Baby’s first birthday

52 weeks postpartum :

• One year old.
• One year of pumping around the clock; one year of sacrifice; one year of meeting the biggest life-changing little person; one year of learning what it means to be a mom; one year of cuddles, baby cries, diapers, and feeding sessions. One year of cuteness. One year of insurmountable joy; one year where DH has not had a full night of sleep; one year of taking photos nearly every day. One year of weekly baby/postpartum updates; one year where mostly every day has been the same (routine wise) but different with new things to discover. One year of baby’s life in the books.
• Sept 18: She climbed up the changing table practically by herself (!) 😱. Our changing table has 3 levels. She has such a strong grip; she climbed up to the third level and I helped her over the edge to the changing pad. She had the biggest smile when she got to the top.
• I belong to a Montessori teaching style of parenting on Facebook and so many other moms with babies this age who see the climbing happen let their babies do it without fear. Instead of saying “Be careful, watch out” we should be encouraging and celebrating when they scale certain furniture pieces or other “climb-able” things. It fosters independence, self-esteem, confidence, and limitless play! 😀
• I had my hand ready at her back lightly touching if she needed my help, but otherwise I guess I’m a rather passive parent. I like watching others in general and so I like watching her crawl and explore her surroundings.
• Grandma helped to take a photo of bb clinging to me as I was pouring laundry detergent into the machine. The little girl clung on to me and wouldn’t let go of my legs. 😅🥰
• That feeling of looking down and seeing a little face peer up with anticipation and love is the cutest thing.
• She likes to be held sometimes yet sometimes arches her back to be let down on the floor.
• For her birthday, we had 3 cupcakes and a small pastry from La Rocca to celebrate. We did a cake per month this entire year. Needless to say, I was pretty tired of full sized cakes by the end lol. How privileged as well and spoiled we were to have cakes every month. So for her actual one-year-old birthday, we scaled down immensely 😀
• She got her own strawberry vanilla bean cupcake to devour. She wiped the cream off the cupcake clean and licked all of the cream off. 😳 Then she devoured the rest of the cupcake. She didn’t eat it all but she smashed it enough that she had some in her stomach and a quarter left for us to try.
• She used her left hand to eat. Is she left-handed? 🤔 But it’s too soon to determine a preference.
• We did the zhuazhou/doljabi “first birthday grab items” tradition. I gathered a bunch of items around the house to represent certain careers/hobbies. I grabbed too many and had to cut it down 😅. In the end we had 9 items for her to choose from: spatula (cooking industry), ukelele (music), box of screws/nails (construction), box of bandaids (medical field), small globe (travel), squash racket (sports), calculator (finance), set of markers (arts), small computer mouse (adminsitrative/desk job??).
• DH set the items up on the floor while grandma put her down in front of it and I recorded the process. Face palm for DH as he had placed the squash racket in the middle (the biggest and most prominent item) so she naturally went for that and touched it. I guess she’s going to be athletic and sporty then! 😀
• But what I mean is that it didn’t become a “fair” “experiment”. I should have went with the small squishy football to represent sports instead so that all the items would be similar in size. Oh well
• It actually took bb a while to gravitate towards the objects. (I chose new objects on purpose that she had never seen before.) She looked like she had been placed in a new environment even though we set it up in her own room. 😅 This little girl is so timid.
• Also, after she had selected the racket, we pulled that aside and wanted to see what her second/third choices would be. Grandma was too eager and moved forward and touched two objects to bring them to her. Noooo. So guess which two objects she touched next? 🤦🏻‍♀️
• Calculator and the markers.
• Then she got hold of the computer mouse and spent time clicking it lol. Naturally at this stage in life, she likes pressing buttons and hearing the reactive “clicks”
• She spent the longest time playing with the computer mouse. I guess she will pursue some sort of computer/desk job then 🤣.
• She completely skipped over the bandaids and box of screws. She touched the globe briefly and it spun but she didn’t know to keep it spinning. She skipped over the ukelele and didn’t even touch the spatula at all. 😂😂🤣 No cooking for this girl then??
• This also meant the last of the monthly photoshoots. Thank goodness in a way because they were tiring and draining to do each month despite the attempt for memories. Now I can pack away the monthly milestone stickers/signs until the next baby.. if/whenever that is.
• She was able to stand more than a few seconds today!!! Maybe even 10 seconds on her own. When I exclaimed and clapped my hands at this, she flashed the biggest smile too. 🥰
• How to get her to eat more solids on her own? She has little patience in the high chair Also she needs to learn how to chew properly.
• Grandma noticed she has two more teeth wanting to burst out from the gums on the bottom now!! I can’t wait for her teeth to come in. She’ll be able to eat so much more and actually chew her food!
