Springtime Happiness

There was a little girl who had a little curl...

My quiet mornings with Lucy are still my favorite time of the day. As you can see above, she is pointing in the photo. She is always pointing all the time these days. Mostly she points at the art on our walls upstairs, specifically our Robbie Conal poster of the Dalai Lama. She smiles and points at him at least a dozen times a day. She has responded strongly to this poster since the first day she came home from the hospital...it's pretty great to see. If we ask her "Where is the Dalai Lama?", she points at the poster immediately.

Also, on a completely different note, Matt taught Lucy to "bauk bauk bauk" last week when she sees our chickens. Hers come out more like "bau bau bau" but it is definitely recognizable! So cute.

This past weekend was the final one that I had to spend working in the printmaking studio away from Lucy and Matt to finish up my artist book project. Dada and Lucy played in the snow, enjoying the 30+ temps of beautiful Alaskan springtime. Canute participated as well! We're so excited to have April just ahead of us to celebrate Lucy's first year with us.

The Busy Week

With Lucy at the Ice Sculpture Park (we went with Maya and Keet)

Mama has been spending many hours in the print studio at UAF this week working on a screenprinted book that will be exhibited for first Friday in April at Wellstreet Gallery. Lucy has been spending more time alone with dada on the weekends which has been good for everyone. Yesterday mama spent 6.5 hours away from Lucy...the longest ever! Everyone did just fine. Today will be another day at the studio. Below is a video of mama returning home from the studio last weekend - everyone was waiting for her at the window. That's a red ballon for Lucy.

The last two nights Lucy has been almost shoveling food into her mouth, one bite after the other...sometimes too much! She completely surprised us. What's on the menu? Sweet potatoes. She loves them, much more than she did a couple of months ago. Last night I added some steamed brown basmati rice and a couple bites of broccoli that were spiced with cumin and mustard seed and she ate those too! Evidence is below. This morning she ate a couple bites of steel cut oats with cinnamon. You can also see in the second photo where she "stores" her sippy cup when she is not using it.

The other night Matt was putting up trim on two very high windows in the living room and Lucy was obsessed with trying to climb up the ladder. We humored her for a few moments just to get a couple of photos but I was too concerned to let it go any further. I didn't want to give her any ideas! This baby doesn't forget anything.

Lucy has been pointing at everything this past week. She is so interested in knowing what everything around her is and enjoys looking at new things. She points at art on the walls, everything outside, people, and sun reflections. The other morning she rolled over when just waking up and was already pointing at the light fixture on the ceiling above her. Sometimes she points at so many things in a row that we can't keep up so we just start explaining to her what everything around her is. We are having so much fun with her!

Lucy's Snowy March Activities

Last weekend we enjoyed a warm bonfire in our yard to celebrate the light evenings we've been having. Who needs daylight savings in Alaska? Sitting by the fire together was a good way to warm up after a cold and dark winter.

Yesterday we all went out for a family ski on the fire break behind our house. Mama hadn't gone skiing since she broke her ankle and it was a welcome break from the monotony of the past few months of winter. The new skis and boots that we bought this past week helped us all play together!

Lucy went tele-skiing with Dada and our friend Dragos today on Moose Mountain. Lucy exclaimed with a great deal of "ah ah"s while they skied down the hill. She also napped for two runs. Dragos was very understanding of a much needed diaper break.

Lucy was very popular on the ski bus that goes up to the top of the mountain.

Here they are below looking like pros. I think if mama would have done this with Lucy, they'd have both come home with broken limbs!

I forgot to mention a couple of things in Lucy's 11 month post. She has gotten two more top teeth in. They started to break through a couple of weeks ago. She continues to drool a great deal so we figure more are on their way. I also failed to mention how much Lucy loves celery and grapefruit in my discussion on food. She likes to gnaw and suck on a stalk of celery until it becomes unsafe and needs to be taken away. She likes to drink grapefruit juice out of a spoon and also suck on wedges of it. Another trait she received from mama...I love grapefruit!

The 11 month old girl!

Who knew having an 11 month old would be so much fun! Every day Lucy sees and learns something new and exciting. She points to practically everything she sees. Most recently she's been pointing to the moon while out on sunny evening walks, art on the walls, reflections on the ceiling, and birds in the trees. It's so much fun to rediscover the world around us with our daughter. She weighs in at about 17.5 pounds today. Her favorite activity is standing up for a moment and then quickly falling, giggling, and doing it over and over. The longest I have seen her stand so far has been about 10 seconds. She also learned how to go down the stairs last week which is a very useful ability! Lucy's level of understanding has skyrocketed recently. This morning we all spent several minutes touching noses while lying in bed. She'd touch dada's nose, then I'd touch her nose, explaining what we were doing. Then I'd say, "touch my nose" and she would touch my nose. Very cool.

