Tales of a picky eater

A couple of months ago my previously adventurous daughter suddenly started hating pretty much everything I tried to feed her. Oh sure, she would eat fishie crackers and raisins, but we were seriously lacking in a lot of very important food groups. We're still working on it, but here are a few of my successes...

1. Edamame.
She loves the stuff! I already knew she liked it, but the only kind I could find at Safeway was a huge package of shelled edamame that went bad before she ate even a quarter of it. It felt like a huge waste of money to me, so I only bought it that one time. But, lo and behold, Trader Joe's sells frozen shelled edamame! I can prepare a small amount at a time, and it's perfect! Definite success.

2. The Dip
Everything's more fun to eat when you can dip it, right? Using yogurt, peanut butter, or hummus as dip, and carrots, apples, and pretzels as the object to be dipped = actual eating! (It also keeps her really busy, which means I have relative peace during mealtime...always a plus)

3. Presentation
How I serve food seems to make a big difference. Most anything with a straw will at least get a few bites (yogurt, in particular). She's terrible at utensils, but loves attempting to eat with a fork. If I get a piece of meat onto a fork for her and let her feed it to herself, she will sometimes swallow! (meat/protein is one of our greatest battles)

4. Smoothies
Whole-milk yogurt, fruit, ice, sometimes carrots, and yes, a little bit of sugar and she's in heaven! I don't always take the time to make them, but smoothies, eaten through a straw of course, are another success.

5. Adult cereal
This one really surprised me. I had been trying different dry cereals out on Livia after she got tired of cheerios. She liked kiddy cereals, but she LOVED muesli! She eats the raisins and dates first of course, but then she systematically goes through and eats all the grains and nuts, too. Who'd have thought? It seems like most kids like oatmeal, but Livia despises it. I can't blame her. I've never liked it either.

So there has been some major progress made, but most of her meals still end up on the floor or stuffed down into her high chair. If any of you have any suggestions, I'd love to hear them! I know a lot of toddlers go through a picky phase, and so I'm rather desperately hoping she'll grow out of it.

Dandelions

Livia discovered dandelions at the park this week.

While we were there a pre-teen girl approached me and said, "Aww, how old is it?"

It? Really?

I could be wrong, but Livia looks quite feminine to me. Particularly with the ponytail and pink shirt with little hearts all over it. I dunno.

And it just felt weird to have someone call her an it. I'd almost rather have had her say, "Aww, how old is he?" (!!)

(Fairly) recent happenings

In other words, things I kept meaning to write about but somehow never did, so now it's all going to be thrown together in one big post. 1. We went camping...a month ago...with our friends the Mayfields.

We camped at Mt. Diablo, and had a great view of the sunset from our campsite.

We hiked to the top, and Chase was a trooper to carry Livia the whole way up.

Two things: 1) DO NOT laugh at me! I know the backpack is almost as big as I am!

2) I'm diggin' Chase's capris.

Yay for friends who put up with our crying baby at night! One tent + two different bedtimes = TROUBLE!!! (Livia woke up when we finally crawled in the tent, and didn't go back to bed until 1:30 a.m. when Chase got the brilliant idea to stick her in her carseat in the car. He didn't even have to drive around. She fell right to sleep. )

2. Livia is growing up so fast!!

This month she learned how to color. We now have drawings up on the fridge. I swear I'm too young for that.

She's starting the I-want-to-dress-myself phase. In this photo she's sporting a long-sleeved onesie over a summery dress.

Her hair is now long enough that I have to do it everyday. It's not quite long enough to look good, but we try. Chase calls this the "bug look"

We're still working on feeding ourselves with a spoon...I don't think I need to say anything more about that.

Livia fell and got her first scraped knee! She didn't cry once, not even when I peeled off the band-aid later. Pretty sure she did NOT get that from me. Ü

She's also demonstrating her "smile for the camera" smile.

Livia will be going into nursery in a month, can you believe it?! She's growing up so fast and is asserting her independence more and more. She LOVES having friends over, playing hide-and-seek, ring around the rosie, getting piggyback rides, reading, and going on walks. She's starting to talk more, but I can't decipher everything. She says something that sounds suspiciously like "money" everytime she wants something. Should I be worried???

3. Chase has been working crazy hours for the past few weeks, but things should be calmer now. Hooray!

4. I started taking a ballet class! Even after just one class a lot of what I learned in past years is coming back to me. I think I'm gonna love this!

Library book sale: part deux

All of these books (35 to be exact) cost us a grand, whopping total of.................$12.50

Does it get any better than that?

The next sale is in December. I'm there!

Top Ten

Top ten reasons you know you're a mom:

1. You get really excited when you see a blimp, doggie, or garbage truck.

2. You catch yourself humming the tune to Elmo's World.

3. Naptime has taken on an almost Christmas-like quality of anticipation.

4. Froot Loops now seem like a reasonably healthy snack for your kid (hey, they're fortified!)

5. You have wipes handy at ALL times.

6. You can carry a bajillion things in your arms at once, and have totally mastered the two-milk-gallons-in-one-hand maneuver when you're bringing in groceries.

