I was going to just post a late 21-month recap, but truthfully so much changed in the last month-plus, that they started running together. Like, she has a baby brother now and while I had a lot of her 21-month post ready-ish before he was born, I wanted to include some stuff about the very beginning of becoming a big sister. And then lots of things changed suddenly and it became hard to separate some of the changes from having a new sibling, so I decided to combine the two months.
Seeing C not only as my baby -which I still try to do- but as a bigger kid, and as Z’s big sister has been a joy. She somehow gets funnier and sweeter and more wonderful every day.
C at 21-22 Months
Exactly what I said the last couple months: I’m not sure how many different ways I can say that C is so fun, but that (and, “I’m obsessed with her,” and, “I adore her,” and, “She’s so sweet”) is what I say about a hundred times a day. I love toddler life.
It’s true. She’s awesome. C is so fun and so funny. She has excellent comedic timing and a big personality, and she makes us laugh every day. She has lots of strong toddler opinions, and she makes them known. But she is still very adaptable and the very sweetest. She’s great at playing by herself, especially when we’re out and about, and her imagination seems to be going wild. She loves pretending to cook, feed us, clean, and talk on the phone, and she pretends her stuffed animals are doing all that stuff, too. My mom got her a baby doll a couple weeks before her brother was born, and seeing her take the baby places, put the baby to bed, and snuggle the baby has been extremely sweet.
She still loves buckles and is gaining interest in zippers and locks. C also loves to throw/catch/kick balls, wrestle around, play with race cars, play the piano, climb all over us, build and knock over towers, and be chased around the house and neighborhood.
She loves to see what I’m cooking and snack on ingredients, help get laundry out of the dryer and unload the dishwasher, take things to the trash, guide the vacuum and mop, and undo (or redo) any attempt at organization she can reach. She’s been helping me feed Willis, let him outside, and walk him for a while now, but she recently figured out how to get his food all by herself, so sometimes she randomly leaves the room and starts giving him a meal well outside his usual eating times.
We call C an outside kid because she is always so happy to be outside – rain or shine – and she gets crabby when she’s been inside too long. We’re outside way more than we were in the summer, and I’m already brainstorming how we’re going to get her outside as much as she needs when it starts getting dark earlier. (Spoiler: she’s not really napping at the moment, so she might have solved this problem for me.) We often start and end the day with a walk in the woods or around the neighborhood.
C loves drawing with chalk, playing with our bubble guns, spraying the gardens (and us) with the hose, and helping with yard work. Jack and I were talking about how we used to see some of those as “hot weather activities.” C sees them as rainy day activities, chilly day activities, and basically just every day activities. She also loves evening adventures to the creek behind our house. Jack is mostly in charge of those these days because at the beginning of the month, I was too pregnant to get down there well and now, I have a cluster-feeding baby in the evenings. But I try to get down there with her a couple times a week.
C is a little athlete and she really doesn’t stop moving. Everyone who spends time with her comments on this. I can’t imagine what she’d do if she wasn’t moving all the time because it’s really all I’ve ever known. She loves walking backwards, spinning in circles, doing sprints down our front hall, rolling around on the couch and ottoman, and trying to climb everything. She’s so good at stairs that I sometimes get lazy with our baby gates; I know she can handle going up and down, and I’m never far behind.
She’s crazy strong, and her new thing is hanging. We’ve known she can hang (and do pull-ups) for a long time now, but she usually just declined to when she got the chance. Now if she sees a bar or the rings at Little Gym or a playground, she beelines toward them and wants to hang, swing, and drop over and over again.
She loves to point at things and tell us what they are. We’re getting more and more words from our little physically-motivated toddler, and it is so fun. I hear her test out a new word or five almost every day and she strings two or three together here and there. Her little voice is the best, and I love having more ways to communicate with her.
C loves dogs and other animals, dolls, books, pictures, mirrors, music, sunglasses, running errands, big kids, playing with water, and anything she can climb. And she really loves Z. She loves reading to him and giving him hugs and kisses, her snacks, her toys, and his pacifiers.
