The Ashlan show: The Ashlan show

Night time sleep and naps are going great! She has been elongating her night time sleep so she is now waking up around 6am even though she still goes down around 6pm so it is pretty awesome for us now! We still get mommy and daddy time in the evenings and she is now sleeping later but not late enough so that way daddy can still play with her in the mornings before he goes to work. Naps are great too. Since she was taking three half hour naps a day I decided to try two naps, and I wish I had done it sooner now. She takes at least one hour nap and then another 30 min nap, so she is still taking a total of 1 ½ hours of naps per day so I’m guessing that’s all she needs. It’s just amazing to me that she can stay awake for so long now, about 4 hours before she has to take a nap! She still goes down wide awake in her crib and falls asleep pretty soon after I put her down, and without a peep still. We are very happy about that! We’re not looking forward to her getting teeth though because we know that it can change!

Eating is about the same…she is a little pig. Now whenever we have something that we don’t give to her, she wants it and will scream until we give her a bite (or the whole thing). I thought maybe she only did it to me but she did it to Dan today as well. For me, I went into the fridge and pulled out a flavored greek yogurt. She followed me out of the kitchen and sat next to me on the floor when I sat on the couch. When I put the first bite in my mouth she watched me, and she screamed after the second bite since I still hadn’t offered her any. So I gave her a bite and before you know it, she ate the whole yogurt container! When I offered Caesar the container to lick the rest of the yogurt off the sides, she screamed because she wanted it. As soon as I got up and put it in the recycle bin, she went about playing with her toys. So, I have resorted to eating when she’s taking naps, unless I make enough food for her to eat off my plate...and this is even if she had a snack about an hour prior! When I was reheating the Sesame chicken that I had made a few days before, Ashlan ended up eating ¾ of it and I had to get something else to eat!

Ashlan and I went to the dollar store a few days ago to see what there was in the way of decorations for her first birthday party (a bit early, I know, but since we’re flying up in Dec I wanted to make sure we took the decorations up when we drove up in October). While we were there I found two bathing suits for her, at $1 each! I couldn’t pass them up so I took some pictures down below of her in them and she fits into them perfectly.

Caesar and her have really become good friends now. As I said before, there are times when I’m in the room but he chooses to bring his toy to her to play! She will grab it and whip it around and he’ll jump to get it from her. Several times right after they got done playing with another toy, he also went to get his rope too so they could play tug of war! It’s just so cute to see them interact together now.

We have been hanging out with all kinds of friends lately! We still have a few that we go to the pool with and then we met some new ones at the O2B Kids place I was talking about a few weeks ago so we have had play dates several times over the last week there as well. Ashlan is definitely starting to get used to that place. She would sit for 30 min or so and just look around and stare at other kids when we first started going. Now she jumps right in when we get there. We also went to two play dates to our friends houses where Ashlan must be getting used to the same kids she plays with because she was interacting in no time! My friend was having issues with her cloth diapers so we went over to help her with that one day. And speaking of issues, I am going to need to strip her diapers too since we’re dealing with some ammonia issues with her night time diapers only. It’s not that big of a deal since the absorbency is still good, but I just need to stop socializing and do it already, haha! Her diapers have needed it for a few weeks at least but it seems I’m never home enough to do it since it takes awhile, and since it’s only her night time diapers, it’s been easy to ‘forget’ about.

Today we grilled out with some friends that were visiting from out of town and Ashlan was so excited because they had a 3 year old son for her to follow around. It was nice to swim in the pool too and just relax! Ashlan spent a good portion of the afternoon in her raft watching the 3 year old jump in the pool about a million times. This coming week is going to be busy as well. Tomorrow I have my girlfriends and their kids coming over to swim and have lunch. We have another play date set up at O2B on Tues and then on the two days that Dan has off, we have her 9 month appointment and her 9 month pictures. I can’t believe she’s going to be 9 months here soon! Time is flying!

Getting into her box of toys.