15 Months

You are saying a lot of words! I can't believe how fast you're learning them. When I ask you yes or know questions, you usually answer "Ya." I love it. You say please all the time, but you say it, "Weeee" while you rub your little chest (the sign for please.) And you just started folding your arms when you hear a prayer. You did it all on your own. Sometimes you mumble a little to say your own prayer. Just this week you've started jabbering sentences at me (without any clear words of course. But you are very intent on what you are telling me.) Whenever I take you outside, you love to push your little push cart toy EVERYWHERE. If you see a paved road, you make a MAD DASH for it. I always have to race after you, even if I'm in my pajamas with no bra, to save you from the road outside our house, and you take off as fast as you can when you see me, almost running. You hold your right arm close to your body for balance and swing that left arm so fast and high that sometimes you almost hit yourself in the nose. It's so cute. I know I'll miss it when you stop doing that.

A few more words:
Nemo
Thank You
Diego
Bath (Baaa)
Beep beep
Good Girl (guh grl)
Goat
Chicken
Turkey
Jack (Jack and Violet Clark stayed with us all last week)
and you say Mama a LOT!
Bite
Happy
you (I say I....love...and you make your mouth in an O and say YOOUU!)
cake

You love pickles and cucumbers and crackers. I try to find the gluten-free ones.

You love to sing Happy and You Know it, and you always beep your nose first, then pat your head, clap your hands, and shout hooray. You don't say hooray, but you lift both your hands up with clenched fists.

You are getting 2 more teeth on the bottom, and you just broke out in Hand Foot & Mouth (a virus, thanks to the Clark kids.)

Videos for Eric

14 Months old

14 months old, 30" tall (43rd percentile- a shorty!) and 23 lbs (59th percentile).

Here's some of the words Annie is saying at 14 months old:
baby
backpack
hello
hola
hi
abre (open in Spanish)
Nigh Nigh
map
Round (wheels on the bus, she says Rou an Rou)
Hey! ("oh what fun it is to ride in a one horse open sleigh" then she yells HEY!)
Me
Roll (roll it and roll it)
Dora (dah dah)
cracker (she says this pretty clearly- cackah)
Thank you (tittoo)
Apple
Banana (buh buh)
Baba (bottle)
All Done (and signs it) "Ah duh"
Eat ("ee")
Mama
Daddy
Please ("pease"
Kalia (Leela)
nose (no)
No no no
pat
Hat
Papa
uh oh
chicken (kicken)
bath (baa)
wee wee
potty

She also likes to say that sheep say "Baa" and Ducks say "quack"

See/hear Kalia's list of words at 14 months HERE

Annie's First Cake!

Annie- 11 Months Old

Annie spent the majority of the month with a terrible teething rash. At first I thought it was allergy related but after eliminating all the culprits, she still had this rash. Kalia never had drool rash, and Annie didn't have it when she cut her bottom teeth, so I learned something new as a Mom... and that is that drool rash/teething rash can look like this, and go all over the face, even up to th eyes (even if drool doesn't actually migrate there.) Craziness.

Two different days:

Poor girl...it seems like every month it's a new challeng with her. I love her dearly but she is still a very needy, high-maintenance child.

The ONLY place she is truly happy is right here...Mommy's lap. Cute for pictures, but challenging when I'm trying to get stuff done around the house. She just follows me around and pulls on my pants (sometimes she pulls them right off...drawstring pants, you know.) She freaks out if I leave the room. I can't wait for her to grow out of this stage, because let's face it...it's draining! (I will add though that she is the cutest, happiest, silliest little thing if I just sit down and let her climb all over me. She also is really good if I take her out and about like the grocery store and stuff. So it's really just at home that she is high maintenance.)

She makes up for her whiny beavior by being an amazing sleeper. (I'm sure all the crying and clinging is exhausting!) She sleeps 14 hours at night and two naps during the days (and I put her to bed very early!) At least once a week she takes a four-hour nap in the afternoon, and then still goes sleeps all night. I thank my lucky stars for that Tender Mercy!

Her Daddy calls her "Chubbas." So naturally Kalia has picked it up and it makes me smile to hear her say, "Where's Chubbas?" or "Here you go Chubbas." I love these sweet round cheeks and the double chin. As you can imagine, I am kissing them nonstop.

She will do "Touchdown" on command, which is funny because we don't watch football in our house.

Allergies are STILL causing problems for us. Will I ever figure it all out? I've been letting her try to eat more foods and I thought it was going well (no face rash) but I got too lax...I'd let her snack on Ritz crackers (corn starch) or V8 Fusion juice (Ascorbic Acid/Citric Acid) and then I realized that she was scratching her back and legs and sides, sometimes scratching until she bled. I FEEL TERRIBLE!!! I remember having the impression (back when she was screaming all the time as a newborn) that she was ITCHING and I had that confirmed this week. I just have to be more careful with her. I've been using hydrocortisone cream, gold bond powder, and sometimes Benadryl to try to stop her itching.

She FINALLY added "Mama" to her vocabulary (about time!) She says about 6 or 7 words occasionally. She jabbers nonstop though, and she is VERY EXPRESSIVE. She is always gasping and oohing and ahhing at things. I'm curious to see what this will mean for her personality in the future.

She's in that cute stage of walking where she still holds her arms up to help her balance and wobbles a bit. I never get tired of watching it. No more crawling for this little one.

She will NOT go down the stairs. She will climb up them and then starts crying because she knows she's stuck. I've worked with her at least eight times, showing her how to go down backwards. It ain't happening. She's not a daredevil like her older sis.

