Merry Christmas!

For Christmas Santa got Camila a Rocking Pony. We weren't sure how she would react when she came down in the morning and saw it sitting in the living room. But we weren't disappointed - she made a beeline for it and started poking around. Too bad she only likes to sit on it for 10 seconds or so. Maybe in a few more months. :)

She also had fun unwrapping gifts. As always, opening is more fun than actually playing with what's inside....except in this case. We gave her a little snowglobe with a cat inside. (She won't be able to play with it until she's like 8!) But she absolutely loved it, and sat hugging the little thing for a good part of the morning. She loves the musical snowglobe I bought for myself, so we thought this would be a fun thing for her to get and then tell her about it when she's older.

Here she is in her Christmas outfit opening gifts at Grandma & Grandpa Nelson's. Not surprisingly, she was much easier this year than last. We were able to eat dinner as a family, play a lot, and enjoy opening gifts. I remember last year she was crying all throughout gift-opening, and Fabricio missed the first part of dinner b/c he was trying to put Camila down for a nap. What a difference a year makes!

We didn't realize how a simple booster seat would turn into such a fun toy. She played on this thing for about 30-45 minutes on Christmas Eve at my Aunt & Uncles', and for another 30-45 minutes on Christmas Day. She loved climbing in and out. I think we'll be getting her a little chair for our house! (This one stays at my parents').

What did you say?

What did you say? Dada will be home in 40 hours?

Did I hear that right? No way!

Oh boy! I'm so excited!

Camila's doll is thirsty

It seems like she's too young to understand, but this afternoon I caught Camila giving her doll a drink of water (well, the glass was empty.) Isn't she too young to understand that? Either way, I thought it was really cute. :) Camila is also now into "washing"herself. I give her a washcloth in the bathtub and she likes to wash herself. But this has also carried over into anytime she has water. Particularly when she's washing her hands; she likes to pat her chest with water. I can just see the wet mess this will turn out to be...

Oh, Christmas Tree!

I hope everyone is enjoying the Christmas season. Camila and I have been listening to Christmas music for about 4 weeks now. :) Anyway, just a quick update of new things with her. She is now trying to blow out the flame everytime she sees a candle. She obviously is imitating what she seems me do, and it's pretty cute. She'll be sitting on the floor playing, look up and realize I've lit a candle, and starts to blow. She also has tried to say "Camila" a couple of times. It's no where near how it's supposed to sound, but I love that she's trying. And this was something interesting I noticed this evening. We were sitting on the floor playing with a tuperware container and lid, and she understood which way the lid needed to face in order to fit on top of the tuperware. If I placed it on the floor upside down or right side up, she knew right away if she needed to flip it or not in order to get it to fit on the container. What a smart girl! ;) Just a few misc pictures from tonight. I was trying to get a picture of us in front of the Christmas tree. Camila was pretty excited to see the lights.

Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving with family and friends. Camila and I enjoyed our Thanksgiving at my parents. My poor dad, he was the only guy there since Fabricio is still in Geneva. Here's a picture of all the girls: my mom, Grandma Bentrup, me & Camila, and Melissa. :) We missed Fabricio a lot, but fortunately he'll be home in just a few weeks. Which means that, yikes, Christmas is only a few weeks away! Camila has been up to several things lately. She just started "clucking" her tongue. I have no idea how she figured out how to do that, because it's not something that I do. Maybe daycare? She also is getting really good at "shushing", which I find adorable. It's a great way to get her to quiet down when she's hyper, because she'll try to imitate me now. :) I'm amazed as she seems to understand some of the animal sounds I've been teaching her. The other night she was reading through her book and stopped on the page with a cow and said "booo" (Camila's way of saying "moo"). She looked at me, almost as if she wanted to make sure she was saying it right. She is still in love with cats (poor Fabricio. I'm afraid he'll lose out on that battle some day. Hopefully there are some good allergy meds for him, or better yet, maybe he'll outgrow his allergies!) She was reading another book of hers yesterday, stopped on the page with the kittens, and gave them a kiss. And of course, whenever we're at my parents she terrorizes the cats by chasing them around. She's pretty quick too, and occasionally gets the cats into a corner which they do NOT like. As a result, Camila doesn't know that cats say "meow". She thinks they say "hiss", and will hiss right back at them every time she sees the cats! Silly girl! Here are just a few pictures of Camila in her Thanksgiving outfit.

A new trick

Camila has been able to push her toys along the floor (either walking on her feet or "walking" on her knees) for the past few weeks. However, this weekend I put her on her ride toy to see what she'd do. After a few minutes she figured out that she can ride it by pushing her feet, in effect going backwards across the room. We spent a good length of time with her riding the toy across the living room, her running into the couch, wall, ottoman, and me having to reposition her so she could do it all over again. :) I think the last picture captured how much fun she was having. ;)

Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!

