Monday, January 20, 2014

14 month milestones and a new year.

Once again, its been too long since I've given an update! Ava is now 14 months old. Shes crawling everywhere, pulling up and "cruising" around the furniture like crazy. We've been practicing walking around with her, and she does good while holding your hand, but she doesn't want to let go. So we are just letting her take her time and we are confident that she will walk when she is good and ready. My poor girl has developed some stranger anxiety. She certainly doesn't like anyone holding her that she doesn't know or isn't familiar with. She's definitely a mommy's girl... she's a daddy's girl too, big time, but only when I'm not around.

Since my last update, Ava has gotten several new teeth in. We are cutting the dreaded molars as I type. She is finally napping after a much needed dose of Tylenol this morning. I heard teething was bad, and I thought the incisors were rough, BOY was I wrong. We have an amber teething necklace, and it worked great for the teeth that came in after her first 3 (we didn't get one soon enough). I couldn't brag about that necklace enough until those molars came along. I don't think it would have been so bad if she wouldn't have started cutting all 4 of them at once. We have had some rough days of constant cuddling, tylenol every 4 hours and a low grade fever. She also stopped eating pretty much anything for a week. Scared me to death and we had to give her PediaSure to make sure she didn't lose any weight (that's another battle we are fighting - the girl is just tiny and she is gaining weight pretty slowly). She's back to her old eating habits, but has become quite the picky little food critic. I've been doing a lot of research lately on toddler meals, and I have to admit, I've been very creative. I feel like she could live on peanut butter sandwiches, grilled cheese sandwiches, peas and carrots. At least she likes some vegetables. She used to love deli meat like turkey and ham, but she won't eat hardly any meat for me now. Josh got lucky the other day and she ate some chicken from him. She usually spits it out when I feed it to her. I have a hard time getting her to eat any beans or eggs too, so protein (other than peanut butter) is an issue right now.
 
We have also finally ended our breastfeeding journey, and Ava is on whole milk now. I didn't think I would have been so sad to stop, but it was pretty emotional for me. We stopped about 2 weeks ago. I'm still producing a little milk, but not much. I'm just hand expressing a tiny bit in the shower for some relief, and I'm going to try the cabbage thing this week as well. I'm not sure how quickly that works. It didn't seem to upset Ava that we stopped. I just decided it was time now since I am really wanting to start TTC #2 in the next few months. I just wanted to have some "time off" if that makes sense, plus I know its a little harder to get pregnant when you're breastfeeding. We won't be actively trying for a while, but I have started to track my cycles again and temping in the morning. I think when we are for sure ready we may just go ahead and do Clomid again since we were successful with that. I have mixed feelings about even trying to get pregnant right now. I want to because I am going to turn 30 in 10 days. I feel like I'm limited on the amount of time I have to waste, but then again, I think about the wonderful one on one time I'm getting to spend with Ava, and I don't want to disrupt that by adding another baby into the mix. I hope that doesn't sound selfish. I'm conflicted, but I know  that when the time is right, God will let it happen. It's always been in His hands anyway. Plus, the emotional roller coaster that you have to ride on the whole time you TTC is just so exhausting. I'm not sure if I'm ready to deal with that again yet.

Ava's new words this month are "paci", "money" (she says that when she wants a drink, I have no idea why), "maggie" and "sadie" (our dogs' names)... and we have finally moved up to mommy and daddy as opposed to mama and dada!

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