Ila turned 13 months old last week. So this is probably a good time to finally get around to writing her 12 month post!
And it is a good thing that we are done with the laying down monthly pictures because MAN! That picture was hard to get!
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At one year, Ila loves...
TO EAT!
Holy crap can this girl put away some food! As I've mentioned before, Ila is (was) super petite. At some of her check-ups this past year, she didn't even register on the charts and was in the ZERO percentile. She was never a bad eater... She nursed every few hours when she was a baby, and we never had any problems. When we introduced baby food, she was content enough to eat it. But she was never a baby that needed to nurse around the clock or needed tons of baby food to keep her full and happy. She ate when I offered her food, and when the bowl was empty, she was fine. I just figured she was a petite thing that wasn't all that interested in food. Then we introduced TABLE FOOD. Ila started eating all of the things we were eating. Like, STEAK and SHRIMP and MACARONI AND CHEESE. This girl will feed herself piece after piece after piece after piece of steak, and when her tray is empty, she SCREAMS for more. And even with vegetables... now that I cut them up for her and she feeds them to herself rather than pureeing them for her, she eats and eats and eats. She eats firsts and seconds and thirds. She eats until all of the pots are empty and we have no leftovers. Then I'll give her a couple of pieces of dark chocolate for dessert at night (both my children like DARK chocolate... weird!), and she devours them like she hasn't eaten in five days, when in reality, she just ate more than I did. I still nurse her when she wakes up in the mornings, and then she can eat a bowl of oatmeal, a whole banana, and two scrambled eggs, and an hour later she's standing at the bottom of her high chair fussing to get in it to eat some more.
Needless to say, the girl is gaining some weight! At her one year check-up, she weighed 18 pounds, which put her around the 20th percentile. That's a big jump for someone who wasn't even on the charts a few months ago!
Ila loves...
ANIMALS!
Of every kind. She gets so excited about our cats and dogs these days. She gets to ride on a horse for a few minutes at all of Eden's horseback riding lessons, and she completely freaks out and gasps and kicks her legs in excitement every single time. Feeding cows with Papa is fun too! She has no problem feeding a cow a cube right out of her hand.
Ila loves...
THE PIANO!
She wanders over to the piano multiple times each day to bang around. On the VERY rare occasion that I ever get to sit down and play a song, she hightails it from wherever she is in the house to come
Ila loves...
TO SWING!
Enough said.
Ila loves...
TO FOLLOW BIG SISSY AROUND.
Ila goes where Eden goes. She's actually really, really good at playing by herself. (Something Eden STILL can't do.) So when Eden is at school, she's perfectly fine. But if she SEES Eden or HEARS Eden, it's like a moth to the flame! She wants to be near her.
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She is such a happy little girl - always smiling, always giggling.
She has jussttt enough hair for teeny-tiny ponytails on top of her head. So teeny-tiny that you can't even see it in this picture because the bow covers it.
She's ticklish. Oh so ticklish!
She's a mama's girl. She's better about going to other people than she used to be, but she's happiest when I'm close-by. (But if you want to be her friend, all you have to do is give her some food, and she'll forget I exist!)
"Mama" is still her only real word. She already understands so much of what we say to her (for example, if I say, "Ila, do you want more water?", she picks up her cup and hands it to me), but she has no interest in repeating me no matter how hard I try to get her to say "more" or "dog" or whatever. She just grins at me.
She is finally starting to walk over crawl. It's been two months since she took her first steps, but it took her a while to choose walking as her main mode of transportation! I thought she would walk faster because of Eden and wanting to keep up with her, but actually the opposite happened. She could crawl much faster than walk, so when Eden took off somewhere, she would drop to the floor to speed-crawl after her. These days she walks more than crawls, though she still crawls some. I'm not real anxious for her to give up crawling altogether because I know it will make me sad. It's a slow transition from crawling to walking - at least it has been for both Eden and Ila. I remember the day it dawned on me that I hadn't seen Eden crawl in two days and how bittersweet that was to know I would never see my little baby crawl again. So Ila can take her dear sweet time giving crawling up completely.
Also, her walking entertains me. It's like a teensy little drunk person - arms flailing around, laughing, falling.
Those pictures crack me up. Ila's goal at Eden's ballet class is to MAKE IT INTO THE ROOM! So when a girl left the class to go to the bathroom a few weeks ago and left the door open, Ila rushed over. Then, I kid you not, she turned around and slowly backed into the room as if she was being sneaky. She was so proud to have made it into the doorway. She cried so hard when I got her.
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It's been a few weeks, but I so enjoyed her birthday and all the days surrounding it. It was such a sweet few days of remembering. Remembering driving to the hospital, remembering spending the morning in the hospital room with Dustin, remembering her grand entrance, remembering our first night with her and Eden coming to meet her and our time in the hospital and coming home and placing her in her bassinet for the first time and all that magical stuff!
So now I have a one year old. And that's so fun and so good and so sad all at the same time!