Food is still not very interesting for Lucy. Bananas, mangos, and blueberries are definitely her favorite closely followed by green beans and broccoli. Mama tries new foods with her every day and offers healthy dinners such as beets, potatoes, swiss chard, and salmon. I think she took one little bitty bite of each thing in her bowl the other night. She favored the beets however and I think she took two bites of those...that's my girl!

New Things

It's an exciting thing that Lucy has FINALLY figured out how to use her sippy cup after playing with it and putting her mouth on the spout for the last 5 months. She suckled out of it today enthusiastically! Perhaps we wont have to share our glasses of water with her all the time now...it's a messy but amusing activity.

To celebrate the use of the sippy cup, I offered Lucy a new food item as well. Soft-cooked red pepper was consumed happily and quickly, even after an "icy pop" of blueberry-beet-banana had already been sucked down. What a good girl!

Afterward I needed to empty the dishwasher so my little helper stood by to help, and "stand" she did! She didn't even realize she was doing it: taking spoons out of the rack, holding them up in both hands, standing steadily, and then dropping them so she could repeat the process over again. She did it so many times it was easy to snap a photo.

The Bouncy Baby

Since the last dancing video was such a hit with everyone I thought I better add another...I purposefully put Dim Dim on, an electronic band that has lots of fun sounds in their songs, just for Lucy. No, I don't usually let her tap on the window with her glockenspiel stick but I did not want to interrupt the video! Her sounds of excitement are for Canute, she always gets excited when she sees him. At the beginning of the video you can hear Canute tapping on the window in the background to come inside.

February Storm

Lucy has taken to gnawing on stalks of broccoli.

Dada took Friday and Monday off from work and we've all enjoyed a cozy long weekend together. It stormed yesterday and today, blowing lots of snow around, so we went for a blustery walk together this afternoon. It was also our attempt to get Lucy to sleep for an hour and it worked! Mama turned around halfway so she could get home and enjoy a quiet house for that hour.

Lucy got bundled up by dada for the cold walk:

Lucy is the little brown bump sticking out of Matt's jacket - she's nice and warm.

Lucy stood for the first time today from sitting! We were playing with her blocks, building them up tall and then she would knock them down, over and over...and then suddenly she just stood up, sturdily, stayed there for 5 seconds and then sat back down! She completely surprised me and luckily Matt was there to see it too. Lucy has been standing for a few months now but always while holding onto something, letting go, and then sitting. This was done all without the aid of something to hold onto! She did it a couple more times then called it quits.

The "Grateful" Daughter

While I admit I am not the biggest Grateful Dead fan, Matt certainly is....and it appears he has passed that along to Lucy! Every Sunday afternoon KSUA radio plays Dead Sessions for three hours. The first video is from last Sunday and the second is from today. Like father, like daughter! Her latest dance move is shaking her head back and forth, it is hilarious. I shot a video of her doing it the other night but it is too dark. I will try again soon.

Yep, It's been 10 Months!

The most exciting thing to report regarding growth is that there are 4 teeth in Lucy's mouth now. Her bottom two teeth came in 2 weeks apart in December and her top two teeth slowly emerged one week apart in January. The top two are still growing. We think she weighs about 16.5 pounds now.

Lucy is quite vocal. Currently, her most common words are: ma-ma, la-la, ba-ba, ya-ya. We are working on da-da, I think she almost has it!

Lucy has some fun games she likes to play. She raises her arms up above her head, then we do it, then she does it, etc, etc. Typically this occurs at the dinner table and we go in waves, it is pretty funny. She is always pleased with our participation. Lucy always loves to share. Everything she puts in her mouth when I am holding her, she then offers to me. I take a nibble, she smiles, pulls it away and then quickly puts it back toward my mouth again. This goes on and on. She loves to share with dada and Canute in this manner as well. Lucy also growls on demand now, it's hilarious. We growl back and forth. She plays peek-a-boo, she initiates it! She also likes to play "follow each other around the coffee table while crawling" with dada. It goes on for quite awhile. She gets more and more wonderful every month!

We are so thankful to have such a healthy and happy baby. Lucy's only ever had one little supposed stomach bug that lasted a few hours when she was 7 months old and one fever that reached 102.8 degrees and lasted overnight about a month ago. I still suspect I ate something that disagreed with her that caused her to "be sick" with the stomach bug.

Adventures in Eating

Lucy has decided on her own that pureed foods are nonsense and she'd like to give "real" food a try. The only mashed food Lucy will eat is banana but that is practically mashed straight out of the peel anyway. Above is a photo of Lucy eating kale blended with banana.

So, since she always refused purees, we tried a different angle and handed her half a pear, a stalk of broccoli, chopped up some green beans, and minced some steamed carrots. She loves picking up the little pieces of food to eat and enjoys gnawing on the larger pieces to take off little bites. Her favorite thing at this point seems to be green beans. She lets out a "Mmmmm" when she eats them...similar to her love for blueberries, which she now eats whole and frozen so they mush in her mouth. She'll only eat about 2 or 3 at a time but wow they make a mess! At this point she still only eats about a teaspoon or two of solid food per day.