She loves dancing, and if there’s a movie on with dancing in it, she will almost always stop whatever other thing she’s doing to exclaim, “Dance!” and dance with the characters.
C loves books, and especially likes pointing at everything in a book so you’ll tell her what it is. Sometimes, she also goes off and sits by herself and looks through her books, babbling to herself, which is adorable. And while she’s pretty easygoing about lots of things, she really does not love having her teeth brushed at night.
C has been acting like her bottom two-year molars are bothering her for a bit, and I finally saw that one of them is finally through and the other is about to erupt. So, looks like we’ll have about a few months off of teething entirely before her brother starts.
Sleep
C’s sleep has been a disaster. It’s very, very hard because we know she needs more than she’s getting, but we don’t know how to help her get it. Her sleep needs have definitely decreased a little, but not quite as much as her actual sleep. When she sleeps 11.5-12 hours at night, she is very happy and listens beautifully and has energy and patience. When she doesn’t, she has a harder time listening and is intermittently very happy and very tired-upset, while still having seemingly endless energy.
Shortly after Z was born, C was pretty congested and her penultimate molar was breaking through, so I thought maybe that explained the terrible sleep. She would take till 10 or later to fall asleep, and then be up every couple hours and hard to get back down. Or, she would be extremely awake and playful for hours at a time. She’d try to get up for the day at 5 or 6. But her naps were pretty good, often 2-2.5 hours.
It got a little better, and then worse again, and then we started experimenting with different combinations of naps and bedtimes to see if we could make it better.
Right now, if she sleeps 11.5-12 hours overnight, we try to get through the day with just a movie and some quiet time on the couch a little bit after lunch. If she sleeps less than that, we try to turn quiet time into a short (hour-ish) nap on the couch.
She’s more than a little tired and crabby many evenings, but this usually allows her to get to bed by 8, and 8:30 at the latest and sleep okay. This seems to be the right recipe for getting us all some decent sleep… except on the couple nights it totally hasn’t. She’s still generally up by 7:30, and often either Jack or I has to try to help her get some more sleep around 6 because she often tries to get up then but is still extremely tired.
She still doesn’t really use blankets on the bed, but we have them rolled up as “bumpers” because she kept hitting her head on the railings in the dark. She occasionally plays with using them as blankets and pillows, but mostly they stay at the edges of the bed.
Jack usually does her bedtime these days. He give her some milk and rocks her, and she falls asleep in his arms or rolls away to fall sleep by herself. Now that we’ve shortened/eliminated naps, It takes between 20-30 minutes most nights. Before, it was taking an hour or more almost every night.
She has mostly been leaving her room in the morning and happily announcing she’s awake by coming into our room or standing at the top of the stairs and calling, “Mom! Dad!”
Eating
C eats well most of the time. There are days where she barely touches anything, even the things she asks for. There are days where she probably eats more chips than anything else, but most days she eats whatever we give her happily. I’m always shocked by how much I see other kids eat in comparison, and then I remember how much milk she still drinks. But she’s healthy and strong and eats a varied diet… it’s just supplemented with a lot of milk.
We only offer dessert occasionally, and C is only interested about half the time. Even then, she only ever wants a few bites. But she does seem to like whipped cream, ice cream, and chocolate.
We eat most meals as a family right now, since Jack is on paternity leave. C doesn’t usually eat much for breakfast, so that’s the main exception. She snacks within reason. We try to avoid big snacks too close to meals. If she’s hungry, she does well with fruit and veggies as “appetizers.” Many days it seems like she hardly eats anything. Others, I’m shocked that she’s eating so much.
C started rejecting her high chair before her brother was born and we had a couple days of absolute meltdowns during dinner when we tried to get her to sit in it. So, now we ask if she wants her high chair or her booster seat, and she usually chooses the latter.
C still loves water but is more curious about other drinks now. We give her tastes when she asks. She has changed her tune on chocolate milk, and she has a little most days. Fortunately, she still loves water, and she’s very big on ice.
Schedule
This has changed again!
