9/19 - Joy has been telling me when she needs a new diaper (patting her bottom) but this day, she got out the changing pad and wipes, set up the pad on the bathroom floor, put a new diaper on top of the wipes box, lay down on the pad, and called for me.
9/20 - Noah is definitely our hands-on guy. He asks for crafts related to what we do in school. When we read a book about archaeology, he immediately wanted to go dig in the back yard. He got a trowel and a sieve and a container to hold his treasures and happily dug and sifted for a long time.
~9/20 - Joy can say, "ow".
9/25 - Joy put on her own socks all by herself. Before this, she had successfully put on mine.
9/27 - Joy says "please" to go with her sign. It sounds like "wee".
9/27 - Sounding the same, but in a different context. When she plays with the abacus, she says, "wee, wee, wee" as she movs the beads. 9/28 - She also "counted" "wee, wee, wee" when playing with the corners cards.
9/28 - Faith really wanted to play Corners with me, so I made up a version she can do. (The "real" game involves finding numbers that add up to 5, 10, 15, or 20.) We played where we had to match the color and the numeral. Faith loved it!
Now Joy's "please" has some gentle consonant in front, similar to "fwee".
I am now 19 weeks into the pregnancy, which means we are almost halfway there! I started feeling movement around 15 weeks, which is a little later than I have felt the couple of most recent others. But there is definitely no worry about that now - baby's moving plenty!
As with Joy's pregnancy, I'm experiencing extreme sensitivity with nursing. For a while, (likely due to transition and sleeping in someone else's house) Joy was nursing every two hours or so during the night. It was really wearing on me, and after one really horrible night, Jon took her for the whole next night and proved to us both (Joy and me) that she could get through the night without nursing. The next night, she slept next to me as usual, but I was as firm as Daddy and told her to wait until morning. That worked, too! And now she sleeps through the night barely even stirring (there was a transition period where she would cry when I said no, gradually decreasing) This is such a sanity saver for me. And now sometimes she doesn't even nurse in the mornings, but we just get up and go have breakfast.
I'm still debating within myself whether to wean her before she's two or not, since I think it's quite likely I'll be tandem nursing again if I do make it until she's two. But that, I think, we will take one day at a time and see what happens. She's only nursing one to three times in a 24 hour period, so I can manage to handle it for now.
Work on the house is progressing and it is encouraging. We have pictures in the camera, but I am so behind on uploading that it will be a while before they're posted.
The weather is definitely fall and the house is getting chilly. But the plumber is not coming to hook up the boiler until next week. That means cold water and only space heaters, but it's not really cold yet. It felt worse when it was two weeks, but now one of those has already gone by!
Jonathan continues to live at the library when he can. He's been reading multitudes of Animorphs and Warriors (about cats.) He LOVES writing in cursive and this is the motivation for writing now. He's going to participate in the Book-It program this year because he can write down the titles in cursive. (Last year he chose not to participate simply because he didn't want to write down the books he read!)
School is going well overall, but the definition of "going well" may mean differently to you than it does to me. And that is my next post.
Joy can say, "uh-oh" too.
Thanks so much for the update, by the way. I love love love the Joy diaper story, even if I had heard it by phone already.
Wow that Joy can put on her own socks already! Think hard about the nursing question. Joseph wasn't nursing much before Vivienne came, but then he wanted it quite often after she arrived. If he'd been weaned a number of weeks before the birth I wonder if nursing would still have been his way of getting more mommy or if he would have found another.
I am expecting that if I don't wean her before the baby comes, she'll nurse a lot more after the milk comes in. I've tandemed twice as you know, so I know I could do it again. Just not sure I want to. But I should decide for sure by December so I'll have time to wean her if that's the decision.
My midwife said sometimes the toddlers wean when the milk comes because the taste changes and they don't like it, but it does seem like a bit of a gamble and that certainly didn't happen with the others! I'll be praying for your decision.
Thank you. I decided already to go ahead and wean her. November 1 at bedtime was her last. She asks occasionally but no longer gets upset when I say no. She's fine with cuddling, and I am so relieved!
Wow! That was easy! Congrats!