Just a quick update

Sorry I haven't updated the blog in a while. It's been tougher this time with Fabricio in Geneva. I think it's because the holidays are coming up and I'm sad he's not here to enjoy it (although he will be here for Christmas) and the economy is so horrible right now it's just depressing in general. Anyway, here's a quick update. Camila is always on the go, never in the same place for more than a minute. It's hard to keep her entertained so I can make dinner or clean up in the kitchen. And tonight she stood on her own (unsupported) for a few seconds. Maybe she's closer to walking than I thought? I still think it will be a couple of months, but maybe I'm wrong. I just appreciate that she waits to do things until she's comfortable. For example, she didn't pull herself up to stand until she was comfortable sitting back down again. I've heard stories about babies crying in the middle of the night because they stand up and can't figure out how to sit back down. Fortunately we haven't had that with Camila yet. :) While I'm not too thrilled about this, it's quite amusing. She has no problem identifying "dada", but ask her who "mama" is, and she pats herself. I think it's because I've tried so hard to teach her who mama is by pointing to myself. So, she just turns around and does the same thing, pointing to herself. :) However, she has no problem shouting for mama when she's upset about something or wants me to do/give her something. I think she's yelling at me. ;) I'm also trying to teach her that the cow says "moo". Camila believes a cow says "boo". :) And at daycare today Lori was teaching her to say "shush". She's not quite there yet, but she'll get there. I got her to do it once on the drive home. She's basically done with baby food. SHe doesn't eat any at daycare. I'm not sure what I'm going to do, b/c I have a cupboard full of baby food! Hmmm...I think that's it. Check out the image on the tv. I had Entertainment Tonight on in the background, and I think they were talking about some cele getting plastic surgery. What a perfect moment to take a picture of Camila!

Camila's birthday party

We were able to celebrate Camila's first birthday on Saturday. My parents and sister came down, and we had Camila's favorite dinner - and mine - (pizza), opened gifts, and ate chocolate cupcakes. Yum! (We really just had pizza because it's the easiest!) Since Camila had never had any type of dessert before (except a bite of brownie that I snuck to her one time) I wasn't sure how she would feel about her birthday cupcake. It took her a while to understand that she could eat it, but ended up picking at the frosting and cupcake until she ate almost the whole thing! It was towards the end that she finally decided to pick it up and stuff it in her face. She also got the hang of opening her gifts, but she took her time. We ended up only having her open the gifts from Melissa and my parents, otherwise we would have been there until 2:00am. :) (I wrapped up some gifts that I've already let her play with.) I was also concerned about daylight savings, but it worked out pretty well. We ended up keeping her up until 9:15, since she had her birthday cupcake at 7:30 (yes, I know - what were we thinking?!) With so much going on she didn't even realize that it was an hour past her bedtime, and she slept until 7:30 (new time). Whew! My struggle now is that she is really resisting her 2nd nap. I don't think she's ready to drop it yet (or rather, I'm not ready for her to drop it!), since she can't make it past 10am without her 1st nap. I don't know if it's because Fabricio's home so she wants to play, or if that was just a coincidence. But sometimes she does only take 1 nap at daycare, so maybe I need to accept it and try dropping that nap....

Happy Halloween

Happy Halloween! Here are some pictures of our little cow. :) We spent the day at a local apple orchard (what a beautiful day!) and tried to get some pictures of Camila sitting on the hay bale. Too bad she kept trying to climb off! That night we didn't do any trick-or-treating with Camila. She's just a little too young. But we did enjoy a dinner at Buffalo Wild Wings. Yum! The bummer was that someone took all our candy (we left it in a bowl out front) so we had to scramble looking for stray pieces of candy to hand out to our neighbor!

Cruising, dancing, and singing

Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of Camila doing these things, but just this weekend I noticed that she has started "cruising" along the furniture. She's also "walking" behind her walk-behind toy. While I don't consider this to be truly walking, I'm guessing Fabricio's right when he said she'll be walking soon. That's when all craziness breaks lose, right? ;) She also seems to dance with me. I'll pick her up and dance around the room and sing when one of my favorite songs comes on the radio (right now it's Viva la Vida by Coldplay.) This weekend Camila started to kick her feet, shake her head, and wave her hands a little. I think that's her way of dancing. Plus, she started shaking her head when the song came on in the car. She also sings along, making "ahhh" sounds. Now I'm trying to teach her to sing to other songs, so this morning it was U2. I love how she gets more and more interactive each day!

I hate Sundays (plus, this is my 100 post!)

I hate Sundays. No matter how hard, easy, busy, boring the weekend has been, I hate Sundays. It's 5 long days until I get to spend any quality time with Camila. The entire week is rush, rush, rush. At least it's a short week, as I'm taking Thurs afternoon and Friday off. Anyway, enough of my complaining. Although I didn't capture any pictures of this, I had a great time this afternoon sitting on the couch snuggling with Camila. We enjoyed our Honeycrisp apples and cheddar cheese snack. :) It was so much fun just sitting there for 20 minutes cuddling with her! Here she is hiding in a "tunnel".

Here she is brushing her hair (I had to buy her a normal brush - the baby brush no longer gets the tangles out!).

Here she is stuck behind the end table (she thought it would be fun to crawl though, but didn't realize she couldn't get out as she can't crawl backwards!)

A few shots from dinner tonight. Little Miss Attitude was demanding chili (which she loves) but her mean mom made her eat her veggies first.

I think someone taught her sign language, but she does the "milk" sign whenever she just wants food in general. She had both hands going tonight at dinner, demanding more chili or corn muffin.

Whenever Camila is tired, she puts her hand up by her face. It's a dead giveaway that it's time for a nap, or an early bedtime in this case.