14 1/2 months

Ooops, I haven't been so good about blogging recently. Changes, in some ways, aren't as big as they were when she was little. But when there are changes, they are pretty big!

As of Oct 4, at exactly 14 months old, Cadence decided, FINALLY, to take her first steps. She had been cruising around the future and climbing like a monkey for so long but just wasn't ready to let go. Oddly enough, that night was just another night and after her bath, as we put her on the bed to get her dressed in her PJ's, she just all of a sudden started putting her feet flat on the bed and her butt in the air and pushing off the floor with her hands to stand up. I have no idea where she learned it, or how she knew to do it since we didn't do anything special that day, but she just decided to try it that night and was SO pleased with herself, laughing the whole time. We put her in the living room to see what would happen and she kept doing it, and taking a few steps away from us. It's official! She's walking. After those first steps, it took awhile for her to really keep letting go but we urged her to more and more and she's getting better. She still falls a lot but the big difference is that instead of crawling once she falls, she actually gets back up and tries to walk more. She's unsteady, which is pretty cute since sometimes she walks in place to keep her balance. I can't believe her butt isn't more bruised! She loves to walk outside with her walker, or pushing the stroller and today, she even let go of the walker and just started walking around without it. She is clearly getting more confident and loves to waddle around the house when I'm in the kitchen. She has even mastered the ramp pretty well, especially now that we have gotten her socks with some gription on the bottom.

Kristin and David's wedding is in 6 days and I'm not sure she'll be up to par on walking by then so we're bringing Brooke's radio flyer wagon walker to help. Her dress is just so cute. It's going to be a great day especially since Cheryl hemmed my dress and it looks really nice!

So, going back to some of the other milestones:

She really has been quite the monkey for many months. She is up and down the couch constantly and James came home with a plastic slide that she can go up and down, as long as she doesn't have socks on. I've been taking her to Fair Oaks Mall sometimes and she holds her own playing in the play area, even though she is still wobbly walking and there are lots of bigger kids. But it's good for her to be around that and learn to hold her own. She finally started standing up on her own, but not taking any steps on September 19. Guess she just needed a few more weeks to take those steps! We tried to get her to let go of the furniture by yelling "no hands!" Sometimes it worked, but not always. She had to do things on her time! She loves to walk around holding a toy or something and at first, I think that helped her balance a little better, oddly enough.

She now has 15 teeth and is only missing 1 on the bottom and her second molars which I don't think she'll get for awhile. I even gave her one of her chewable fluoride vitamins yesterday to see how she would do (she is just too big for baby food these days as she won't really eat it anymore unless we fake her out saying it's our food, which doesn't always work.) She was able to chew the vitamin all by herself!

She is learning that shoes and socks go on her feet and she loves, when she's allowed in the dining room, to go grab her shoes and try to put them on. She even loves finding my shoes in the kitchen and pretending to put them on. She's not able to do it but she always puts them near her feet. I'm just amazed at how much she understands even though her communication isn't great. She is learning new signs and has a few she can do well: milk, all finished, more, bye, and night night. She points at EVERYTHING these days and we are trying to teach her juice (which we introduced for the first time on October 13 with the V8 fusion stuff) and please and thank you. She has a couple of words, but they aren't really clear and she does them best when repeating them: ma ma, da da (but not usually directed at us except for the day James appeared in the doorway and she clearly said "da da"), diaper, dog, duck, ba (for book) and up.

Eating wise, she is definitely getting out of the baby stage and doing a lot of finger foods. We pretty much give her whatever we eat for dinner which she usually eats with her fingers and not a fork or spoon. We probably should work on that more. Breakfast is fruit and cheerios and lunch can be anything, including bites of sandwiches. It certainly makes meals a lot easier.

Our best friend is definitely still Brooke and we love hanging out with her. We try to get them together once or twice a week to play. They were doing a lot of parallel play but now they seem to interact more but sharing or taking toys from each other. Any way they play is good experience for them. I bought a double stroller off Craigslist to use with both of them and have used it once to go on a walk when Brooke was over once. It's heavy! The idea is to use it now with them but when we have another kid, I'll already have a double stroller. I thought for awhile, around when she turned 1, that Cadence was switching to 1 nap. But then, all of a sudden, she happily went back to two.

Within the last week, we seem to be trying out the 1 nap thing again and for 3 days, we only did 1 nap, around 12:30 or 1pm since when I put her down for the morning nap, she just sang and played in her crib. Yesterday, I put her down to do the same thing but she actually fell asleep. :) Today, she woke up at 8am so I put her down around 12:50pm for a nap. She'll probably sleep anywhere between 2 and 3 hours. The one long nap is fine since I'm able to get work done but I don't like how it forces an early lunch if we want to go out with someone. Oh well!

And finally, Cadence got her first illness. Before I left for DB this year, she had a cold but it just didn't seem to get better while I was gone. She started out snotty then got a cough and stayed snotty. After I got back, James took her to the doctor and it turns out she had an ear infection in one ear. She got some antibiotics and started feeling better pretty quickly. Luckily giving her the medicine wasn't too hard either b/c it tasted sweet. It went a lot better than when we had to give her the ezcema medicine! I think we should be pretty proud that it took her 14 months to get her first real sickness!

Here's the video from the night she started walking.