Smock it to me, baby: Holy cow...Arden is one!

This post is so overdue. I feel like my blogging skills are deteriorating along the same path of decline as my brain cell count. I honestly feel like I am getting dumber with each successive child, so maybe I should stop having kids while I'm ahead.

I'm not sure how this happened, but Arden is one. She is so cute and smiley all day long. She has grown leaps and bounds but she is still the cuddly little baby she always was. She has a great disposition and will smile her squinty smile at anyone. She is so irresistible when she smiles and her four top teeth and two bottom teeth are showing. She does get a little shy sometimes and will shrug her shoulders up and tilt her head sideways.

One year stats:

Weight-19 lbs (10-25th percentile)
Height-29. 5 inches (50-75th percentile)

Arden was acting like a crazy baby during her one year check up. She did not want to go near the nurse or the doctor and she was frantically trying to climb off the scale. At least she didn't pee on the examination table like she almost always does. She had to endure a chickenpox vaccine and finger pricks but bounced back pretty quickly after that. She had to endure all of this on her actual birthday.

So no good news on the sleeping situation. In fact, her sleep habits have gotten worse. She still naps twice a day around 9am and 2pm. Now I have to lay her on my chest after nursing her to put her to sleep for naps and at night. Sometimes this process can take up to 45 minutes! Sometimes I ask myself why I spend so much time trying to get her to nap when she might only nap for 45 minutes. But I do it anyway and hope that we'll figure it out along the way. If I just let her hang out in her crib without laying her on me, she will just babble to herself or cry and not sleep at all. I can't nurse Arden to sleep anymore and just put her in the crib and walk away like I used to. Now she'll finish nursing, sit up, give me a sweet little smile, and crawl onto my chest. How can I resist her? But my patience wears thin by the third time she wakes up in the middle of the night. Not sure who wins "worst sleeper ever" title-Ava when she was under 2, or Arden.

These days Arden and I are roomies while David sleeps on an aerobed in Ava's room. So far it has worked alright but David has discovered that Ava has some weird sleep habits like standing straight up in the middle of the night. Ava also likes to sleep on the aerobed until David transfer to her own bed.

Arden doesn't take a bottle or a sippy cup very well. Somehow the "Teen Moms" on MTV can get their babies to sleep and take bottles but I can't do either. These days when I struggle with some aspect of parenting, I just shrug my shoulders and think "this won't last forever". Someday Arden will sleep, right? Somebody please tell me yes.

Arden does the cutest things, like growl. But if I growl at her, she gets a little scared. She likes to play peek-a-boo by putting her hands over her eyes, and she is an excellent clapper. She will blow kisses if we ask her to do it. She walks alongside furniture like a champ but has not taken any steps at all.

Words: she has mastered "dada", and her version of "uh-oh" (sounds like "hmm-mmmm"). I think she might know "dog" because one day we got in the elevator and she said "doh" at the dog in there. "Mama" comes out once in a while but it could just be a coincidence.

Favorite foods: chicken apple sausage, vegetable beef pilaf, baby mum mums, ribs, Indian chicken, salmon, tofu, and pasta.

Sometimes Arden likes to wave her arms around to music, with her hands looking a bit like pincers. This is not a perfect depiction of her "rapping lobster" look, but it is pretty close.