How Does She Grow That Fast?

My little girl is growing! She's getting bigger, which I notice when I trim her nails and when I hold her in the shower. And, she's getting more mature. She crawls around like a speed demon, she plays on her own for 20 minutes or so at a time, and she smiles a lot. We have conversations in babble-speak.

I find I'm still amazed at having her here. I've wanted a child for so long that I'm used to wanting one but not having one. To have Isabelle around and be able to watch her interact with the world around her is amazing. It's an awsome blessing and just plain fun.

When she crawls, it's like a Frankenstein's monster crawl, with straight arms slapping at the floor as she goes. Very cute. She's also like a swimmer doing the crawl; her head is down and she veers off course, so every so often she looks up and corrects her path. It's a blast to watch.

She is eating all kinds of foods now. She always wants a little bit of what we're eating, like tonight we had to find things off our salad for her to eat even though she had raviolies and banana and potato and sweet potato and spaghetti with tomato sauce on her plate. And she will yell to let you know that that's what she wants. Sometimes she is an eating machine, which I love.

She has gotten much better about not playing in the dog's water dish or messing with the cd player in her room. My strategy has been to tell her no, and then move her to some toys she can play with. I've also tried to give her more attention when she is doing good things as when she is doing bad things. I've read that for children good attention is great, but bad attention is almost as good, and much more attractive than no attention. I'd thought that sounded odd, but now that I've watched Isabelle it makes sense; her survival depends on getting attention from her parents, and so there is a strong drive within her to be sure she is getting attention. It makes sense that things she does that get attention are repeated and things that are ignored are often not (unless they have their own reward, maybe). I'm trying the same strategy with her screaming (the girl does have a healthy set of lungs). I just ignore it. But I clap and smile when she smiles at me or drinks out of her sippy cup herself. I will report on how it goes.

She has also quit playing with the books and CDs and I'm not sure why. I have put boxes of her toys in front of the book cases, and also other small caches of her toys around the house, often in little boxes or paper bags. And I try to spend at least half an hour a day playing with her using her toys and Robert often spends more than that with her in the evenings. I'm still waiting to see if this is a momentary lull in getting into the bookshelves or if what I'm doing is working. So far this discipline thing is still a work in process.

One of my big issues is food. Food should be fun. I love food (as you can tell by seeing me around it) and enjoy making it and eating it. I don't force Isabelle to eat anything. That doesn't mean she can eat whatever she wants because I'm the one who gets to decide what her choices are. But, I don't push food on her that she's not interested in, I just try something else that I'm interested in having her eat. So far this effort, too, is just in the beginning stages, but it seems to be going well. I've noticed, too, that often she won't want to eat something if I feed it to her, but she will eat it if I let her feed herself. She's an independent little cuss ;-)