About Gracie | Marriage Confessions About Gracie

Gracie has been using a sippy cup for about a month now, and that’s been going really great. She’s completely off the bottle (in fact, we sold all of our bottles at our yard sale last weekend, so there’s no turning back now!), and she’s doing great. Now, we’re letting her get used to other utensils at mealtimes. She loves waving around spoons. She thinks they are hammers. But when she’s not beating things with them, she actually tries to use them. She’ll poke her food in an attempt to scoop some up on her spoon, but she’s still not sure how to keep the food on her spoon when she shoves it in her mouth. But, she’s getting the hang of it.

This week we started giving her her food in a real bowl. Some days, she eats right out of it and doesn’t even blink. But, then there are other days…

Maybe we’ll wait a little bit longer on the plate…

10 comments | posted in About Gracie, Food and Eating, Gracie Girl, The Romper Room | tags: babies

This weekend Gracie and Bean went to my parent’s house so that Chris and I could have a yard sale and not have to worry about chasing kids around. While they were up there, Gracie took her first steps! I was kind of bummed I missed them, but I’m just so glad she’s starting to walk! She came home and took a few steps on Sunday afternoon with me and Chris, and at daycare this afternoon they said she walked around a little bit. But tonight she was walking a lot. After this video was taken, she took off across our living room all on her own, chasing Lucy. She’s a girl on the go now! I’m so proud of her!

13 comments | posted in About Gracie, Gracie Girl, Milestones, The Romper Room | tags: babies, milestones

These days, Gracie Girl is constantly on the go. Since she figured out how to crawl, I don’t think she’s stopped to rest for a single minute. She’s all over the living room, but really loves crawling around upstairs between her room and Bean’s room. Her favorite thing is when Bean gets down and crawls with her, chasing her all over. She just squeals the whole time like it’s the most fun in the whole world. More than crawling though, Gracie loves to cruise. She pulls up on anything that will hold her weight (and sometimes things that don’t…). She loves standing at the coffee table and then reaching for anything she can get her paws on. She’s into EVERYTHING, and we all are loving it!

These days, Gracie loves to boss us all around. She will sit in her high chair or stand at the coffee table and point at us and then point all around the room, babbling incoherent instructions. You can see her wanting us to all get up and move. And if none of us get up and actually DO anything, she starts to get really mad. She’ll cruise right on over to where we are sitting, point right at us, and start grunting and babbling her demands. What makes her really mad is if she’s sitting in her high chair, dictating the movements of the rest of the household and we all walk out of the kitchen in the middle of her reign. If we walk out while she’s “talking,” she sits there for just a second and then starts yelling, “HEY! HEY! HEY!” and tries to get us to come back in there. She’s a bossy girl. I can’t imagine where she gets it…

These days, Gracie is repeating everything we say. At first, I thought it was just coincidence that her babbling happened to sound like the last thing we said, but then it happened so often that I started to pay more attention to it. She really loves jewelry (that’s my girl!) and she’s always pointing to and pulling on my jewelry while babbling and cooing. Last week, she was pointing to my necklace and when I said, “Necklace,” she went, “Ne-ne.” I stopped for a minute and thought, “Did she really just say that?” and so I waited, and sure enough she pointed to my necklace a few more times while saying very distinctly, “Ne-ne.” She can also say “ball,” “bottle,” and “bibi” (which is binky). She’s said other things, but those are pretty constant in her vocabulary these days. I remember that from when Bean was little, too. They start to learn one letter sound at a time, and right now she is all over the “b” sound. My little chatter pants.

These days, Gracie is a pain in the tooshy at bedtime. She has learned our bedtime routine and so she knows right away when bedtime is coming. She loves her bath, whines a little while I put her in her PJ’s, squirms through two books, and then freaks out when I lay her in her crib. I’m sure it’s just something she’s having to adjust to because now she can tell when it’s coming, but it’s kind of annoying because it happens every. single. night. She girlfriend has a wicked set of pipes. She can yell and protest and cry with the best of ‘em. But we just hold steady with our nighttime routine, then tell her we love her, and close her door. Harsh, but it’s how we roll. She’ll eventually learn that no matter how much she protests, she isn’t going to be rescued. Until she learns that part of the routine, though, we’re investing in the family-size packs of ear plugs.

