Clapping and Dancing

Kaelyn has started clapping along to things and dancing quite a bit as well. We had American Idol on the other night and she just danced and danced. Sean liked that, of course, because they were singing Elvis songs! Sorry, Sean, she'll dance to about anything! She danced away to KGBI on the radio the other day. And she danced to the song her new little musical teapot sings. She's an equal opportunity dancer.

The clapping is cute too. She started clapping from playing a lot of patty cake with my mom. But now she claps for other things too. When we were at my parents house last weekend we went to their church and they had a children's program for most of the service. At the end everyone applauded...including Kaelyn! I feel mighty special today, too, because she nursed first thing this morning and then clapped. I must have made some tasty milk.

On those cute notes, sleeping hasn't been going so well lately. Kaelyn has slept through the night twice in her almost one year. For quite some time she was going to bed around 8:30 and nursing at 5:30am and then sleeping till 7am. That has completely stopped. Now if I'm lucky enough for her to sleep till 5:30 it's REALLY hard to get her back to sleep. Or at least back to sleep in her own bed. This week she just got up for the day twice at that time. A couple of times I took her back to bed with me and with lots of urging she slept on. Once she got up at 4am and partied for an hour and a half. She wasn't even tired, it seemed! And once she would NOT sleep alone from 1:30am on so she had to sleep with me. That night she would NOT stop moving, the only way I could keep her from moving long enough to fall back asleep was to hold her tightly against me. I was exhausted the next day because I didn't get much sleep, but thankfully, Kaelyn was in a decent mood so at least we weren't BOTH grumpy! Just when I was getting used to having my blissful mornings alone to run and get a massage and read and write, of course, things had to change.

I would love to find a way to get Kaelyn to go to sleep by herself. I still have to rock her to sleep for her naps and then dump her in her bed. It's an artform, really. If I try just putting her in her bed she either screams bloody murder or laughs and giggles and plays like it's a great time! Not sure how to transition here...

And I'm not sure how to get her to eat food other than baby stuff. She likes zuchinni bread, gram crackers, and veggie puffs. That's it for "real food." Everything else she just pushes away. She's going to need something other than baby food at some point! But most of the time she won't every TRY anything much less eat more than one bite if she DOES.

Sometimes Kaelyn babbles endlessly. That's pretty cute. She's quite the little storyteller! And now she has stories to tell. We went to the church garage sale yesterday and she picked out a 300 page chapter book. No pictures! She flipped through that thing ALL the way home. I had no idea she was so advanced! And here I keep getting her board books from the library! We'll have to go to the big people section next time!

Tomorrow is Kaelyn's second first birthday party with my husband's family. They're coming to our house. Probably from 6-9 people total. We made chocolate and funfetti white cupcakes this morning so all we have to do is ice them and we're set. We'll have hamburgers on the grill so we have some hamburger patting to do too. We have a LOT of cleaning up to do today, there's stuff EVERYWHERE! Don't want people to have to kick their way in! :) Hopefully the party goes as well as last weekend's. That one was fun and Kaelyn was good and all was well with the world!

Hey, if the party is REALLY good maybe she'll even clap and dance for us! :)