Elmo

Well we've officially hit Elmo obsession. We don't really watch TV when Lila's awake, but we've been letting her watch Sesame Street lately. She doesn't like some of the muppets though. As soon as she sees Bert or Tele, she says "no, no, no, no" and tries to crawl into my lap. There are some other random muppets she doesn't like as well, but mostly just Bert and Tele. On the other hand, she is in love with Elmo. One day last week she just started saying "Emo, Emo, Emo" and pointing at the TV (which was off by the way). Now at different times throughout the day she'll hand us the remote control and say "Emo, Emo" like she was wants us to turn on Elmo. We tell her Elmo went bye bye or Elmo went night night. Sometimes she'll accept that and sometimes she persists. She has a couple Elmo dolls that her Aunt Teri got for her and until this week she rarely played with them. Both of them talk and she's been playing with them all the time now. The video at the bottom is of her having a small Elmo fit.

Daddy got her a new track suit

We got a jogging stroller a couple months ago. She loves it so Roman takes her running with him all the time.

This is how Daddy gets some extra resistance doing pushups. Seriously!

A nice "summer" day here in Houston (and yep, it's Novemeber)

Lila got a hold of the mesh laundry bag

Halloween

All-in-all I think Lila enjoyed Halloween. We carved pumpkins Thursday night, and then Jenna, the neighbor, went trick or treating with us on Halloween. Lila got scared of some of the decorations as we went from house to house, esp. those that made nosie. Roman or I had to carry her to quite a few doors, but she enjoyed looking in her bucket to see what people had given her. She's never really eaten candy so she didn't understand what it all was until we got home. It was time to go to bed so we didn't want to let her try too much of the candy. We gave her some Twizzlers licorice pieces and she was in love. Today she's been telling us "bum, bum" all day. That's what she calls her trick or treat pumpkin (and any other pumpkin she sees for that matter).

We're having problems with our camera, so the quality of some of the pictures is poor. There's a video at the bottom of her after we got home with her candy stash.

She liked scooping the stuff out of the pumpkin

Daddy threatening his pumpkin

Coloring on Daddy's pumpkin design

Her costume has a hood that has antenna on it, but she won't let us put the hood on her head. So I made these antenna instead and attached them to two red hair bows. This is how we determined they were a little too long. She thought it was so fun to swing her head back and forth so the antenna would flop around.

She loved her pumpkin...

...as evidenced by her kissing it.

Mama and Lala's pumpkins

All ready for trick or treating

Going to the first house

Back home with her "bum"

Our pumpkins all lit up

I got crafty and made this halloween wreath for our door

The weekend

The weekend didn't start out very well for us. If you read that last post you know that Lila had some kind of stomach bug this week. My stomach was upset during the day on Friday and that night while I was making dinner, it got me. Then Roman got it in the middle of the night. It was awful! I have never gotten sick so many time, so forcefully, in my life! Yesterday the "getting sick" was done but both of our stomachs were still pretty upset. Grana Nana came and took Lila for the day and Roman and I slept and tried to recover.

Sunday was much better and we took Lila to the pumpkin patch. The place that does the pumpkin patch is a christmas tree farm, so we were able to see all trees growing when we went on the hay ride. We saw some squirrels and a bunch of cows as well, all of which Lila loved. It's amazing how fast her vocabulary is growing. It seems she grasps things especially quickly if we teach her the sign along with the word. She calls all animals "dog", but I showed her the sign for cow a couple times while reading one of her books and she picked it up. They had a couple goats in a little pen at the pumpkin patch, which Lila became easily enamored with. We keep telling her "a goat" and doing the sign and pretty soon she was trying to call it "ago". Lesson learned for Mommy and Daddy, drop the article when you teach her a word. We said goat a couple times and she eventually got it.

Doctor's Appointments

Lila and I both had doctor's appointments in the last week. Mine was uneventful. Baby's hearbeat is normal, next appointment will be the ultrasound to check the babies in anatomy. That won't be until mid-November.




Lila's appt. was much more eventful. Or at least leading up to it was. Roman's out of town so last night Lila and I went to have some dinner with Grana Nana. Just as we were coming around the corner to our house after dinner, Lila threw up. This has happened a couple times before, she gets a litle carsick I think. I took her in and put her down for bed. About 8:30 I heard her crying a little bit in her crib, then she stopped, and then started again a little while later. When I went to check on her I discovered she had thrown up all over in her crib! She continued to throw-up/dry heave until almost midnight. This morning she seemed fine and ate a normal breakfast. Her 18 month checkup was at 11:30 and it's a 45 minute drive to get to the office. About half way there Lila proceeded to projectile vomit ALL OVER in the backseat! It was awful! The doctor said she seems fine, not ear infections, etc. so she must have some kind of stomach bug, or something she ate last night didn't agree with her. She ate lunch a short time ago and seems fine now as well. I guess we just need to avoid car rides. As for her stats, Lila now weighs 25.5 lbs which puts her in the 66th percentile! She has become quite the eater. He said that most babies her age are actually going down percentile-wise, but that we shouldn't worry about it as long as she's eating healthy food, and a good variety of it, which she is. She's in the 96th percentile for height though, so I guess that balances out her weight a bit. Her development is good, so outside of any sick visits, we don't need to come back until she's two.

