Days of Eliza & Emily: Updates

It's been really fun being with Eliza. I suspect she'll grow up to be quite a fun-loving gal. I know most babies her age are getting really curious about their world and so is Eliza..my ever curious baby, even in the kitchen, a familiar place, her eyes will be darting to see what's new to play with and she'll lean towards it even when you're carrying her. She's so determined you just have to go there. Sometimes i wonder if she's gonna be quite a head-strong kinda gal next time.

I love Eliza's excited moments:
- When we are getting ready to go out, as in all dressed up and the main door is open. She'll squeal, kick her legs in excitement and she give her classic mi3-mi3 eyes grin, which looks like this:

if she does get out of the house to gai-gai, she does her lil dance of excitement again when we are out of the house. we all unanimously agree she have hui1 ka1 (aka flower feet in hokkien which means to love to go out)
- she gets excited when we play all kids of peek-a-boo with her and she'll play it back with us. (towel over our head / book covering our eyes / hiding behind a door...)
- she gets excited when we give her a new toy she really really wants (ok every baby will anyway) and i enjoy her excitement with her

It's really really fun. and it gets better because...
- the frustrations of weaning to soilds is more or less over (as she loves eating now...including the food we put into our mouths)
- she's easier to put to sleep, especially when it's milktime + naptime is around the same time, the milk knocks her out and saves me the time letting her roll all around till she falls asleep.
- she's not that difficult to understand. she whines, she 'ehs', she lunges to where she wants...we more or less understand what she wants. even when she woke up this morning at 5am rolling all over us in bed but not crying i could sense that she wanted to drink milk.
- she is quite content to be occupied with things to play
- she doesn't rouse so often from her night sleep from 9-12pm timing
- she's really responsive and will show affection towards us. ie she'll be playing and halfway thru she'll go to daddy and lean on his thigh, as if giving him a hug. she'll place her head on my chest and put her arm at my waist in an affectionate way... and she'll be up after a few seconds to play again.

Then there are the challenges:
- wondering when we can wean her off the pacifier at night
- having to be patient through all the repetitions of telling her 'no, you cannot touch this' or 'no, you cannot eat this' AND be consistent at it. i'm waiting for the day she can learn it. she'll still go head on towards whatever she wants and is insistent on having it, if she doesn't get it or if you snatch it away from her, she'll cry the house down, it's those fierce angry "why didn't you let me have it" cries. the more peaceful way is a one-for-one exchange, though sometimes i run out of exciting things to let her play with.
- watching her now since she's so mobile. this morning while i was still groggily asleep, she has already woken with daddy and when she saw daddy go out of the room, she wanted to follow and crawled to the bed edge and....her bump, and few seconds later her cry, woke me up. she didn't really cry very long though, Ww says it's a 6/10 intensity cry and it probably lasted less than 3mins. oh dear oh dear. poor lil gal. i wondered if i should bring her to sleep with us now that she'll fall off the bed, but i think it's cos she's awake and not that she was sleeping and rolled off the bed. still, we'll see, we'll see. somehow, she has learnt to climb off the mattress legs down first (yes she did it on her own last sunday!! got me so excited and proud of her), hope she'll be able to learn how to get off our bed legs down first, i'll try to teach her over the weekend.

There's so much i wished i could pen down but i somehow get amnesia when i sit in front of the computer, i wonder what i need to do.

Days of Eliza:

I was trying to get a shot of her excited while she's playing...really cute!

One day i'll upload the video of what she was doing. somehow, she'll always sing into containers like these...and this is a big container. she does get quite excited when she does so.

finally she holds her own bottle on her own!!!

it's hard to put her to sleep in her cot aka playpen. ok..maybe that's why it's called a playpen..gee. we've raised the playpen a little higher so that it's easier for us to put her in to sleep and so that she can reach the edge to stand up, however, it leaves 2 sides with gaps which she sometimes finds it fun to play. here she's trying to reach for something inside...i can't remember what it was...

this is the other fun part of the playpen where i put her shoes, books and toys. here's Eliza checking what fun and new things are in there...

i was washing clothes on saturday morning and knew her time on the walker is up, so i left her to crawl the kitchen floor..and she discovered the washing machine.