oh a.m. on the dot. But this is not the norm by a long shot.

A normal night with our sweet little fussy-pot is a resistance to bedtime that begins with horrific screaming. It is worth the repetition: horrific screaming. These are the kind of screams that we are familiar with hearing when she is hurt, like say getting stuck with a ton of needles at the doctor or struggling with some 'we-didn't-know-you-couldn't-take-dairy' newborn gas'. Or the kind of screams our four-year-old lets loose when she falls down on concrete and tears the skin off her leg. They go on for as long as she is lying (though these days she actually pulls herself up and either sits or stands up against the side of her bed) in her sleeping space.

Once we pick her up, she's fine. She takes about ten minutes to collect herself while we hold her shiny faced and shaky little body in our arms. Then she's back to Mama for comfort. If Dadoo tries to walk her back to sleep, (God bless him for those moments of respite), she arches her back against his hold and screams some more as he carries her into the playroom for soothing. Sometimes it works, and she calms down enough to fall back to sleep for two hours before waking up again. Sometimes, it doesn't, and she ends up back with Mama, cuddling her tiny body right up under the covers, as close as she can get to her milk-supply.

During the day, we've been using the controlled-crying method of learning to sleep. It is not always successful. It is getting better. She is sleeping more than she used to sleep. And in between the not-sleeping, she's still being her sweet little self, cuter and cuter and sweeter and sweeter each day. It's this part that makes up for the long, rest-less days and nights.

Take for example her new skills: "Yay!" and "Where's Isla?". These are two games she's been working on for a month or two and ones she's recently nearly perfected. "Yay!" involves big smiles and claps and a sort of yay-like sound,( truthfully it's more like 'aaaaaaayyyyzzzzhhhh', but we know what she's trying to say). She's begun to do this whenever she sees her Dadoo come home from work and when her Mama picks her up to change her diaper. She also does it with added bouncing when she sees Remy.

"Where's Isla?" could be one of those top-five-cutest-things. She balls her fingers up into near fists and puts them over eyes, leaving them there until someone notices and asks, 'Where's Isla?' after which she pulls them down quickly and smiles a teensy-bitty smile and jams them right back up over her eyes. She will play this game over and over and over and over without pause.

In addition to these super-cute-skills, she has moved beyond the army-crawl into a full on tummy up racing position. Except on non-carpeted surfaces. She does not like the feel of tile or wood on her knees, so when she encounters these types of flooring, she puts her flat feet down on the floor. It makes for a hilarious crab-walking kind of movement as she struggles to find her center of balance.

And ... drum roll ... she's cruising. Wow for us. Yay for her. She is doing this months earlier than our first born, and we are excited and slightly nervous. There is little in our home that is actually child-proofed to the extent needed for a new walker, thanks to the ease of life we've had since we got a four-year-old who knows not to put stuff in her mouth. Also, that four-year-old has so many tiny toys with tiny parts. And we, expecting the same sort of 14-month-old timeline for beginning steps have only recently realized that, um, our bitty-babypants is right there, right now.

Sweetie-pants is as sweetie-pants does, and our own blossoming pot of sweet is so, so very full of all that sugar. Here she is enjoying the art during her first trip to an art museum. This exhibit is called, 'Delicious: a portrait of the artist as a ten-month-old'.

chewing

on everything. She is so proud of her one little tooth and the tiniest beginnings of her soon-to-be-showing second tooth that she tries it (them) out on every single thing she touches. Dirty shoes? Check. Dirty socks? Check. Leaf from patio? In it goes. Worm? You betcha, baby. It all goes into her mouth and onto her tooth.

Everything, that is, except carrots, spinach, apricots and green beans.

Yeah, you read that sentence correctly. She chewed a worm. A big, brown, squishy, slug-like, wormy caterpillar that made its way in one day during the spring worm storm that showered our home and yard with an incredible variety of creepy crawlies for two weeks time. Not only did the smallest person in our home manage to find the smallest creature in our home, but once she found it, she also refused to release it, holding it in an increasingly tighter grip as her mother, weak from the shock and horror of finding her baby with a worm in her mouth, tried frantically to free it from her tiny fist.

At the end of the event, the worm was captured in a baggie for identification by the resident bug expert upon his arrival home, and the Isla was extremely unhappy with the mother who took her new favorite food and toy away. Big sister probably had the worst of the deal and appeared shell-shocked herself after witnessing her mother's screams and the ensuing tug of war with her baby sister.

Some people might call this less than stellar parenting. Here at chez-baby-pants, we call it protein.

on the move and on the edge

Growing, growing, growing, changing. That's the news on Isla. At eight months and a few weeks old, she's changing so quickly we find ourselves looking for a new skill almost daily.