• Speaking of which, we gave her a bone to munch on for the first time. We could have done this earlier when she was 6 months old actually. She must have felt like a big girl because she held the meatless spareribs one and smiled at us and laughed. Then she trepidly held the bone and gnawed on it. It’s mostly for her to lick and get used to holding the bone which she was able to do. She doesn’t have the teeth to tear apart a drumstick though but the bone with some meat attached would be perfect for her.
• It’s amazing how much I can write about her development each week.
• Breastmilk output dropping to 290ml daily now… my body is weaning itself gradually. I still haven’t dropped a pump yet. Still at 3 pumps per day.
• She is a year old now but some of the clothes she wears are still marked as 9 months or 6 to 9 months or even 3 months old. 🤣 She is on the small side and so jackets marked as 3 months still fit her.. lol.
• Looked back at photos a year ago when she was in the hospital as a newborn. She was so fragile and precious and small. Her cries were different and she doesn’t even look the same anymore. She had thin skin that is not like the full fleshy tone that she has now. What a change in this year.
• Sept 21: She used a straw yesterday for the first time!!! I had my winter melon juice carton and I let her suck on the straw. She didn’t know what to do with it at first but I kept telling her to “suck” the straw and eventually she got it. She did a small sip where I saw the juice travel up the straw into her mouth but she stopped sucking when the juice got into her mouth. She doesn’t know how to continously drink and suck from it yet. But still a cool milestone. 🙂
• She repeated our words today!!! She repeated me saying “gan jing” and then later DH’s “mm dut”. It was soooo cute to hear her try to pronounce it. It’s not perfect yet but we could tell she was directly trying to copy us. She can speak soon!
• She did the sign for “milk” recently and when she did, I made sure to get some for her. She didn’t drink a lot though after she “requested” it but the signing is a great start to being able to communicate with us! 🙂
• She was so incredibly clingy today. She not only followed me into the bathroom but she held onto my legs that I couldn’t even pull up my pants back up properly. 😆
• I could see the two teeth next to the bottom existing two come out! So exciting for her teeth to come in so she can eat more.
• She loves to climb on things. Today she climbed up into the seat of her high chair. She needed my assistance when pulling herself up as the chair is quite high but she still led the way. She loves climbing and then smiling big when she gets to the top.
• Today in the morning when taking her out in her stroller, when she fell asleep, I put the back support down but she cried every time and wouldn’t let me set her down. She kept holding onto the tray and continuing to sleep. I tried four times and she would jolt awake and grab onto the tray and keep sleeping with her head leaning on the tray. 😆😆
• She’s not the best at chewing and swallowing. I have to remind her to chew before I feed her the next spoonful.
• She dances to music!! When the ever-constant “Pizza Nova” commercial comes on the TV, she dances to it. She dances because that commercial plays so often during dinner time and I’m pretty sure she recognizes the song from in-utero too.
• Sept 22:  Not willing to sleep lying flat in the stroller! Grandma tried and she would cry. She also woke up after only maybe 10 mins of nap time. Her daytime naps aren’t long enough.
• We returned to Lake Wilcox Park to get a yearly photo of us at the same rock area where we took our wedding photos two years ago. Last year was a preggers photo and this year we have our little babe in between us. 🥰
• We reused the decorations and balloons for her actual bday day celebration from her early celebration last week. 😀
• She can now climb into the extrasaucer that we have in her playpen by herself. She crawls in and she sits there with her foot hanging squeezed into the seat while the other one is flat on the floor. She cannot get out without our help though lol..
• Who would have thought after all this time pumping and knowing better that I still suddenly got a cracked and bleeding nipple out of nowhere. I thought I had it down pat since getting the Bellababy pump as everything was going so smoothly. The right nipple got sensitive and sore and cracked all of a sudden this week :(. Extra coconut oil to the rescue and more studious cleaning of parts. It also might have been triggered when I chose not to use coconut oil one time when in a rush..
• No more Nanit analytic stats. 😦 The first year subscription was free with the purchase of the monitor but to continue subscribing would be like $300/year. something exorbitantly expensive. She is older now and technically the stats are not needed as much anymore. It was still nice to see “Bb was put to sleep __ minutes/hours ago” or “Bb fell asleep __ minutes/hours ago.” We have a lot of video segments saved from the Nanit camera/monitor too. The camera still works; only the analytics/stats are gone.
• We had so many cakes this past year that for my upcoming birthday I don’t even want a full cake. Maybe a selection of small pastries or cupcakes will do. 🙂
• She has big feet. They look like long triangles.
• Did I mention as of two weeks ago she can now put objects back into a container? She can put the wooden blocks into the box. She can also tear apart a Mega Bloks tower that daddy built. Every day DH likes to build something different for her. She knows how to take them apart.
• She really likes looking out of windows.
• She isn’t sleeping too well these days. Sleep regression? Because of teething?
• She changes positions constantly while sleeping. We have so many pictures of her posed differently on her bed.