Milestones

Over the past week, Meredith has had a few important milestones to put under her belt.  Both good and bad! - I should probably start with the good:

She is now a walker!  Though she is still unable to fully stand up on her own, that is, without the aid of a couch or pushing off of mommy and daddy's bodies, she is a MAD walker when she is up.  At times, she even appears to run.  She really is a fearless little girl.  She still stumbles quite a bit and can't fully figure out how to balance (kind of reminds me how I look on roller skates), but when she does fall, she just gets back up!  I wish I had that courage.  She still prefers to crawl most places, but I know it won't be long before she walks/runs everywhere. 

Another good milestone, at least in my mind (not too sure whether she sees teething as this eventful), is that she is cutting her first top tooth!  This will be tooth #3.  With each tooth, I think she is beginning to look more like a little girl and not like a gummy baby anymore!

With good, I suppose there is always a little bit of bad.  So here it is - we had our first "bleeding" incident, as Chad coined the phrase.  One of our favorite times of day with Meredith is when she wakes up from a nap.  This is when she is at the peak of happiness - she is well rested and loves seeing us enter the room to pick her up.  She gets so wound up in the crib and is a hoot during this time.  Well, I was getting ready in the bathroom and heard a terrible cry and heard Chad say, "Oh no".  I rush in to find Meredith bleeding from her mouth!  Not exactly the site I wanted to see.  Of course, I had to take her away from Chad and hold her to console her myself.  She apparently lunged her head forward into the crib railing and her bottom teeth hit her top gum line.  She had a small cut that looked like a paper-cut on her gum - surprisingly, after just a few minutes, she was back to her old self. 

Another bad milestone we have hit is with bath time.  When Meredith was very small and still a bit colicky, bath time was one of the few relief moments for us because it always got her to calm down!  Chad even thought she was going to be the next Michael Phelps and we had big dreams of her Olympic debut.  For 11 months now, we have all loved bath time!  Well, this past week, she decided it would be more fun to stand up in the baby tub.  This caused us a bit of nervousness, since we know she can't stand up on her own in the tub without slipping, but she doesn't know that yet.  We moved her to the big tub, hoping that would change her behavior, but it's almost worse now.  We are hoping she gets over this phase soon, because she may soon be the dirtiest kid on the block if we have our way (we are thinking of boycotting bath time).

Here is how we both look/feel during bath time.

I hate to end on a bad note, but there is one more bad milestone that happened.  I thought we still had another year or so for this one, but apparently not.  We think we entered the "terrible 2's".  What, you may ask, has happened?  Drum roll please.....Meredith threw her first temper-tantrum yesterday.  I was babysitting Meredith's little playmate, Lauren, and that's when it happened.  She actually did really well playing the first two hours or so, other than the occasional 'I'm going to steal your toy, even though I'm already holding one in my hand and there are a dozen others on the floor'.  I chalk that up to kid stuff and the fact that Meredith is pretty outgoing and aggressive when it comes to toys.  After some time, she must have realized I was not providing her 100% one-on-one time and she threw a fit.  Anytime I would hold Lauren or talk with him, she would want to sit on my lap too or would come walking/crawling towards me hysterically crying.  She also wouldn't let me leave the room without wailing.  She did fine when Lauren's parents watched her on Saturday, so I'm thinking it's because she is not used to me being in the room with her and another child or because it was at our house, where she is surrounded by her toys and has her routine.

Meredith wanting the basketball hoop AND Lauren's bat.

Well, I just can't do it - I can't end on a bad note.  It wouldn't be fair to Meredith and her normally good demeanor :)  We have gone walking quite a bit over the past week, since this normally crazy, unpredictable Illinois weather has been absolutely lovely.  Now who couldn't be happy when looking at this little girl in her stroller....surely, this precious baby couldn't throw a temper-tantrum, right?: