14 Months!!

Thanks for such a great Mood Board Monday, everyone! (If you missed it, check out all the gorgeous rooms here.) I was so impressed by all your dining rooms, excited that we had a good mix of the different inspiration items, and basically floored by all your talent:) Maybe with all the holiday madness approaching we'll wait and do the next one sometime in early 2012? What do you think?

I wanted to do a quick check in about Maura. She turned 14 months on November 10th! I won't do one of these posts every month like I was doing during the first year, but I will try to do one every once and awhile, mostly just for me. I work better with a goal/deadlines, and I feel like these posts are a good way to chronicle this wonderful time in our lives. I love being able to look back at these and see what was going on with her each month. I feel like if I don't make myself write about it than I will forget everything!


I also decided to try and keep taking some pictures of her in her bunny chair, just at every month milestone now. So here's 13 months and 14 months:


We made the transition from formula to only whole milk smoothly. From bottle to sippy cup...not so much. After lots of experiments, we finally figured out that Maura likes the straw sippy cups better. That's cool...she's drinking milk from the cup in the morning when she wakes up (not as many ounces, but at least something) and sometimes in the afternoon with her snack. She is still having a bottle right before naptime and bedtime. Her bottle is like her pacifier and has been part of her falling asleep ritual for a long time now. I'm worried that when we try to give her a sippy cup of milk and put her to bed its going to go horribly wrong. So we haven't tried it yet! Does this make me a terrible mother?! Any tips or ideas if you've been through this before? Is it unheard of that my 14 month old still gets two bottles a day? Help!

In the sleep category we are down to one nap a day, right in the middle of the afternoon, usually starting around 1/1:30pm (which is the complete opposite of the schedule we used to keep - now we are out and about in the morning and home in the afternoon). She will usually nap for about 2 hours, sometimes more, hopefully not less:) She still goes to bed at 8pm and wakes up about 7-7:30am. She's a good sleeper.

Maura is getting her 8th tooth...the bottom lateral incisor on her right. She's learned how to run and walk backwards and stomp her feet and put her hands in the air for "hooray".


She finally, finally, finally loves books! Yay! I've been waiting for this for forever. I really want her to grow up to be a reader (like me). If not, that'll be ok too, but I hope so. Now she's so into them. She doesn't necessarily want to sit there and have me read them to her...she likes to flip through them herself, or she points to things and goes "uh, uh, uh" and I tell her what each object is, or we play the game where I ask "Where's the turtle?", "Where's the butterfly?", "Where's the beach ball?" and she points to that specific thing on the page. We play with books a lot:)

Maura's other favorite toys are mostly all new things she got for her birthday: her car, her little baby doll and little doll stroller, her plastic shopping cart and fake food, her ball-poppin' dinosaur, her Melissa and Doug jumbo knob puzzles.

We have been going to free story time at the library on Thursday mornings and attend Mommy and Me classes at My Gym on Friday mornings (both with our buddy Jack - who's 2 months older than Maura - and his mom, Meredith).


Her hair has taken off recently and is really starting to grow! We've started wearing hair bows, so at least people aren't calling her a boy nearly as often:)


We still managed to get in a lot of beach time in September and October! (We've had really warm fall weather up here in New England.)

Our other favorite pastimes include anything outside - hitting the playground, going for walks in the wagon and playing in our driveway and yard (she loves her soccer ball).

We took her to the zoo for the first time in October. She liked it, although at times it seemed like she was more obsessed with the zookeeper's 4wd vehicle than the animals. We had a great time!

{inside the deer park}

{inside the petting zoo}

We also visited a local pumpkin patch. (Again, she might have been more into the tractor that pulled our hay ride out to the patch as opposed to the pumpkins themselves, but...)


This was the first year Maura dressed up for Halloween (she was a cow!) and went trick-or-treating. She loved it! I took her around in her wagon while Paul stayed home and gave out candy. She got so excited during the rest of the night when any kids would come to the door.


One of the things I'm enjoying most about this stage is how much she is learning. Most days she blows my mind with the concepts she puts together, the things she remembers and the associations she makes. I might be biased, but she could be a genius;)

Ps. Its not all rainbows and sprinkles around here:) If you are still reading this (thank you - its a long post!), any suggestions for how to deal with the toddler attitude? She is quick to get very upset when she doesn't get her way. We were in Target and some other stores this morning running errands and she started screaming and crying because she wanted whatever we were looking at. I do not want to to be that mom with that kid. How do you keep them from getting spoiled?