16 Months

This little firefighter girl is 16 months! It's been awhile since I've done a month update for Belén and I just couldn't wait till 18 months because she is changing so much from month to month!

At the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum

The girl is obsessed with buckles. If she sneaks away at church or the park or storytime, she can most often be found playing with the buckle in someone else's car seat or stroller. With our big drive to ID coming up, I'm really wishing I could just let her sit in the car seat like this (but don't worry, I won't): 

I wouldn't say she is going through a sleep regression or anything dramatic and terrifying like that, but she is definitely sleeping less than she used to (which really just means she is going from A LOT of sleep to a normal amount of sleep). Instead of waking up at 8:30, she is now waking up closer to 7 or 7:30, some days she even wakes up before Shae. She used to go down for bed at 6:30 p.m., but now goes down closer to 7 or 7:30 and then we hear her playing in her bed for awhile. We've just recently started to put her down in the pack n' play in our room and then transfer her to the crib when we go to bed because she was still awake when we put Shae down and both of them awake at the same time did not help either of them sleep. 

This is the first time we have found her sleeping with her legs out of the crib!

Quick story for memory sake: last week we put Shae in bed and Belén was still awake, jumping around her crib. We left, hoping they would magically fall asleep. There was lots of noise and thumping and Shae yelling, "Be quiet! Lie down!" So I walk in and Shae is on the dresser next to her crib talking to her. He runs across the dresser and jumps back in bed. I take Belén out since Shae is more likely to fall asleep at this point then her.

When I bring her back in, Shae is OUT and she looks over at him and points at him and tries to "talk" to him, thinking she was still going to be able to "play." When she realizes that he is not responding she got super sad and started crying and pointing at him. Poor thing. She loves that silly brother of hers.

Still sucks that bottom lip like crazy when she is sleepy.

Tabby is her main squeeze. She does NOT like it when Shae tries to play with it (which is daily since he is obsessed with stuffed animals and piling them together).

The best part is that she usually always tries to find it's face and puts it in her face like this. If not the face, the tip of the tail. So funny!

Trying to read with Belén has been a joke for the past 4 to 5 months. Like, you sit down with a book and she immediately pushes it awake and freaks out until you let her go. But all of a sudden she likes reading again! And it is more fun now than it was 6 months ago because she interacts while we are reading and pretends to eat things off the pages, or does animal noises when there are animals, or like in this amazing Baby Lit book of Emma, she does all the emotions while we read it. She'll also just sit by herself with a stack of them and read them herself.

Stop taking pictures of me while I read.

She tries to climb in and out of everything.

A little blurry, but this one is the second shelf of one of the toy storage things in nursery.

When she is hungry, she finds the diaper bag and brings it to me. Apparently she has learned that the diaper bag is the ultimate provider. 

And when I don't give her food because we are preparing for a meal, this is usually what happens:

Back in Ithaca we had to start leaving church classes because she was just in to everything or angry because there was nothing for her to do. 

Now that we are in Michigan, the nursery coordinator told us to just go ahead and take her to the younger nursery class as long as we stay with her. She approves of this plan. (They only have 2 nurseries now but said that they will have 4 in the fall! Such a big ward!)

Still loves swings. She could be pushed in a swing all day. Our friends gave us back this baby swing that they were borrowing and she even loved sitting in this little swing. (And Shae loved trying to swing her so hard that she would flip out of it).

 The other day when I could hear her playing instead of napping. I went in to see if she was poopy and this is what I found. Pack n' play mat flipped over and her laying all over it, smiling up at me with a big smile. Curious, mischievous, call it what you will. 

She has refused to let anyone feed her but herself for awhile now, but I used to be able to at least get in a spoonful or two of something before she would freak out and indicate that she wanted to take over. Now, if I even try to give her a spoonful of something she just turns her head away until I hand her the spoon. 

She imitates everything which is really fun. You can just see the wheels turning in her brain as she watches us do something and then tries to do it herself. Sometimes it scares me though too as she imitates Shae's angry face or tries to fake a tantrum while he is on the floor having one. The other day he was shaking his finger at me saying, "Nnoo." And I look over at her and she was shaking her finger at me too.

We played this fun game the other day where one of us would do something, like pat our head, then another person would do it, and then another, and then we all just kept doing it until she caught on and started to do it as well.

Belén is WAY more talkative now then she ever has been. She has been fairly quiet up to this point in her life. Now she is constantly jabbering away about something. She will look up at us and jabber about something and it really feels like she is trying to communicate something to us, or have a conversation with us.

She has gotten fiery over the past few weeks. When she is angry and doesn't want to be held she will first take my glasses off my face and then grab a fistful of hair. She kicks and arches her little body until we get her out of our laps. She has opinions and is not afraid to make them known.

With that said, she is still just the sweetest. She is so goofy and does things everyday that make us laugh (lately it has been trying to walk on her head). We can't get enough of her!