Gracie’s Life Experiment

Now Evie’s up and about more, took her over to see my friend and her kids. She lives really close to a beach so we took the kids out in the pushchairs to go play on the sand. Evie’s last time at the beach was probably in March and she absolutely hated it. Screamed and screamed. Today she loved it. She was playing with the spade and attempting to eat the shells and sand. And digging, plenty of digging with her hands. It was quite funny because she drools so much her chin was wet so when she ate some of the sand it ended up pebbledashing her chin and looked like she had blonde stubble! She enjoyed walking on the sand and even toddled with me to the water’s edge and splashed her hands in the waves. She’s almost like a different baby from 5 months ago. Now can’t wait till we go to the beach more in a couple of months (when it’s not Winter). Feeling a lot happier today, there’s nothing like a warm sunny day and the sea breeze to blast away the blues. Makes you appreciate what you have and thinking about it, yes, I believe that my life is actually great!

We’re trying hard to kick my daughter’s addiction. Today is the 3rd day of her going cold turkey and she’s not doing too badly. It’s mostly just when she goes for her naps and bedtime. We’re determined this time that we will not give in. We’ve confiscated all her dummies. I was quite surprised on the first day as she had managed to secrete a few about her nursery and playroom and each time we took one away she crawled off and came back making sucking noises around a different dummy. Now we have them all accounted for she’s going totally cold turkey. We decided to do it now as she’s 1 and her teeth are mostly through and from Sept-next April we have visitors coming and it just won’t work when she’s screaming for it and the grandparents will cave. She’s been less interested in the dummies during the day now and only had it when we put her down for naps. Even then she’d suck it a bit and fall asleep and it would fall out or she’d just lie there playing with it in her hands. I’m hoping by the end of the week she’ll have forgotten about her addiction and gets used to going to sleep without all the crying and angry cat noises.

Took Evie for her 12 month check this morning. All is fine and she’s developing well.

Latest stats are…
- Height : 73cm
- Weight : 8.4kg
- Head Circumference : 44.5cm

She’s quite petite between 10th and 25th percentile but perfectly formed.

So all’s well in Evie land The only thing we need to change now is the milk. The family nurse said that Evie should now have normal milk rather than formula and to start training her to get off the bottles and onto cups. As I’m allergic to cow’s milk and hubby drinks soya too, I asked whether it was OK to have soya instead. Nurse said that was fine as long as it has plenty of calcium in it. Tried Evie on 200ml of soya in her bottle when we got back from the clinic and she downed the lot. No probs at all with changing her milk (I was reading up on how you start to mix the formula with soy until it’s all soy, but Evie didn’t seem to mind just going straight to soy).

This week’s 10 things are 10 names we use to refer to our baby! She’s 1 next week and I’m amazed at just how many names we use. These are the 10 most commonly used

1. Evie
2. Squeakface (primarily because of all the squeaky noises she used to make when tiny, at one point she was squeakface and the dog was fluffface)
3. Kitten/kitty (when she’s angry she cries like an angry cat)
4. Squitty (a hybrid of squeaky and kitty!!)
5. It (commonly used whilst referring to her when something unpleasant has happened – i.e. “It needs a nappy change” or “It has been a really grumpy bugger today”)
6. Evangeline Kim (full name used when she is being very naughty on purpose – i.e. “don’t you pull that electrical wire, don’t touch it” to which Evie stops looks at you and then carries on and then hubby usually goes “EVANGELINE KIM” in his best scary teacher voice)
7. Humbug (no idea where that one came from)
8. Chipmunk (usually used when all her food has gone from her plate and is stuffed into her cheeks but with no sign of being swallowed)
9. Funny bunny (used when she’s doing something odd like randomly rolling about on the floor or rubbing her head on the floor)
10. Cheeky (used when she uses her cheeky smile to get out of being in trouble)

Of course there are plenty of other names that randomly come out including the smaltzy sickening lovey dovey ones as well as the more “blue” ones used when shouting at her whilst she tries to delve into the contents of her nappy!