Granna

My Mom, known to Kylie as Granna, is visiting with us this week. On Sunday afternoon, it was raining but this didn't stop me from taking a few photos as we played on our front porch with some chalk.



And I made this milestone scrapbook page:

Leaves and roses

Closed doors

We have a small walk-in closet in Kylie's room. Lately, Kylie has started walking into her closet and shutting the door. The first time she did it, I was alarmed because I thought she would get upset being away from me. Quite the opposite was true.

She wanted to be in there and have some private play time. She did it again this morning. As I sat in the room's rocker and read a book, it was hard to not worry. I just kept telling myself that the closet is completely child safe and that she's not going to hurt herself or smother or anything. But I still checked on her twice during the 20 minutes she was in there. Each time, she was simply playing with toys. And each time, she stood up, smiled at me and then shut the door.

Sigh.

And as I write this, I can hear you Moms with older kids saying, "Get used to it honey! There's going to be a lot of closed (slammed) doors in your face in the coming years."

I know. Sigh.
(Note- the above picture was taken in May. Hasn't she changed a bunch?!)

We just shifted some stuff around in Kylie's room. And I found myself wishing that I had taken more pictures of how her room has changed during her different growth stages. I'm bad about not taking full room pictures because I have a macro lens on my camera. But I resolve to do better. And let this be a lesson to all you. Take pictures of your rooms or you might regret it!

In other news, I am in love with these toddler yoga pants.


They are from The Children's Placeand they fit Kylie perfectly. They are having a sale right now so head on over to their online store.
We found The Children's Place by visiting a mall across town. I just love the bright, vibrant colors of their clothes.

And I especially love these pants. Kylie is wearing 18 month shirts and 12 month pants. And even her 12 month pants are too long in length and don't come up high enough on her body. As a result, I see her diaper all day long (unless she's in a onesie) and I'm constantly pulling them up or rolling up the bottoms. But these yoga pants have a great amount of spandex so they hug her thin frame really well. And they are the perfect length.

Lastly, here is a scrapbook page I made last night. The template is from Jessica Sprauge's Type+Writer class. She has such awesome templates. The finished pages I've created from her class have such wonderful details that add to the overall beauty of the page. In particular on this page, I learned how to create a word overlay (using a word pattern paper). The words treasure, enjoy, laugh and more are on the edges of the focal photo and on the subtitile.

The class prompt for this page was "I love the things you say". And it was a great jourmaling prompt for me. Without it, I don't think I would have recorded the story about this nonsensical song that Karen sings to Kylie. You'll probably have to click hereto read the journaling.

17 months

Dearest Kylie,
This month, you have gained confidence in walking. You learned how to walk on level changes (such as the carpet to the hardwood floors or the Gymobree mats to the carpet) without falling. You can hold my hand and take a step up the sidewalk and then back down the sidewalk. You can squat to examine something or to pick up a toy or two and then stand up and continue walking. You still scooter feet first down the stairs. You like proving your strength by picking up your heavier toys and moving them around.

You have learned to twirl. When you hear music, you will turn in a circle. This delights your Moms and you get lots of claps when you do it. You’ve also learned to stand on my feet while I hold your hands and dance you around. You learned how to drop a basketball through a basketball hoop. And you like to climb my back and have me jiggle and bounce you.

We’ve started working on some simple manners such as setting your sippy cup next to your plate and not on your food, wiping your hands with a napkin during meals, and picking one book for us to read and lot grabbing handfuls of books and raking them to the floor. You are using your fork and spoon more effectively; you are learning to turn your wrist correctly. You still eat about half of your meals with your fingers.

This month, you added six more words to your vocabulary bringing our total to 24 words. The five words you learned were rock, beep (you love to say this when the microwave beeps), mole (while pointing to a mole on Momma Karen’s leg), tickle, and when they were visiting you learned to say Nana and Pap.

Some other milestones include:

You can scribble with magic markers without getting marks all over your clothes.

You are interested in cartoons and The Wiggles on TV. Before now, you would glance at the Baby Einstein DVDs we would have on for you at night while you continued to play. Now, you will actually sit and watch about 20 minutes of a children’s program.

