18 Months

Well, Raiah isn't a baby any more, that's for sure. She's a full blown toddler complete with tantrums, emotional turbulence, lots and lots to say and very very little patience. She basically repeats everything we say but her daily vocabulary has grown exponentially, which is awesome! She seems to know exactly what she's NOT supposed to do. She'll do it while yelling "NONONONO" (I  know a lot of kids do this and it's hilarious!). she knows some shapes and colors but only says "circle" and "purple", the rest she'll just point to. she knows most animals by name and the sounds of some (like every time I tell her to eat her chicken, she goes "bagh bagh bagh??" she knows cows say "moo" and sheep say "baa" and dogs say "woof woof"). she has also started feeding herself a lot more lately, to the point that she won't eat unless she's feeding herself. 

she somehow always knows exactly where we're heading. she'll call out "granpa!" before i even turn into their street and claps and yells "HOME!!!" when i pull into the Target parking lot :) she can also count 1 to 5 in farsi and knows all of her books by name or subject. I try to read some of her books in farsi but she always wants me to start over in english. I'll get to page 3 and she yanks the book away, goes back to page one and says "doreh? doreh?" (dobareh is farsi for "again") until I start reading in english and then she'll let me finish the book. ha!

her vocabulary at 18 months:

monkey dumpy dumpy ("no more monkeys jumping on the bed")

taab (farsi for swing)

park

show

moobie (movie)

hockey
all done

window

table

chair

tree (means tree or broccoli)

gol (farsi for flower)

hair/nose/toes/eyes/ear/teeth/knees

bubbles

colololo (color)

book

cat

ake (snake)

lion

zeba (zebra)

milk

cup

dance

blanket

baby

shoes

socks

pants

diaper

"thank you" and "mersi"

sheep

fish

dog

duck
bear

target

cracker

apple/bewi (blueberry)/nana (banana)

puzzi (puzzle)

ball/boom=baloon

hot

bath

farm

tractor

plus all of our names.

and I'm sure I'm forgetting about 25 more words. and she talks constantly. it never stops. even in her sleep. sometimes it's a string of all the words listed above or just gibberish but the girl LOVES to hear her own voice.

Life's a beach

We took Raiah to the beach yesterday. Scott and I had a day off together (which is very rare!) and even though the forecast was rain, we went anyway. We're definitely NOT beach people but we've been trying to take Raiah as often as possible since we live close by. This was the first time she seemed to enjoy herself, however. She had a permanent smile on her face and took a good four hour nap after. 

She's nearing 16 months and is basically the best baby in the world. She has started talking a little and I feel like she's not going to stop.... her words at 15.5 months are: mama, dada, nana, papa, bah bah (food), up, down, dog, duck, ee i ee i o, hi, baby, baa (bath), apple, tachee (taji) and oah (noah). Her newest thing is when we ask her to say something, she'll whisper the opposite. Like we'll say "say nana! can you say nana?" and she'll walk away whispering "papa" or we'll say "can you say daddy?" and she'll whisper "mama" and look for our reaction. it's pretty funny. 

Resolutions

The older I get, the more I like that my birthday is so close to new years. Making resolutions makes more sense this way. And there are quite a few things I want to try to keep up with this year. I'm actually pretty good at keeping new years/birthday resolutions. For example, last year my goal was to take more pictures and document our lives better. I took over 2000 pictures with my phone and another 700 with my camera plus about 100 videos. It helps that I had such a great little model to take pictures of :) Anyway, these are my goals for 2013:

1. Look up from my phone a lot more often. Be present. Leave my phone in my purse so I'm not tempted to keep browsing. This will be hard, but not impossible.

2. Plan an activity for every week. We work a lot of hours and barely ever see each other but we have some mornings together, just enough time to have some family time. I want Raiah to experience new things all the time and be well versed in the world. So every week we'll do something fun. Like this week we went to a petting zoo. (yes, even though I hate animals...) I think this will get easier when she's better at walking because, it's hard to keep her in a stroller :). Also when she's a more stable walking toddler, I want to do more service oriented things. I remember my mom doing things for our neighborhood all the time when I was little and I did a lot of service in high school. I don't want to be too busy for that.

3. Take care of my skin. Wash my makeup off every night. Keep up with a skin care regiment because let's face it, all the fun-in-the-sun times are starting to show on my poor face.

4. Say YES before talking myself out of things. Just say YES more often. To everything.

5. Not feel guilty. This is a big one for me. I think a lot of working moms feel this way in the age of excessive social networking and pinterest when everyone else's craftiness, cooking and creative parenting is shoved in everyone else's faces. If I don't have time to repurpose furniture or grow our own food or sew little dresses out of pillow cases, that's ok. The truth is, even with my limited time, I do a lot of creative things that make my heart happy. Planting an edible garden is NOT one of those things and I'm going to be ok with that. When it counts, I do enough "homemade" and I do it whole heartedly.

6. Drink less coffee, more tea, NO soda. Less coffee will be hard but no soda will be super easy because we don't drink soda at home anyway and it'll be easy not to order it at restaurants.

7. Not dwell on things (or people's behavior) that are out of my control. This is my resolution every year... and I fail miserably every year.

