These are a Few of My Favorite Things

As Aria turns 13 months old...

Aria is currently obsessed with:
-Dogs (stuffed animals, plastic dogs, dogs on TV, Paw Patrol, dogs barking outside, etc.)
-Music (she'll start to dance by pumping one arm like PopEye or stomping her feet in place)
-Sesame Street books
-"Love My Shoes" book. She will just lay on the changing table flipping through the book as I change her diaper and say "shoe"
-Shoes: don't leave one laying around, she'll pick up, play with the strap/laces, carry it around.
-Snow: after the blizzard, she would look out the window and say "See! See!" I'm not sure if she's asking me if I see it all or if she thinks the word for snow is see.
-TV shows: Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, Little Einsteins 


At 13 months Aria has 12 teeth. She's been teething her first molars (3 of them) at the same time for weeks and weeks now. You can always tell when she's teething because her nose runs nonstop. A few days ago I felt one of the bottom molars poke through. The next morning, the other two (1 bottom, 1 top) came through as well. A few days after that, the other top molar came through. So you would think she'd sleep better at night not having all these teeth bothering her. Nope, I think now she's sleeping worse. She's back to waking up from about midnight on and every hour or so. She's also getting into that phase like Luc went through. She wakes up between 4:30-5:30 and wants to be up for the day, refuses to go back down, and so I take her on the couch with me to get some rest. Sometimes she falls back asleep. Hopefully her teething will give us a break for awhile.

No more formula! Finally! Aria is totally transitioned over to cow's milk. Woot! She loves the taste so much better anyways. She's totally phased out her mid morning and afternoon bottles as well. This past weekend I had been contemplating getting rid of her bottles once and for all. Friday night she had none of her bedtime bottle because she was drinking from her sippy cup after dinner. Saturday morning, she hardly had any and then ate real food for breakfast. So Frederic and I decided to roll with it and try it out. We skipped Saturday night bottle for the sippy cup; she slept decently. Sunday morning, she ate a whole Kashi bar and some milk. I was meeting up with friends Sunday afternoon and one of the friends had triplets in October. I knew she used the Dr Brown bottles we were using, so I pushed myself to pack it all up to give to her that day. No going back. Aria doesn't seem to notice. I'm still a little in shock that we won't have those moments when she's drinking from her bottle while laying in my arms. That's the hardest part of transitioning. It probably has nothing to do with her, she'll forget all about bottles soon enough (if she hasn't already). I don't want to give up that dependence and Aria/Mommy, cuddle time.

She doing a lot better with the milk in her other sippy cup.
-I figured out why she wasn't drinking it from there before. I was cleaning out her Tommy Tippee cup and got a whiff of sour milk. I pulled out the white insert in the top mouth piece area to wash it. I looked closely at the ventilation whole and noticed some white stuff (we only use this cup for milk). I grabbed a tiny bottle brush and stuck it inside and all this curdled, dried milk came out on the brush. I pushed in farther over and over and each time all this nasty stuff came out. I couldn't get the brush in any deeper, and so left the piece sitting on the counter. I took a different cup out and she drank the milk just fine. I can only assume the dried up yucky milk inside the mouth piece went sour and was giving the good milk a bad taste and that's why she wouldn't drink the milk. With the other cup- no problem.


Aria is also now able to climb onto the couch all by herself and climb down on her belly. She has not tried to get past the first step to go upstairs though. Whew!