When I’m cleaning, you like to grab a paper towel and help me clean.

You continue to be very organized. You are constantly organizing your toys into various groups and you would rather put toys into a basket than dump them out.

You cut your right top and bottom incisors, your left top molar and right top and bottom molars.

A few fun things

Kylie was very opinionated today. And I seemed to irritate her by doing the smallest things like offering her sidewalk chalk on our walk or by insisting on her outdoor shoes instead of her house shoes. There were lots of frustrated toddler yells today.

But Kylie did do some very funny and cool things! Such as:

She stuffed her large Elmo doll into her Little People barn. She just kept pushing until she got him all the way in there. "Get in there and stay in there". And there he stayed all day!

She walked across the playground gym bridge all by herself.

And she crawled up the many stairs of the playground slide by herself, turned around and slid down the slide feet first on her belly. I forgot to breathe for a few seconds but she just looked at me triumphantly and proceeded to do again 6 more times.
Way to go Kylie!

Here are a few scrapbook pages:
This template is from the Type+Writer class.


And I finally got around to creating Kylie's 16 month milestone page--just in time to start working on her 17 month one.


Details for the pages are here and here.

Rules, manners and a tub of fun

I was reading a section in "What to Expect the Toddler Years" which states that some parents begin to use time-outs as a discipline aid for their 17 month olds.

This got me to thinking about what rules and guidelines we have in place for Kylie. Just for grins, I thought I would share them with you.
Rule #1. No hitting. Karen and I have both talked about this one but fortunately it hasn't been an issue for Kylie.

Rule #2. We don't throw food off the table.
For a couple of months now, Kylie has occasionally tested us on this one. She'll hold a piece of food away from her highchair or booster seat and look at us like, "Are you going to say/do something?" And we'll say, "If you don't want it, put it on your tray or hand it to Mommy ". And she usually puts it down. But it took some doing to get this boundary in place. For a while, throwing food was Kylie's way of letting us know she didn't want something or was done and frustrated. But then she learned the "all done sign" in sign language and she learned to say "No". Now she hardly ever throws a piece of food.

But every once in a while, she'll get a mischievous look in her eye and she'll hold a piece of food away from her. We'll say our usual line and she'll kind of nod to herself as if to say, "Yep, that boundary is still there". It really IS all about repetition. And if she throws it anyway, we say "Kylie!" in a stern voice and we get her up quickly from the table. The key for us is to not talk to her because normally, when we clean her hands after a meal, we praise her for being well-behaved at the table.

Off the top of my head, these are the only two rules we have in place. But we do have some expectations and some things we are working on.

During meals, we are trying to teach Kylie to put her sippy cup NEXT to her plate instead of ON her plate of food. And we're working on teaching her to "SET DOWN" her sippy cup of water and not throw it when she's walking around the house and decides she's done with it. We've gotten some success on the first part and not so much on the second.

This month, she's become interested in wiping her hands so we've started putting a small napkin next to her during her meals. And she's started to signal to us to let us know she wants her hands wiped. We'll wipe them and then she'll grab the napkin and finish wiping them herself.

She can stand on our family room green couch and on her own child-sized chairs but we've started telling her to sit down when she moves like she wants to stand on one of our other pieces of furniture. This is mostly for her own safety.

Stay on the sidewalk.
Kylie wants to walk up to all our neighbors' front stoops and doors. She is very used to hearing me say, "Stay on the sidewalk" and guide her away from the driveways. The good news is that the sidewalks are filled with interesting rocks and lovely flowers so I have lots of options for distractions. But we have had quite a few toddler meltdowns when I've needed to herd her back to our house and she doesn't want to go.

One book at a time.
This one is important to me. Kylie can play with her books, she can explore them and chew on them and so forth. But we've been encouraging her to not rake large armfuls of books off the shelf and onto the floor. If she looks like she's going to get a handful, we'll say, "Pick ONE book please" and amazingly she does!