8. Speak and read more in Farsi to Raiah. I always forget to talk to her in Farsi. She's going to be bilingual. I'll have to make sure of that :)

9. Use the china, the fancy soap, the expensive towels/sheets, etc. Who the heck am I saving them for exactly?! Why not enjoy them ourselves!?!

10. Speak kindly about others and be less judgmental. (another resolution I fail to keep every year....)

and here's Raiah dancing.

A few videos

i need to get all the photos and vidoes off of my phone before i get my new phone so here are a few. the most recent is the one of her eating pears and watching her Baby Einstein. that one is from yesterday. the one of her on the swing is from last week but the other two are from a few months ago. i just LOVE her little voice!

Good Intentions

When I started this blog, I had very good intentions of keeping a journal of our lives and document details that we might forget someday. I was obsessed with everyone else's family blogs and how beautiful and funny their children were and how even everyday happenings seemed prettier in their pictures. I still LOVE reading blogs when I have a split second but keeping one, not so much. I don't know, just the thought of catching up with uploading pictures and keeping this thing up to date is exhausting! so this is my last post for a while (as if i even update this more than once every couple of months anyway).

I'm on a mission to cut unnecessarily time consuming things out of my life and this blog is one of those things. I work full time (10+ hours a day, most days) and spend as much time as I possibly can with Raiah, during which I make sure to not check my phone or do anything other than being mommy. I'm still nursing and it's so tempting to be reading blogs on my phone while she's nursing but I'd really rather watch her and cuddle with her and kiss her little feet while she tries to kick me in the throat :) from the time Raiah goes to sleep around 9:30 till I go to sleep (which ends up being around midnight) i have a couple of hours a day to clean the house, do dishes, prepare food, pay bills, eat dinner, do laundry, shower and get ready for the next day with maybe a few minutes to spend sitting in front of the tv with scott after he gets home from work. sometimes i even have a couple of minutes to check my facebook, hotmail, gmail, yahoo, and browse pinterest before i fall asleep. most days i feel like i'm swimming upstream against time but i like swimming and i'm not complaining. The point is that I'm really grateful for the things I have to do, but the things that i don't HAVE to do, I can do without, like this blog. I was just looking through my phone to pick pictures/videos to upload and there are over 600 of them between my last post and this one!

As of today, Raiah is 8.5 months and can crawl or more like scoot backwards. she's super animated and fun. she finally got her first tooth when she was 7 months and 7 days old. she LOVES food. i mean, we've never seen her turn away from food or act full. ever. even if she doesn't like something (pears or avocado for example) she'll still eat it and make a disgusted face but then opens wide for the next spoonful. i have to get a better video of her eating. she LOVES Baby Einstein videos. she's absolutely mesmerized by them. there are 3 things that really piss her off: no more food (she'll throw a fit when you finish feeding her cuz she ALWAYS wants more!), taking her out of the bath when she's not done playing and walking by her and not acknowledging her on the floor playing. otherwise, she's the happiest baby ever.


I've been meaning to add some photos to this post for over 2 months. when I started to write this, Raiah was 7 months. now she's almost 9 months and crawling. I'm gonna post with no photos cuz I know it'll take me another couple of months to upload them :(

At 5 Months

Raiah is almost half a year old! I can't believe how fast she's growing. She's already developing a hilarious personality. Some things that she's doing by today are:

- She sleeps through the night and still takes at least 3 naps during the day. it's wonderful!

-  Chews INTENSELY on everything and especially loves hands. Sometimes she'll turn away when I'm nursing her just to chew on her hand (or mine). She can be 3 feet away from someone's hand and she still opens her mouth wide to try to attack it from far away. It's pretty funny.

- She's been saying DADADADADADADA for a few weeks now. She says it in times of happy/cooy-ness, boredom, anger, frustration, etc. but when she notices one of us leaving the room, she'll use it like a name, calling out to us. I know, you're thinking she's way too young to do that but SHE DOES! Scott was playing with her and left the room for a minute and she started saying "da da da da da" and when he didn't come back she started screaming "DAAAAAAAAAAAD!!!!" like a freakin teenager!!! (ok, maybe she doesn't know what she's saying but we like to think she's way advanced)

- Rolls all over the place. There's no need to even put a blanket on the floor for her because she'll roll off of it right away.

- She's a very happy baby. She wakes up smiling (and almost upside down) every day. mornings are her favorite time of the day. She's cranky at night tho. She warms up to people very fast and as long as we're close by, let's anyone hold her and smiles at them. If you let her chew on your hand, she'll fall in love with you!

- She usually falls asleep with a blanket pulled over her face. If she doesn't have a blanket, she'll pull her bib over her face. 

sleeping with her bib over her face

- She's still going bald and we find her fine little hairs all over the place!

- She LOVES when we sing to her. it can calm the biggest freakouts like magic. it's a good thing she doesn't judge my horrible singing voice.

- She used to HATE taking baths but the last 2 times she's been calm. The look on her face is still unsure and questioning like she'll freak out at any moment. She definitely doesn't enjoy it yet, but we're making progress.

- She loves to taste the wind. If we're outside and it's windy or even if you just blow in her face, she'll stick out her tongue.

outside tasting the wind

scott was blowing in her face here :)

- She's very interested in our food and expects the food to go in her mouth instead of ours. We gotta start her on solids next week. 

A visit with grandparents

my baby getting spoiled and loved :)