Walking!

This week Kinsey has made HUGE progress walking on her own! Last weekend Jamie and I tried a new thing - sitting on the floor a few feet apart and getting Kinsey to walk back and forth between us. She fought it at first (trying to sit down or lean back or not let go of my hand), but it only took a minute or two and she took off towards Jamie. Once she got the hang of it, she thought it was a pretty fun game and was really into it. So we've been practicing every day and we've been getting further and further apart - yesterday I measured 15 ft - and she's doing a GREAT job! I got it on video earlier in the week.

She's been doing great walking at school too. Several times she has willingly let go of a teacher's hand to walk on her own towards another teacher or a table or something. Not far distances, but the significant thing is that she's letting go on her own! I can't get her to let go of my hand yet, but it's good to know she will do it. Walking is definitely a confidence thing for her so to know that she feels confident enough to let go is good. And apparently today she really took off at school on her own. She was on the playground holding onto a tree by herself and she let go of the tree, turned around and walked toward the gate and held onto the fence for a minute then walked out of the playground, down the sidewalk and into the classroom totally on her own! She had to turn a couple of corners in there too! I didn't see it - she did it about 5 minutes before I got there :(, but she did it! I think she'll be walking all over the place on her own by her 4th birthday!

On Thursday Kinsey went on her first class field trip - they walked to the Windsor Library. Kinsey walked the whole way there and back holding a teacher's hand. Her stamina has definitely improved lately too and she will walk for quite a while before she poops out. 

Today we went back to The Farm with Aliy and 2 of her kids to see the baby animals again - we were hoping the baby goats would be more active and they were! But the exciting part was that I got Kinsey to walk a few feet on her own a couple of times!!! I love seeing her get to be like the other kids. :) Anyway, here are a few pictures from The Farm:

Kinsey has recently expanded her food choices again. A few weeks ago we had pizza and basically took all the toppings off of a slice and gave it to her on a plate. She ate everything: cheese, red peppers, sausage, pepperoni, and black olives! In fact, the black olives were her favorite - she picked every one of them out before she ate anything else on the plate! And we've given her other olives since then - greek olives, regular green olives and she loves them all! Boy is she ever our kid with her love of pickles and olives! And this week her teacher told me she gave Kinsey some apple, so I gave her some pieces of an apple for lunch one day and she really liked that too. I didn't think she could eat apple, but she did a pretty good job with it. There's definitely room for improvement (I had to fish a piece out of her mouth that she wasn't chewing), but I'm impressed she could manage it at all.

Speaking of food - I think all the solid foods she's been eating lately (instead of so much pureed stuff) has made a difference . . . she's gained some weight and is up to 25 lbs 5.5 oz (that's about a pound weight gain since just a couple of weeks ago)! I can actually see it too - her legs finally have a little meat on them instead of being stick figures. Her pants are all still too big though!

Last weekend we had a little Easter fun! A local store here (Jax Ranch) had an Easter Egg Hunt that was broken down by age groups and the first one was for kids 3 and under so it was perfect for Kinsey! Kinsey was really excited about it - she was holding her basket like a purse (of course), practically ran (dragging Jamie by the hand) toward the Easter bunny when she saw him and was very anxious while we were waiting for the hunt to begin. She was totally into the hunt too - it's an activity that's right up her alley. . . picking things up and putting them into her "purse." She loved it! Then we went to get a picture with the Easter bunny, which she also loved!

The Easter Bunny was good to Kinsey too. She got lots of fun toys, including a cool art easel (like they have at school). It has a chalkboard on one side and a magnetic dry erase board on the other and clips to hold paper for painting or coloring too. She enjoys playing with it and already painted her first masterpiece:

And one last fun thing - Jamie showed Kinsey how to lean her soft chair backwards, so now she pushes back and does it all the time. It's another fun game. Here's a video.

Easter Fun

I can't think of anything specific to report this week, except lots of fun stuff from this week. Here's a video of Jamie spinning Kinsey on the floor and her "spinning" herself around too.

On Monday, Kinsey and I colored Easter eggs for the first time. I found dyeable plastic eggs at Walmart and was really excited about them because that meant I didn't have to worry about Kinsey's allergies (I don't think she would have a problem handling eggs, but this way I didn't have to think about that possibility) and there's no chance that should would break them. Plus it saved me the effort of hard boiling eggs (which I never seen to get just right). Anyway, these would great, except that they float, which made them a little difficult to color. But Kinsey was really into the whole process and really enjoyed it.

It's hard to see it here, but she's actually putting the egg in the dipper wand

Good thing they can't break . . .

A few weeks ago we had some professional pictures taken for Easter, but I wasn't very happy with them so I decided to take some myself. We did it last week, but the wind picked up and made it nearly impossible, but this week we had a nice afternoon and I was able to get some good pictures. I even brought one of the baby chickens out to be in the pictures (what fun is it having baby chicks if you can't use them for Easter pictures?)

This is one of the professional ones

This one too

I LOVE this one I took!

Oh how she wanted to get her hands on that chick!

Jamie had the day off for Good Friday and it was a beautiful day so we went to The Farm, which was a lot of fun because they had a bunch of babies there: 5 baby goats, 2 baby sheep, 2 piglets, 1 baby cow and 2 chicks. We are planning to go back in a few weeks when they're all a little older and more playful (the goats were all just born this week!).

A friend made this outfit for her daughter and handed it down to Kinsey. How adorable!

She did a great job feeding the goats this time!

Checking out the baby sheep

And the baby cow! How cute!!!

3 Ft Tall & Full of Attitude

I forgot to mention last week that Kinsey is now officially 3 ft tall . . . or a yard, as Aunt Linda would say :) She continues to weight about 24.5 lbs, so now she's skinnier than ever because she's even taller, but still weighs the same.

