Nothing Is Worth More Than This Day: Nola @ 12 Months (and a little beyond…)

Yes, Ms. Nola turned TWELVE months old on January 27th!
Here's what she's up to these days...

Nola went to the doctor on February 14th for her well visit. She weighed 23 lbs (75.55 percentile) was 28.5” tall (24.1 percentile) and had a head circumference of 47 cm. She got her 2nd flu shot, a chicken pox shot, an MMR shot and a pneumonia shot at that appointment too.
When she turned 12 months, she was still taking bottles when she woke up. Shortly after that, on February 10th, we decided to start “bottle rehab.” We boxed up all of her bottles and replaced them with sippy cups. Day one was not fun. After that, she started to get the hang of it. By the 13th, she was completely fine with it. We donated all of her bottles to Loving Choices. God willing, there will never be bottles in our house again – at least not for our own children.
We were going to switch to sippy cups and milk at the same time, but our well visit got pushed back a couple weeks due to the snow. I wasn’t comfortable making the formula to milk switch without her doctor’s okay, so we did that after our visit. Since February 15th, she hasn’t had any formula at all. She drinks only whole milk. We give her milk in the mornings when she wakes up and she drinks it at lunch at daycare. Otherwise, she’s drinking water or juice or diluted juice from sippy cups at all of her meals and snacks.
Speaking of meals and snacks…the girl LOVES to eat. She will eat pretty much anything we give her. Bananas continue to be her absolute favorite food. She gets so excited when she sees us with one. She starts clapping her hands together (her sign for “more”) and grinning. She also loves yogurt, cheese, bread, pancakes, turkey, chicken, salmon, pizza toppings, spaghetti, soup (with the broth strained out), cooked carrots and the toddler ravioli meals from Gerber. She’ll pretty much eat anything that we eat as long as it’s not spicy. She (of course) LOVES sweets. When we give her a bite of something that she really likes, she says, “mmm” and grins and claps. If it’s something really good and she’s never had it before, she might even laugh.
Nola still wears size 4 diapers. She can still wear some of her 12 month clothes. Her 18 month clothes aren’t as snug, but they are usually too long. When she tries to crawl in her 18 month PJ’s, she gets tangled up in the legs because they are too long. She wears size 3 shoes.
Just recently, Nola has started walking while holding onto our hands. She’ll even walk holding one hand, but it’s slow going and she won’t do it for long. She would much rather crawl. We’ve seen her let go of the furniture that she’s holding onto once or twice, but she’s not quite ready to take a step yet. She is starting to get a little braver though. She has gone from cruising the furniture to walking while holding on to the wall.
She has started pointing lately at anything and everything. She usually points and says, “ga” or “da”. We try to label what she points to, but sometimes we have no idea what exactly that might be.
As for words – she’s not very consistent. (I still blame that on the persistent fluid in her ears.) She said “mama” very clearly on 2/12 – right after she gave me one of her big kisses that seems like she’s going to take a bite out of whomever she is kissing. I nearly melted to the floor when she did it. She still says “mama” sometimes, but usually, she says, “mamamama.” She has also said “dada”. She said it today when she saw Rudy after school and I’m pretty sure that’s the first time she’s done that where we knew for sure that she was actually calling him “dada”. We think she’s calling Caleb “ba” or “bab.” She does it somewhat consistently, but she says that syllable so often that we’re not completely sure. She will imitate “uh-oh”, but she says “uh-uh” instead. She gets the intonation, just not the syllable change. She also babbles with conversational intonation and she plays with sound a lot, repeating sound patterns and sing-song babbling as though she’s carrying on a conversation with herself. She’ll imitate a few syllables like “kah” when we say “quack quack”, but she doesn’t spontaneously say any other words.
What she lacks in words, she makes up for in gestures. She signs “more” by clapping. (She only does it for food, though. I guess technically that would mean that she’s signing “eat” by clapping, right?) She waves any time she hears the words “bye-bye” and she usually blows kisses when we ask her to by opening her mouth and patting it with her hand. When she’s doing something she knows she’s not supposed to do and I say her name with a stern tone, she looks up at me and smiles while shaking her head. I have to try really hard not to laugh because it’s pretty cute. Sometimes when we are talking to her, she’ll raise her eyebrows up and nod like she’s really agreeing with everything we’re saying. I’ve tried to get video of these things, but she clams up every time I get the camera out.
She still sucks her thumb. A lot. Pretty much any time I pick her up, she puts her thumb in her mouth and she always does it when she’s tired or if something upsets her. I asked the pediatrician if there is anything I can do about it and he said it’s too early to worry about it. Everyone always comments about how cute it is and I just cringe.
Nola now has 7 teeth – 4 on the top and 3 on the bottom. That 4th bottom one should be coming through any day now.
Nola moved up to the toddler room at daycare on February 14th. She’s now a “Busy Bee.” One of her daycare workers was also Caleb’s daycare worker when he was 18 months. Nola is the only child in the class that doesn’t walk. In the class, she sits in a little chair at a table for her meals and sleeps on a cot instead of in a crib. Apparently, she’s doing pretty well with it. She usually sleeps anywhere from an hour to 2 hours at naptime. The girls in her class tell us that she eats pretty much everything they give her and hasn’t had trouble at the table at all.