These days, Gracie is eating anything and everything and lots of it. She’s turning one this weekend, and so starting next week we’ll start weening her from formula and adding whole milk to her diet. (And all God’s children with checking accounts said, “AMEN!”) Judging from the way she has so far happily eaten anything we’ve given her, I’m not expecting too many problems with that transition. Right now, her favorite foods are blueberries (or “crackberries” as we call them), bananas, pancakes, spaghetti, green beans, vanilla yogurt, cheese, sweet potatoes, and carrots. She tried two bites of a brownie the other night and seemed like she could have taken it or left it. She ate a bite and then went back to her blueberries. Good girl!!!

These days, Gracie is showing us her fierce temper and lack of patience. (Again, I don’t know where she gets these things…) If you take something away from her, she will stop whatever she’s doing, hurl herself on the floor, and cry like you just broke her wittle heart. Big, pathetic, crocodile tears, I tell you. All because you took away the remote control. Even if you temporarily take something away, like…oh…say, you have to get her out of the car seat, but she’s holding on to a toy so you have to take the toy away for TWO SECONDS while you get her arms out of the car seat straps. She will fling her head back, open those lungs, and out come the crocodile tears, all in about 2.5 seconds. And it doesn’t matter if you try to give the toy back at that point. The damage is done. You’ve angered the mini beast. And YOU. SHALL. BE PUNISHED.

These days, you can see Gracie’s personality just bursting out of her. She’s sassy and funny and spirited and demanding and all the things I’d want my daughter to be. (Though I’d be cool with her taking the temper thing down a notch or twelve…) These days, she makes me happy from deep inside my heart and that happiness just bursts out through my ears. These days, when she’s not driving me absolutely crazy, I’m wildly crazy about her.

There’s just something about those baby girls…

16 comments | posted in About Gracie, Gracie Girl, Sweet Gracie, The Romper Room | tags: babies, daughters, humor, parenting

Up until now, Gracie and Bean have been pretty great together. He really loved showing her his toys and she was crazy about him. But then last weekend, Gracie started to crawl.

And Bean’s life changed forever.

Now, Gracie can get into his stuff. And if he moves it away from her, she can crawl over to it again. Bean doesn’t know what the crap is going on, but he knows he is not happy about it. He’s started doing this really funny thing when he sees Gracie coming towards one of his treasures. He throws himself down on top of his toys and covers them with his entire body, while yelling out, “NO, GWAYCIE!”

Chris and I didn’t really prepare for how to handle sibling rivalry. We had parenting talks about discipline and setting boundaries and potty training and religion and all that other important stuff. But we never really put a game plan together for sibling rivalry. We’ve been shooting from the hip for the past week, and, so far, we’ve actually got a pretty good system going.

Whenever Gracie starts getting all over Bean and his toys, we don’t go remove Gracie from the situation. It would be easy for us to just walk over when Bean starts freaking out and put Gracie somewhere else, but the fact is that Bean and Gracie are going to be playing together for a looooooong time, so Bean’s going to have to learn at some point how to handle sharing with her. Why not start at the very beginning?

When Bean starts yelling about Gracie taking his things, Chris and I usually say to him, “Speak nicely to her, Bean. Gracie is just a baby. She doesn’t understand.” And he actually does. He’ll stop yelling and instead use his sweet singsong voice he uses just for her. And he says things like, “No, no, Gracie. These toys aren’t for you.”

He used to snap at her and say, “No, Gracie! MINE!” But we quickly stepped in on that one. We treat the word “mine,” as a bad word in our house. If he says that word, we sharply tell him, “No, sir. We do not say that word.” That has helped with the temper tantrums this week a little bit because he has to find a different way to tell her to stop. Instead, he usually says things like, “That’s not yours, Gracie,” or “That’s not for you, Gracie.” Both of which are acceptable in our house.

We are coaching Bean verbally as he is talking to Gracie. We don’t go over to them and remove her, but we talk him through fixing the situation himself. After he has told her no, we tell him that if he doesn’t want her to play with his toys, he needs to go get her a toy that she can play with. Or, if he is hoarding all the toys (another thing that’s started happening since Gracie became mobile), we tell him he has to choose one of his toys to share with her. That seems to really help because it gives him ownership over the situation and he gets to make a decision about Gracie playing with his toys.

I know that this is just the beginning of sibling rivalry in our family. I’m sure we have years of this left ahead of us. But I figure at least we’re starting to handle it by teaching Bean HOW to handle it.

How do YOU handle sibling rivalries in your house?

17 comments | posted in About Beanie, About Gracie, parenting, Parenting Ideas, Siblings, The Romper Room | tags: parenting, sibling rivalry, siblings