Kinsey has always been strong and determined. Let's face it, that's probably a good part of the reason she's doing so well, but she's been getting much more opinionated lately too (or maybe she's always been so opinionated, but just recently figured out how to express it more). She's pretty much always refused to do something if she didn't want to, but lately she expresses that feeling stronger. She's just starting to show this attitude to the teachers at school - every day this week her teacher has told me that they've had a battle of wills! Apparently she doesn't want to walk for them anymore and she's also refusing to cooperate in learning her signs (more and all done are what we've been working on). She's also doing it at home more, primarily with eating! We used to have "tricks" to get her to eat things if she was being picky - like show the thing she wants to get her to open her mouth, but then put the other thing in, but now she either refuses to open or she spits out the food you slipped in! Stinker!! All these things are good developmentally, but boy is she is a stinker sometimes!

Last weekend we decided to add some new members to our family - baby chickens!! We got 6 chicks that will hopefully all start producing eggs in 4-6 months. Kinsey likes checking them out, but she wants to grab them too roughly so we're trying to show her how to pet them gently (she's never understood that with the bunnies either). We'll be getting some new piglets in a few weeks too (if you didn't know, the 2 we got last spring went to the butcher this winter).

 

I think that's it for this week, but here's a cute picture of Kinsey shopping. She was walking through the aisles with me and picked up this little "purse" of nail polishes and carried it around the store.  Silly girl!

Spring Break

This week Kinsey had Spring Break from school so we had some extra time to spend together. We also got some additional one-on-one time because Jamie had to go out of town all week for work. He's never had to travel before, but his company is being sold (the current company is a small, local one and it's being sold to a national company that basically buys small tech companies and sort of keeps them running individually). Anyway, he had to go to MN last week Wed-Fri for a meeting with all the other tech people and when he got home late Friday night, he surprised me with the news that he had to go to Chicago all this week for some training on the new company's software. So I've been a single mom all week and let me say, I do not envy single parents. It has been a LONG week!

Kinsey and I had some fun, but we also had some not so fun adventures - it couldn't be a run of the mill week while Jamie was gone, there had to be some interesting things happen. One night Kinsey woke up screaming in the middle of the night because her leg was stuck in the slats of her crib. It took me a few minutes to get it free (I thought I was going to have to call my dad for help because it really wasn't coming out at first) and she was screaming the whole time. She was actually so upset that she made herself sick a little bit. Anyway, she settled down quickly and went back to sleep afterwards, but that was definitely interesting. Another night she wouldn't go to sleep, but she wasn't playing in her usual way, she cried for about an hour before she settled down. And yet another night, I had to make her go potty with the pedialax because she hadn't really gone for a few days and was refusing to eat. She still didn't eat dinner that night, but she did drink two things of milk before going to bed. So, as I said, it's been an adventure. But at least nothing major happened.

We had a little fun this week - we went to an indoor water park with Aliy and her kids since they are on Spring Break too. We'd never been there before, but we will definitely be going back! Kinsey absolutely loved it and it was perfect for her. They have a regular pool and they have a shallow lazy river-type pool, but the best part is the zero-entrance water park. There are no stairs, it's just a really gradual entrance and the entire thing is no more than 2 ft deep. They have water fountains coming up from the ground, water spraying and falling from above, and a staircase leading to 2 water slides - one of which Kinsey can do with help (and she loved it)! I forgot my camera so I snapped some shots with my phone, but Aliy brought hers and captured some great shots! And here are some videos: crawling and splashing.

She was happy sitting still for a while, but then decided to crawl through the water

This was her favorite because it's like the faucet in the tub

We walked up the stairs and through the waterfalls- she loved that!

And she did a little walking around on her own holding onto the staircase railing.

 That made me really nervous! 

Kinsey also got a new "toy" this week . . . Pop-Pop bought her own iPad! Since she uses it at school, he wanted her to be able to do the same thing at home. The reason I got an iPad was to get some apps on it for her and, as you know, she likes playing with it, so now she has her own. She got a new case for it and even a thing to hang it in front of her in the car so she can watch videos or whatever. She's not spoiled or anything! So, I've been busy this week downloading some new apps for her to play with, including the one she uses at school and some fancier apps than she'd had before (ie ones you actually have to pay for instead of free). She's enjoying playing with it so far and I've been working on teaching her how to do more things than just swipe the screen (like actually point and click buttons on the screen). Here's a video of her playing with the app Peakaboo Farm. 

In other news, Kinsey has started doing something that I think is pretty cool - she's started giving hugs. At least she sometimes wraps her arms around me or my neck tightly and it feels like a hug. I don't know if she's doing it on purpose, but it feels good and I always squeeze back :)

She also doing something really cute all the time too. She scoots out of her chair onto the floor and when she decides she wants to get back in the chair, she stands up, turns around and sits back down in the chair. She repeats this process several times in an afternoon. Too funny.

This week Kinsey has become completely obsessed with eating Mac N Cheese. In fact, for a few days I couldn't get her to eat any solid food other than that. If I managed to get something else solid in her mouth, she would pull it out and very purposefully throw it on the floor! Sometimes she can be such a 3-year-old! But it wasn't because she wasn't hungry - the minute I would give in and put mac n cheese in front of her, she would devour it. Stinker! She's still eating her food pouches and willing to eat yogurt so I'm getting some veggies and other things in her diet, but it's still frustrating. Especially when I make something and she refuses to eat it. But she's getting better at using silverware and has used a regular, adult fork several times this week (I still have to put the food on it for her, but she tries to do it herself). 

Well, I think that's it for this week. Kinsey will be really excited to see Jamie when she wakes up in the morning :) (We did skype with him one night this week and she was really happy to see him.)