Now for the photos/video. Okay, so I know this video is the wrong orientation. I was going to take a photo of her, but when I pressed the button I realized it was in record mode. So I just took a video. She is looking outside looking for squirrels, which is the sign you see her doing.


Cuddling on the couch with my very fashionable daughter. Gotta love stripes and giraffe together.



I guess she didn't want me to take her picture

Sand and Sunday

Lila is now the official owner of a sandbox. When I took her to Moody Gardens (the water park, see the July 3rd post if you missed that) she LOVED the sand. One of the moms in my moms' group was selling a sandbox at her moving sale so we got it for Lila. It's a smallish one with a cover so we can keep bugs and water out. As we thought, she loves it! Jenna, the neigbor, came over to play with her in it. Since it's past season we couldn't really find her any beach toys, but were were able to find a small sand castle thing at Target that at least had a shovel that she can use.

Saturday night Roman and I went to dinner for our anniversary and Lila stayed overnight at Grana Nana's. That's the first time she had been away from us overnight, but she does fine with Grana. She was up earlier than normal though (6:15am!), poor Grana!

On Sunday we had a bit of a scare. We were out running errands and when we pulled up in the driveway our front door was wide open. Roman went up to the house and peaked inside and didn't see anything strange, but just to be safe we called the police to come check out the house. They took their time getting there and we had groceries in the trunk, so we called our neighbors and asked if we could borrow their freezer for a little bit. Two officer came and went it with guns drawn--they don't mess around--and "cleared" all the rooms in the house. Luckily there was no one in the house, but better safe than sorry. The only thing we can think happened is that we didn't close the door all the way that morning when we came in from taking Lila out in her wagon and the wind blew the door open.

Below are some recent photos...


Eating lasagna. She's been picky about her food lately, but she loved the lasagna.


Yep, still loves shoes. The other week Roman went to the gym on his lunch break and when he started getting stuff out of his workout bag, he didn't have any shorts, but somehow one of Lila's little blue Converse made it in the bag. And she'd also left one of her little pink and white socks in his running shoe.


Lila got these beautiful bracelets from our friends Wally and Soha. They actually gave them to us at our baby shower, but Lila could pull them off her wrist for so long that it's only been recently that she can wear them. I should take an upclose picture so you can see them, they are darling!


Lila and Jenna in the sandbox

videos and a new phase

Lila has entered a whole new phase, it's called challenging authority. She has been having little fits about what seems like nothing, and is now very easily frustrated as well. She started screaming and crying today because I took her toothbrush away from her. You would have thought the world was coming to an end. I've been trying to pick my battles, but I want to know what happened to my previously easy-going toddler!! Hopefully this will be a short-lived phase.

On another note, she's doing a lot better when I leave her, especially at school. She still cries and attaches herself to my leg, but once I leave she only cries a couple minutes. Mrs. Diane, the teacher, says Lila's been having a merry old time, and she's been teaching Lila how to swing on the big-kid swing when they play outside.

I included a couple photos, and two videos. As you can see from the first video, we now have a new housekeeper. She's loves that swiffer. She did the kitchen and the bathroom floors! The second video is mostly of the back of her head, but she was looking out the window jabbering away. She just kept talking and talking so it's more about what you hear than what you see in that one I guess. She's been talking a lot lately, some of it jibberish, some of it words. When we were in San Antonio she said her first official sentence. She said "bub-bye Nana" and then "bub-bye Mer Mer".

One last thing, life for most of us here has returned to normal since hurricane Ike, but there are a lot of people who are still suffering...no power, no car, no home, no nothing. If you all could say a prayer for the people here who are still going through a tough time I know it would be appreciated.

Auntie Nikki got me this cute dress!

Lila and San Antonio

The day before Ike trashed everything.


This is the house we stayed in in San Antonio. As you can see, we weren't suffering!


We put Lila's little dog "Puppy" on Manolo's leash and she was walking him around the house.


She wanted to go walk Puppy outside.


The Alamo. Pictures aren't allowed anywhere inside, so I could only take them of the grounds.


Lila and Nana


This oak tree was huge, and that's an old water well in front of it.


Across from The Alamo is The San Antonio River Walk. We walked down to get a bite to eat.

Lila was SO enamored by the flags that were blowing outside at The Alamo. I got a video of her jabbering away and doing some kind of flag dance.