Of course, manners go both ways. In the past, if Kylie was holding something that she shouldn't, I would just take it from her. Now I'll say, "Please hand that to Mommy" and she usually does so. It's the same thing with wiping her hands and mouth, I used to just do it. But I've started announcing, "I need to wipe your nose" and she tolerates it better.

Whew! That was a long post! What rules/expectations/boundaries/things are you working on with your kids?

And for those of you who visit to see Miss Kylie, here she is playing in a tub of water in our back yard. We are making the most of end of Summer.

Photo Friday

I shot these photos yesterday. They are pretty unremarkable. But I don't feel like unloading the dishwasher yet so I thought I would share them with you! These are straight from the camera. You can click here if you want a closer look.

Sitting on our front porch watching the garbage truck attend to our neighborhood.

Enough of that. Let's get down and play.

I made it to the bottom of the steps. Let's dance for joy.

I'm going to draw on the side of the house with chalk.

And crawl all over our utility meter. (I love how the sun kissed the top of her head on this one.)

And see how dirty I can get playing in the muddy spot around the side of the house.

She spies her bathing suit while we're changing her clothes and carries it around the house while signing for "water".

"Please can we go to the fountain?" Who could resist that face?

And that's about 20 minutes of our day and me looking for beauty in the ordinary with my camera.

Maybe I should stick to scrapbook pages?

Details are here.
Thanks for stopping by and have a great weekend!

Back, down and all around

Thanks to those of you who've clicked on the Followers tab in my sidebar. It's been an ego boost to see you there. If you haven't joined yet, do it now and make my day!

Kylie has been making me laugh with her new skill of backing up. Here is an exaggerated version-- she's backing up to the fountain spray.

Around the house, she backs up to doors and stands against them. She likes to back up to her chair and to my lap. One day, I made the moving truck noise, "beep, beep, beep". And she copied me and said "beep, beep" while still backing up. It's the little things around here that crack me up.

She has also recently delighted me by learning how to lower herself from sitting to lying down without using her arms. She's getting a great ab workout. She mostly does this in the grass. She'll be sitting there, playing with the grass. And then she'll slowly lay down and sigh. She blinks at the sky and rolls her head around to feel the grass. This kid makes me appreciate the smallest things.

She has two new favorite snacks.

We found Pirate's Booty at Costco. They were offering free samples and Kylie had three! This is her new official "car food". She usually has Cheerios but now she's all about the Booty! (that was fun to type.)

And Raisins.

I held off giving her raisins until mid August. I wanted her to have some molars first so that she wouldn't just swallow the raisins whole. I thought she would love them and she does. Raisins have outpaced bananas as her new favorite food. She has some every day.

You Photo and Scrapbooking folks might be interested in Vi.sualize.us. It's a free source that creates a library of your favorite images. Be sure to add the browser plugin because that's what makes it really work well. This site helps me out a lot because I turn to other's scrapbook pages as inspiration for my own. Previously, I had been downloading ones I really like and saving them to my computer. But with this nifty thing, I can spare my hard drive. Plus, each picture has an automatic link back to where you find it. Jessica Sprauge turned me on to this. You can see her Vi.sualize.us account here.

Here's some recent scrapbook pages.


This is a two-page spread. Click here for a closer look.


This is from my Type+Writer class


Have a great day!

Ten New Things

1. Me-Ma
Kylie has called both Karen and I "Momma" since she was 8 months old. Around the house and in front of Kylie, I go by Mommy and Karen is Momma. But Kylie has created her own word for me which is Me-Ma (it sounds like Mommy in reverse). I kind of like it but I would still prefer Mommy.

2. Socks and slippers
When Kylie was younger, she couldn't stand to have socks on her feet. She would pull them off as soon as we put them on. Then, as she was learning to walk, we had her go barefoot at home so that she could get a better grip. But now that she is walking well, she loves her socks (I think the Gymboree non-skids are the best for around the house). And we bought her a pair of slippers which she adores.

3 & 4 New shoes and sidewalk chalk.

Her new Fall shoes are size 4 1/2. And Kylie doesn't really draw with the chalk but she likes to carry it around. She HAS made marks on all the utility covers on our sidewalks and in the street. Little faint pink chalk marks that say, "Kylie was here".

