July has been one busy month because …

… my cousin Vanessa was in town for a visit the first week of July.

… we went on vacation to the mountains.

… my cousin, Cristina and her husband, Marcio, were in town this past week.

BUT it’s been a GREAT month because of so much time spent with family!

When family is in town, we stay with my parents because it is just easier to stay with them rather than drive back and forth between their house and ours every day in order to visit the family in town. Plus, we can put Little Bug to bed on time and still have more time to visit with family.

We’ve been gone now for almost two weeks (a week in the mountains and then a week with my parents). Tomorrow we are going home and it will be good to get home, get unpacked (I am tired of living in a suitcase!) and get back to our normal routine.

I have several goals I want to achieve with Little Bug starting in August:

• Establish a new schedule/routine with her. She really isn’t off her schedule (even with all the traveling & being away from home!) but I really really really want to find a solution to the nap problem that has been going on since she turned one. I might attempt dropping the morning nap and seeing how things go. Although, today we skipped the morning nap because of a birthday party. After we got back to my parents’ house I laid her down for a nap and she took the usual 1.5 hour nap. She wasn’t her normal self as the evening wore on, so I don’t think one nap is going to cut it quite yet. (Unless she started taking a 2-3 hour nap in the afternoon, which she did not do today.) I will be SO HAPPY when we pass this phase and figure things out!
• Start doing Independent Playtime (IP) with Little Bug. I’ll probably write a post soon about IP but I’ll just say this for now… I admit when I read about IP in the babywise book when Little Bug was a newborn I thought IP was for the birds, not babies. However, now that I have a 14 month old that will hardly ever play independently and relies on Mama’s 24/7 entertainment, I am seeing the reason behind IP and I can see that Little Bug (and myself) will benefit from the skills babies/toddlers learn from doing daily independent playtime. So, I plan to start implementing some IP into Little Bug’s daily routine.
• Continue work on manners! Overall, Little Bug is doing GREAT with her manners. Like Babywise says, I see her pitching the fits only when she has not had enough sleep!

Until we get settled back in at home I’ll leave you with this:

My big girl eating her dinner with a fork for the first time tonight at dinner!

- Elaine