Intentionally altering C’s schedule has never worked for us before (it temporarily worked at 20 months, but she slowly crept back to a 10pm bedtime). But with a new baby and neither us nor C getting any sleep, we decided we had to try again.
She (mostly) gets up between 7 and 8 these days. We have some family time in the morning, she plays and listens to her Tonies and reads, and then we run errands, go outside, or go on play dates.
We eat lunch around 12-12:30, and then she plays or helps while I clean up. And then we try for quiet time or a nap after lunch. This usually looks like C playing at the beginning of a movie, us asking if she’s ready for milk when she slows down, and her cuddling with me on the couch while she drinks milk. If she’s going to fall asleep, she usually does around 2:30-3. We try to only let her sleep for an hour, and still don’t get her up later than 4. If she naps, she usually needs a snack and some time to reenter the world, but she’s often ready to go outside and play or play with her toys shortly after. She and Jack usually venture to the creek for a bit while I prep dinner.
As part of moving her schedule forward a bit, I’ve been trying to get dinner together earlier. It’s pretty easy with Jack not working.
We eat dinner around 6:30, often squeeze in a little more outside time, and let her get all her energy out by running all over the couch, tumbling around on her Nugget, or climbing up and down the stairs. Jack takes her up to bed once she crashes or when she admits to being ready. It’s usually between 7:45 and 8, and she’s typically asleep well before 8:30.
Things I Don’t Want to Forget
- She has recently started including soft back pats in her long hugs. She also often says, “Awwwww,” because she hears us say that when she gives out hugs. So sweet.
- She gets frustrated with having a ponytail and insists on going through most of the day with her hair in her face. This also bothers her, and she spends a lot of time swiping it out of her eyes. I spend a lot of time trying to convince her to just keep it up.
- The two signs she’s used the longest are “more” and “please,” and she’s started adding the verbalization to the sign.
- She loves signing “again” and saying something that sounds vaguely like “again” when she hears a song she likes or wants you to keep reading the same book. We have been repeating everything from Taylor Swift songs to Nat King Cole’s “L-O-V-E” to her favorite books to her favorite scenes in Sleeping Beauty due to this request.
- When we’re outside, she doesn’t want to go in, even if she says she does. We wrap up our after-dinner walk when the stars are out, and she’s still insisting we go to the creek. As soon as we walk inside, she’s desperate to go back out.
- She has the best eyesight and spots ants, other bugs, and birds from weirdly far away.
- C still loves the tags on her toys and rubbing her fingers on anything that vaguely resembles tags or nubs. She plays with the strings on my shorts, the extra length on my watch, my hair, the diamond on my engagement ring, and the strap on my bra while she’s winding down. She’ll absentmindedly play with the fringe on a blanket or a tag on her toy while she’s playing.
- She’ll randomly climb onto your lap and hug/kiss you. It’s like she just realized she loves you so much that she has to give you a hug/kiss right now.
- Sometimes she also just climbs in my lap facing me, looks me in the eyes, and takes a handful of hair on each side of my head and plays with it.
- She likes to duck between your legs when you’re standing, and she’ll go back and forth for a while before she gets tired of the game.
- When I pick her up, sometimes she’ll lay her head on my shoulder and just go totally limp for a few minutes.
- She brings us her rain/creek boots when she wants to go outside, usually yelling, “Buts!”
- We’ve always said she does things in her own time, and it’s only now that she consistently wants to repeat things we say. Before, when we asked her to say something, she’d just say, “No,” or laugh. Now, she very often makes a valiant attempt.
- She was Princess Aurora for Halloween, largely because she says, “Issess Awowa,” all the time and I think it’s the cutest thing ever.
- When she doesn’t want to be put down, she’ll pull her knees into her chest and refuse to put her feet on the floor.
- When she doesn’t want to be picked up, she makes her armpits go limp so she just slides through your grip.
- She fake coughs and sneezes anytime she hears someone else cough or sneeze.
- She has the best, most genuine giggle ever.
- Whether you’re laying on the floor or sitting on the couch, she treats you like a jungle gym and climbs and rolls all over you.
- She still loves milk to help her wind down. Her way of asking to go to bed is asking for milk.