I gave her Haircut #3 last month and I've decided to stop trying to tame the Fro. We'll just have to let it grow out!

Can't believe my baby's almost 1...that's not really a baby anymore to me. Boo.

10 Months Old

Blueberries! Her favorite treat. Sometimes her face and hands get stained purple.

Would someone tell me what is going on with these eyes of hers? They have definite brown streaks, but now it looks like they're going LIGHTER but only in certain spots? Cuh-razy! Here's the monthly update on Annaliese, for the Grandmas and for the record:

Weight: 21 lbs

Height: I forgot...I'll fill this in later

She is standing on her own, and has taken 6 or 7 steps. She still prefers crawling and probably will for awhile.

She's putting up with a lot of bullying from Kalia. She'll take it for awhile, but if Kalia holds her and won't let go (7 or 8 times a day) she just starts screaming til I come rescue her. She has a VERY loud yell, one she perfected when she was 2 months old.

She's not really into signing like Kalia was. I've seen her do "more" once or twice, and "milk" but she just looks at me like I'm a weirdo when I do signs with her.

She's at that age where she likes to drop everything on purpose, just to watch it fall. Then she says, "Uh-oh."

She can't have any juice, not even pear or apple, because of the citric acid and ascorbic acid, (it gives her face rashes, cradle cap and makes her cranky) but she LOVES water out of a sippy cup.

I am mixing chamomile tea in with her formula to help her body deal with the allergies and also to help her relax and sleep at night. (I'm a big fan of chamomile myself.)

She says 4 words: Dada, Ni-Ni (ni-night), Uh-oh, and my personal favorite, "Toot" (she says it like the "toot" in "tootsie". I'm still waiting on "mama"

She is a great clapper and gives high fives.

She seems to love music a lot more than Kalia ever did, and I see her bouncing and dancing to music all the time.

She's in the process of cutting all 4 top teeth. She bit me the other day with her razor bottom teeth and almost hit the bone.

She is getting really hard to handle at church. She's almost hyperactive when I try to contain her in the pew. I am confused about this because I thought she was going to be my calm baby.

Still taking 2 naps a day and going to bed at 6 p.m.

Has been nicknamed "Chubbas" by her dad, and so now Kalia calls her that all the time,

Loves to climb up the stairs (but she won't even attempt going down.)

Loves to wave hi to people.

She got called "Thumbelina" by someone at the store the other day. (random!)

9 Months Old

This picture is blurry, but I had to put it up anyway. My mom and my brother and I went to visit Alice Holland (Elder Holland's mother). She was a close friend of my great grandma Esplin, and she is almost 94. Annaliese has never shown any signs of separation anxiety, but it may just be starting. She wasn't really smiling in this picture, she was starting to get a little nervous.

I just had to save it for her so that she can know she was held by my favorite apostle's mom!

No, this is not Annaliese (Man how she's changed! That's what you were thinking, right?) This is Kalia at 9 months. For comparisons sake. It just dawned on me that I created a separate blog for Kalia to do these monthly updates. I even created one for Annaliese, then forgot all about it, and I've been doing monthly updates here. Oh well. I missed her 8 month mark too. So, it's been a BIG few months for her. She is on the GO!!! She learned to crawl, then pull to a stand, and then try to take a step (only one step, then she fell) all in a matter of about 5 weeks. It's so funny when babies first figure out how to pull to a stand and cruise around pieces of furniture. While we were in Colorado, I woke up to see Annaliese, standing there in the dark, going round and round her pack and play, standing and holding on to the sides. It made me smile.

She also learned to pick things up and put them in her mouth, and today I had to pull out skittles and a piece of tape. Actually, she choked on the tape and threw up, and got it out on her own. But besides the choking hazard, her allergies are still challenging us. We tried her on avocado, and it gave her a nasty rash on her neck. (My brother said he has an avocado allergy too!) I also tried her on fresh goats milk. She LOVED the taste and would guzzle it down. And for 3 days, all seemed well. But you know what they say...you need to wait 4 days! And that's when her constipation showed up, and the tiny rash (looks like baby acne) showed up all over her hairline. It got pretty bad, and stayed for about 4 days AFTER we took her off the goats milk. Dang it. If she's that allergic to goats milk, can you imagine if I let her have cows milk? I am on a mission to start making her baby food, and getting her on more solids. She just keeps chugging down that formula, and even though she's super active now, I swear she's just getting fatter. (I won't lie, I love all that fat.) She loves her prunes though, thank goodness since she needs them to help keep her regular sometimes.

It looks like she might have gotten the curly hair gene too. This is about when Kalia's started to curl, but mostly only when its wet:

Those bottom 2 teeth broke through! FINALLY! Those were some tricky little buggers.

Her eyes have a few more streaks of brown in them, but they are still mostly blue. I can't believe how long they are taking to change!! Kalia's were already hazely brown at this age. (See above picture...I cannot get it to move down here.)

She loves to mimic people, and does this funny slurping sound, or she shakes her head no while she smiles really big, or she tries to copy the tone and inflection of sounds that I make to her.

This is what she looks like when she does her slurping sound. Great comic relief.

And for some odd reason, everyone says she looks EXACTLY like her dad. I don't see it, but then, I can't see either of us in either our kids.

9 months...I really love this age.

Well, that was really long, but I needed a break from writing about all the craziness. Tune in tomorrow though, and I'll fill ya in on the latest. I think we've finally found a place to go, maybe even a house of our own.