Magical Age

This is the worst age.  I mean, I don't even know what the worst age is but this one is pretty bad.  Felicity is 15.5 months and the climbing!  The teething!  The not great sleeping!  The SHRIEKING.  OH LORD THE SHRIEKING.  Just today I feel like it's started in earnest - like before she was shrieking sometimes, in the way that babies do when they are just discovering their voices, but now, today, she is shrieking in a very demanding and very LOUD way.  It's 8:29 and I put her to bed at around 7:40 and my ears are still kind of ringing.

I was telling her tonight when I was rocking her, I'm sorry.  I mean it, I am really sorry.  I am MUCH more wrung out by her than I was with the others.  I'm older, there are so many more of them, it's just - I am awful with her, sometimes.  We're having some work done on the kitchen so Felicity and I have had to be out of the house for the last two days and it has been ROUGH.  I feel like I've taken her in and out of that car seat 200 times in the last two days.

I took the girls out to lunch today and she was hungry, starving, like a crazy person.  I couldn't SHOVEL that applesauce in her face fast enough to stop her from screaming.  We are in public!, I kept telling her!  CUT IT OUT!

She is hilarious and adorable and also she is driving me crazy.  By the end of the day, I am so sick of her and then she is VERY cute, which helps.  She is cute in the bath and cute when I put lotion on her. Mmmmmmm, she says, which is just adorable.  She was jamming her bottle in my mouth tonight - it just has water in it, she doesn't get milk bottles anymore, which is another thing that is making her mad.  Anyways, she was jamming the bottle in my mouth, offering it to me and I said "mmmmm thank you!" and she was laughing in this super cute, barely amused way.  She kills me and she also kills me.  And she is probably killing me.  Ha!

Waaaah!  

Bottle

Ugh, Felicity is still taking a bottle!  I know she shouldn't, I guess.  I mean, I don't really know anything, I don't care.  Maria only took a bottle at the end, and never well, and Veronica was awful with the sippy cup for months and never took a bottle.  Anthony took a bottle and at 15 months, I just switched him over to a sippy cup and all was well.  But I am at a loss with Felicity.

I really don't care, I have some vague notion of getting her off the bottles by about 15 or 16 months.  She doesn't take any more formula, she takes a bottle of milk before bed and one before her nap because she is so in the habit of drinking and then going to sleep.  Normally I would tsk tsk about it, but she has a crappy life, nap and sleep wise, and she almost always has.  There are all these other people around who don't give a HOOT if she sleeps, so I try to make it work as well as I can.

Lately she has been finishing her bottle and then going to sleep.  Like today at TWO (late!) I was putting her down, I gave her a bottle and she popped up and started babbling away and I said okay go to sleep, and lay her down and she cried on and off for about 15 or 20 minutes but then napped.  So I figure soon, I'll just bring up a sippy cup and do that and then soon after that I'll start doing that at night.  We'll see.  I'm sure it will all work out, ha ha ha sure it will.

She is doing just great, she's so cute.  She babbles away, she says "Daddy!" and "Hiiiii!" and "Baby!".  I told Laura, today our friend Fillipo stepped on her hand and she said, all accusingly and through tears, "Baby!  BABY!", while shoving her hand in my face, as if to say "I am only a baby!  How dare he hurt me in this way?".  That's what I got out of it anyway.  I have to take her for her 15 month checkup here soon, I suppose.  More shots, probably, ugh.

Oh this was funny.  I have this friend who posted on Facebook that she thought it was bs that toddlers had the ability to climb so high before they had the fear that they would fall.  She said if you need me, I'll just be sitting here with my eyes glued to my son.  So I commented and said I felt for her, I thought it was crazy that they were designed to fall from their height but not their height PLUS four feet!  Some jackass friend of hers posted this CRAZY thing about - I want to copy it but I shouldn't.  But he said that children are meant to be free and try things and if you put them in a rocker seat, a stroller, a jumper, an exersaucer, and something else, it meant they would have a developmental problem or be ruined in some other way.  WTH?  What the hell?  What are you supposed to do with a fool who is 14 months old and would walk into traffic if you let them?  You can't put them in a stroller or it will give them developmental disorders?  People are insane.  INSANE.