5. Beep
Kylie says "beep, beep" when the microwave beeps.

6. And she holds her hand to her ear when the phone rings. She always says something but rarely says "Hi" or "Hello". Mostly it sounds like, "Eh?"

7. Followers
There is a link on our blog's right sidebar to become a "Follower". Join up! Boost my ego!

8. I changed some settings on my camera for the first time today. I changed the lighting to florescent and the ISO to 800 to shoot these photos at Gymboree. Last time I took pictures at Gymboree, everything came out blurry and very orange so this in an improvement!



(I love the Mom's expression in the back of the bottom photo). Click here if you would like a closer look or if you are interested in the camera settings.

9. The Sunday afternoon photos posted to the blog this morning were tweaked using Scott Kelby's Photoshop System.

10. Today was the first day of my Type+Writer class.

11. And I'm registered Candice Stringham's6-week beginning photography class. I really wanted into this class last quarter but it sold out in 7 minutes and I wasn't able to get in. So I was sitting in front of my computer promptly at 6pm Pacific, hitting my browser's refresh button until registration opened. I notice that it's sold out again which is amazing. Wouldn't you love to be a teacher of something that people wanted so much that your classes filled up that quickly? It must be an incredible feeling.

Anyway, I'm a beginning photo geek. I took pictures of Kylie all day today (poor little munchkin). I'll post some more later. I'm having a lot of fun with this.

So what's new with you?

Sunday afternoon

She had to play in the fountain again before we headed home. And you can see, it wiped her out.

Why I love Photoshop

Last Tuesday, I took some photos of Kylie fingerpainting. I had the camera set on Auto and was sloppily snapping away while trying to keep the paint on the table and not in Kylie's mouth, or hair or on my camera or clothes. At the end of day, I loaded the pictures on my computer and was not surprised when I saw that they were complete crap.

Out of all the crappy pictures, I thought this one was the most interesting and worth spending some time on.


So while Kylie was napping today, I decided to play with it. I open it in Adobe Camera Raw and do some tweaking.

Already it is looking better. But if you look, you can see where the flash bounced off the chair on both the left and right of Kylie's head. Plus, we have the ugly orange booster seat that's clashing with everything. What was I thinking when I bought this? It's a scrapbooking nightmare to have that bright orange seat to contend with.

So, I click on my clone brush and paint the flash and some of the booster seat away. Give your mouse finger a workout. Scroll up and down and check out the differences!


The angles of the chair, window sill and the table are bugging me. So I come in and do a tight, angled crop of the picture.


So much better!

And finally, just for the heck of it, I convert it black and white.

(I used a new tip I learned at the seminar. I used to slide the saturation slider all the way to the left to convert a photo. But on this one, I hit "gradient map" instead. Just as simple but looks much better. If you try it, just be sure that your foreground and background colors are set to black and white first).

All of these steps took me 20 minutes. You might think that it's a long time to spend on a single photo. But it's fun! It's like a game.

Of course, there are dishes piled in the sink and dust bunnies floating around my wood floors. But hey, a girl's gotta have fun somehow!

Spicy

Thank you for your recent comments. You encourage me and support me more than you know.

Kylie has fallen in love with spicy food. I really started to notice it when we recently had lunch at Buffalo Wild Wings. Karen and I were handing her skinless pieces of our wings and she was eating them so fast we could hardly keep up. She kept saying and signing, "More". She also surprised us that day by going nuts over the celery sticks and dip. I've since served her celery and dip at home and she loves it. I just have to serve it at the end of her lunch or she won't let go of the sticks in order to eat anything else.

Kylie also loves Foster Farms Southwestern Chicken breast strips & Morning Star Southwestern Veggie cakes. She mostly turns up her nose to hamburger but she ate some taco meat yesterday. And she ate a small bowl of Southwestern black beans today.

My girl likes it spicy!

If any of you know of some other spicy foods I could offer her, please let me know.

Here are a few pictures I took this afternoon in our backyard.