7. When your husband asks how your day went, the first thing that comes to mind is "Livia had FOUR messy diapers today!"

8. You stop and smell the roses. All of them.

9. You have taken thousands of pictures in the past year, but you're only in about 6 of them.

10. You now know every nursery rhyme. ever. written.

A not so typical friday morning

1. 6:30 a.m. (a full hour too early) Chase nudges me and says, "Livia's crying." What? I can't even hear her over the fan, and am fully prepared to just ignore the whole situation (I'm not terribly nice when I'm sleepy) and go back to sleep. But Chase keeps nudging me, so I finally get up, grab her some milk out of the fridge and cuddle up with Livvy in a chair so she can quench her usual thirst and go back to sleep. "C'mon Livvy," I mutter, as she's holding the sippy cup straw in her mouth but not sucking at all, "Drink your milk so I can go back to bed." Now she's fighting to get out of my lap. Knowing this will wake her up even more, but being too tired to fight back, I let her get down. She walks right over to her dresser and starts insistently pointing to her Very Hungry Caterpillar book. Oh great, I think to myself, that's what this whole thing is about. She saw her favorite book from her crib! And so I read it to her. Twice. When she started going for round three I decided I was done and put her back in her crib and went back to bed.
She was crying of course, but since I knew there wasn't anything actually wrong, I was content to let the fan drown her out and go back to sleep. Like I said, I'm not the kindest soul when I'm tired. Chase, however, couldn't sleep, so he got up with her, read the book to her a few times (his plan to just let her flip through the pages in her crib didn't go over so well) and then gave up, too. She never did go back to sleep. But I sure did! (thanks, chase, for staying up with her)

2. Later in the morning I'm now officially awake and getting ready. Suddenly I hear a crash from our bedroom. What?! I peek in Livia's bedroom where I could've sworn she was, and sure enough, she was still sitting on the ground reading books. So what in the world happened? I go into our bedroom and Chase looks at me sheepishly as he replaces a picture frame on top of the bookcase. "What happened?" I demanded, totally confused as to how he could have accidentally knocked over a frame in a remote, high corner of the room.
"I was doing a handstand," he finally admitted.
What?! Since when is Chase a gymnast?! He saw my incredulous look and started to explain, "I just got the urge to do one! And guess what? I think it's the best one I've ever done...until I fell and hit the bookcase. I held it for so long..."

Oh , yes. We're off to a great start today, folks!

And I will be hiding The Very Hungry Caterpillar tonight!

July

July's been a busy month for us, and as I haven't had a chance to blog in awhile I was starting to feel a bit overwhelmed with everything I wanted to write about! So I decided to simplify and not worry about including everything. There will, however, be several pictures, which for some reason aren't uploading well and look super pixel-y right now.

1. Fitt family reunion! This is for my Grandpa, all his brothers, and all their descendents.

Our side of the family all wore matching red t-shirts.

Even Livvy had a little mini t-shirt

It was a lot of fun to visit with everyone, but this next picture is an unfortunately accurate depiction of the trip.

(She really did have fun...but she had to be told NO an awful lot, and being out of her routine and all made for a tired baby--and mommy.)

This next picture I love. Here's Livia thorougly enjoying her great-uncle David.

Playing with her Great-Grandma. My Grandpa Fitt is there in the back, with the camera.

Some highlights of the reunion include old family videos (the really old kind, with no sound), 3 live snakes being brought into the area by some distant cousins of mine, one blissful nap under a tree taken by Livia, and a rattlesnake that was caught, killed, cooked, and subsequently eaten by almost everyone there--including myself! Yes folks, I ate a wild rattlesnake. Not bad...but not all that great either.

2. Two days after I got back from my trip, my little brother and sister came to stay with me for a week! Livia was in absolute heaven, and was so excited when she woke up each morning and they were still here! I always think it must be strange as a baby: to often wake up in new places, to never really know where you are, where you're going, why you're in a car for 6+ hours, and whether or not a person is going to be there for any length of time. I guess that's why so many have separation anxiety: their parents are the only real thing they can count on!

Anyway, we had a great time together, going to parks, the zoo, and swimming. Here's Livia enjoying her first frosty from Wendy's. Once she got one sip of it, she seriously would not let go of the straw until she had finished every last drop!

Here's Emily and David at a park near our home.

We went to a cute little zoo and children's museum that they all really enjoyed

We don't have tons of room in our apartment, so they got to sleep on an air mattress in our living room.

Wait, what's that you say? There are THREE people in that bed?? Yup. Chase got to enjoy some good reading time with his brother and sister-in-law.

We had so much fun with Emily and David, and hope they'll come visit us again sometime in the future! Livia sure misses having people in the house who have as much energy as she does.

3. I had a birthday, shout hooray! My main present was going to a Coldplay concert with Chase, which was a lot of fun. We planned on going out to dinner on my actual birthday with Emily and David, but as we walked up to the restaurant three different fire engines and several ambulances came screaming past us. Seriously? Our restaurant was on fire! We watched for awhile as they put out the fire, and though there wasn't any serious damage, we decided not to wait until they started seating people again, and got dinner at a little soup and sandwich place across the street. Not quite what I had hoped for, but it was still fun to be with family. My mom's so sweet though: when she heard what had happened she sent me a gift card to the restaurant so that Chase and I can go back sometime and try again.

Here are a few more pictures from my Utah trip:

The Oquirrh mountain temple. We went through the open house, and it was simply gorgeous!

Austin helping Livia strum his guitar.

Just loungin'

Livia and my sister Laura

Well, that about covers it! Sometime soon I'll have to post a video of Livia "singing" songs. She can make the hand motions to three different songs, and though she's a little camera shy and hasn't yet done them all for the video camera, I'm going to keep trying. It is so cute!