A few steps forward, a few steps back

Since I have had a lot more time to spend with Nora during winter break, I had a list of goals I wanted to accomplish with her.  We're always working on her age appropriate skills, which are mostly speaking-related at this point.  She's learning up, down, thank you, please, on, and off to varying levels of success.  But I had a list of specific tasks that I hoped to accomplish, too.  Some of these were things we'd been meaning to work on but were too busy to tackle while I prepared for my test, and some were things we needed to do in order to help get Nora ready for the toddler classroom at her new school.  The list of things included:
-helping her learn to use utensils while eating
-transitioning her to one nap a day and pushing it back to as close to 1pm as possible
-finish day weaning and switch from bottles to sippy cups

We were making a lot of progress with these goals.  Her utensil use has been pretty hit or miss, but overall she is making progress and taking an interest in using her spoon and spork.  She was no longer asking to nurse during the day, and though we had to use a soft spout sippy cup as an intermediate step, she had taken to those and was sometimes accepting milk in a regular sippy.  Her nap transition was going the best-- we'd pushed her back from 9am to 11:30, and most days she didn't need a second nap.  We even got rid of the noise machine and the room darkening plastic bags without much trouble.

And then Nora got sick.  Suddenly she's napping at crazy times, nursing during the day since it soothes her and gives her some extra antibodies, and she doesn't have enough of an appetite to make mealtime a lesson.  There's nothing to do but laugh!  Thankfully, I realize that all the work we did before was not for naught because re-learning these skills will be easier for her than learning them the first time.  Bouts of sickness are also times when we can see how much we all benefit from the other skills we worked so hard to help her learn.  For example, Nora's so good at self-soothing that she goes right back to sleep after coughing and sneezing fits, which helps all of us maximize our sleep.

She's feeling much better now, so we'll be back to working on these skills in no time.  It's hard to believe I've been away from campus for almost a month now!  When you're a stay-at-home mom, the days sometimes feel long, but the weeks go by at lightspeed.  Here are some pictures I've taken in the past few weeks that haven't yet been posted to the blog.

We got a little bit of snow right after Christmas, so Nora got to see it falling for the first time.  She had no idea what to make of it but was very interested in her footprints.

She finally grew into the onesie I bought her almost a year ago!  When you grow into a 6-12mo onesie at 15 months, I think you lay special claim to the "Though she be but little" half of this quote from A Midsummer Night's Dream. : )

There is one silver lining about times when she's not feeling well: she gets extra cuddly.  Here she is sitting in bed with Dad while he shows her a keyboard on the iPad.

Nora's family members gave her generous monetary gifts for Christmas, so we bought her this foam chair and put the rest of it away in her savings account.  I didn't anticipate that it would also become Oscar's favorite piece of furniture, but I should've known!

Kiss my sass, Oscar.

 

Her hair is getting so long!  Sometimes she'll leave it in a clip or a ponytail holder, and we're hoping that any day now her bangs will be long enough to tuck behind her ear.