Not long ago, at seven months, she could not sit unsupported. She could sit fine in her bumbo chair or in her booster seat at the dinner table. But put this little bit on the floor and her abdominal muscles could only hold her upright for a few seconds before letting her itty bitty body slump over to one side or the other. We-the-parents (or at least me-the-mama) feared it was due to not enough tummy time, or some other part of parenting we'd failed this second time around.

Thankfully, within a matter of weeks, our Bun-baby has mastered the art of sitting alone. She's also mastered the art of the tummy scoot. And she is f-a-s-t, fast, fast, fast. She can push herself up, and has recently started the typical rocking back and forth on hands and knees thing (seriously, how cute is that move?), and any moment now we expect her to start crawling full speed.

She's also eating 'real' food now, probably later than most babies, but still fine with us, since she gets nearly all her nutrition from milk. Like her sister before her, she skipped the cereal and went straight to the red stuff: sweet potatoes. Peas make her gag, and sometimes pears do, too, but she will almost always scarf down every bit of her bananas, though also like her sister, she has a strong dislike for carrots. She had her first sips of sweet tea (decaf, of course) just a few days ago from her mother's straw, and she loved it, but then, we kind of had an inkling she might.

In addition to her mad tummy-racing skills, our Isla likes to live life with an element of danger. This bitty girl moves fastest when she's headed toward something she doesn't need to get her hands (and subsequently, her mouth) on. Her tiny legs never inch up more quickly than when she's headed toward a box of choking hazards (read: big sister's toys) or any electrical cord.

Just last week she inched her twenty-seven-inch-long body right over to the bright orange carrot her sister left under the dining table, swiped it with her free hand and popped that baby right onto her tongue. Thankfully her big sister is very observant and even faster than the little sister and managed to race over herself and yank that carrot right out of the baby's mouth before the tiny daredevil choked. And even earlier that same morning, the wee one managed to work her way off the couch where she was cozily (and seemingly safely) sleeping and onto the floor. No bones were broken, no joints bruised, no tears shed, which is amazing considering the two foot drop. (Where's that baby's mother while all of this craziness is going on?)

She has one tiny tooth and she likes to run her tongue over it when she's bored. She also likes to use it to bite on baby wipes, but so far we are thankful to report that she is not a 'biter'. We pray things remain this way. There is nothing so bad in the world of infant relations as a biting child.

What does an eight-and-three-quarters-month-old-baby-isla look like??? Well, she looks like perfect sweetness. See for yourself ...

done with shots

for the next six months! Woo hoo!

Her six month - oh.man.six.month - check up went well. She tipped the scales at a perfect sixteen pounds, six ounces ... a whopping ten pounds more than she weighed when we brought her home. She is twenty-seven inches from head to heel which puts her in the 95th percentile for height.

Today's four-vaccine combo went over about as well as the last round. And after it was over, the band-aids wouldn't stick to her little legs, so she kept getting poked on the sore spots with more. Sniff. It was sad.

In other news, Isla's slept well for two nights in a row. We're holding our breath and saying our prayers that tonight is no different.

six months old

Six months ago, we were sitting in the Telfair family room, waiting for the floor manager to bring us to a room. Six months ago, sometime around now, I was posting one of the first few entries on this blog, sipping from both a bottle of water and a bottle of diet coke, and trying not to make a display of myself in front of the other families waiting as my contractions got stronger. Six months ago, I was only waiting to hear the crying that currently serves as background music to this post. Six months ago, I was so ready to meet Isla, and for her to be a part of our family.

Right now, Isla is standing in her exersaucer - the same one that used to belong to her big sister - and managing a menagerie of baby toys while she spins herself around. I'm watching her as she turns the pages of her 'peek-a-boo-baby' cloth book, and watching her fingers stretching and curling as she examines the different textiles of its pages. It's sweet and incredible - seeing her learn right in front of me and knowing that for her, something as small as the difference in satin and corduroy is amazing and full of newness.

Six months ago, Isla was born after what seemed like minutes compared to her sister's thirty-three hour labor. Just a few hours after her birth, her sweet Daddy went to get Mama the dinner she'd been craving ... tacos. This morning, that same sweet Daddy offered to take us all out for ... tacos. Wonder if he remembers ...

Here's our sweet six month old. As her big sis would say, 'Cute, huh? Yeah? Yes you are, Iwah! Yes you are!'

talking

Sort of. She has one word ... and it sounds sort of like mama. She says it when she wants me. Which is usually when she's hungry or wants to be picked up. She stops saying it and smiles when I get to her. So we've pretty much decided it is 'mama'. And I'm pretty much claiming first word rights, which is awesome since I missed out on the claim first time around, what with that Dadoo person hogging all the baby love and stuff.

'ah-na-ma-mamama
ah-na-ma-mamama'

Yep. That's me. Woo Hoo!!