Lucy did fabulously at her first day of daycare yesterday! Her teacher, Ms. Gwen, has decided to call Lucy her “hard-core girl,” since Lucy was running and jumping and playing non-stop. On Tuesdays the one-year-old class has water play and apparently Lucy kept bouncing between all three pools. She finally crashed while eating lunch and took a nap from noon to 2pm (and then another one on the way home from daycare). The teachers were all very surprised to find out that Lucy had never been in childcare - she even cried when Dan picked her up because she didn’t want to stop playing and go home! The only problem was eating and drinking formula: Lucy was so busy that she didn’t want to take the time to do either. Hopefully she’ll get over that soon!
At 11 months, Lucy:
- loves table/solid food! Her favorites are blueberries, cherries, grapes, graham crackers, cottage cheese (which she feeds herself… sans utensils), Morningstar veggie “sausage” patties, and chicken.
- is a really good walker. She’s even trying to run after us these days.
- has a tooth! FINALLY!
- sleeps through the night! FINALLY! (I have now jinxed this…)
- weighs almost 21 pounds and is around 28 inches.
- still says “mama,” “dada,” and “bye bye,” while also starting to understand and follow instructions like “come on.” Lucy also makes all kinds of funny noises and a couple people have started to comment that they think she might have a low or raspy voice.
- goes to bed at 8pm, wakes to nurse between 5 and 5:30am, and is up for the day between 5:30 and 6:30am.
- likes to play with stacking cups and play silks, “reading” her board books, and ripping up magazines.
- is starting daycare tomorrow.
- loves playing with her buddy Ethan!
Since my fellowship is up, this past week I moved the dissertation to part-time status and work to full time. On Tuesday I started a Development and Public Affairs position at a well-known New Orleans institution. My mom flew down and watched Lucy for the week, while this coming week Dan is going to try out the stay-at-home-dad thing (which he’ll be doing every Friday once Lucy starts daycare in July). It’s going to take some adjusting to get used to the new situation, especially since Lucy is not thrilled with formula in a sippy cup in place of nursing, but we’ll figure it out!
Speaking of Lucy, we have a full-blown toddler on our hands these days. She hardly ever crawls anymore, eats pretty much everything we eat, and is becoming a very good walker. She’s also getting into everything: she reached up and pulled off one of the stove knobs, she loves to pull the toilet paper off the roll and eat it, she’s doing things to get a laugh, and is starting to throw lots of tantrums when she doesn’t get her way. Fun times!
Lucy had her 10-month doctor’s appointment last week. She’s now 20lbs, 8.5 ozs and 28 inches; between the 50th and 75th percentiles for both height and weight. She’s finally getting into the solid food-mostly all table food-and eats a LOT these days. The biggest development this month, other than eating better, is language acquisition.
Lucy can now say (in context):
1. mama
2. dada (or da)
3. bye-bye
Lucy now says “bye-bye” every time we leave the house. I wonder what word will be next! Any guesses? She is also starting to understand words. If I say “books,” for example, she crawls over to her books. Lucy is really into pointing right now, so I try to identify everything she points to as a way for her to learn more words. Maybe her excitement over all the new words (and all the new walking) is why she’s waking up around 5am every morning. 
Last week we took care of the excessive wake ups, next step is night weaning in the hopes that it pushes back Lucy’s wake up time (since right now she wakes up to nurse at 4:30am, then can’t get back into a deep sleep and consequently just decides to get up for the day), and maybe pushing back bedtime.
Also, congratulations to Steve for his successful appearance on the Steve Harvey Show this morning!
This morning Lucy and I spent about an hour at the zoo. It’s really handy having it in our neighborhood! Lucy had a good time, but she found the people (and especially all the kids) as interesting, or more interesting, than the animals.
When Lucy wakes up in the morning (5:45am these days), we bring her into our bedroom and she plays for a little while until we can summon the energy to get up. Most mornings Lucy likes to stand up at our headboard and look out the window. This morning she started waving and saying “bah-bye” over and over. We’re not sure if she knows what it means, but she does know that it goes with waving!
Well, we still have not managed to catch Lucy on video doing her usual slow, steady walk. BUT, we did get her trying to run (not very successfully) to the camera!
Lucy just walked the entire length of our living room! We’ve attempted to catch her on video, but every time she sees or hears the camera she drops to a crawl and books it over to try and play with the electronic equipment. We’ll keep trying though, and hopefully there will be a video soon!
