Painting on a Sunny Afternoon

It was 82 yesterday....today the high is 66. This is actually my favorite time of the year. I hope Calais learns to love it as well! Joe worked all day yesterday, so Calais and I were able to spend some QT time together. Google Reader has been a great resource of activities for BG. One of my starred items was make your own sidewalk paint (the actual blog was for fizzle sidewalk paint, you use vinegar and spray it on the paint and it fizzles!) We just ended up making regular sidewalk paint (1 cup cornstarch, 2/3 cup water and food coloring) I was pretty happy with the colors. The blog mentioned gel food coloring works better, all we had was liquid!Calais dove right in! She really enjoyed painting and then scraping her fingers on the paint. And of course what's painting unless you start painting on yourself! She ended up getting some paint on her by mistake and then realized how much fun that was. S0 needless to say she tried painting all parts of her body. I'm very happy to say that she didn't try to eat it at all.
Another one of Calais' favorite things was pouring it on the driveway. I have to say the brushes I used with her soaked up the paint more than letting you paint with them. So pouring it out was a much QUICKER was of painting. And stomping in the paint was a blast!
And the finished product!I got a rag out to clean her hands. She decided she would clean the paint up. Knowing that it was supposed to rain today, I didn't need to actually hose down our driveway. Thank you Mother Nature! All in all a successful afternoon activity!

Young Adult Dystopian Books

Since The Hunger Games and The Iron Fey I've gobbled up all dystopian type books! After visiting websites and browsing Amazon I came up with my own list. (cause we all know I LOVE lists of books!)

William Sleator’s House of Stairs

John Christopher’s The White Mountains

Robert C. O’Brien’s Z for Zachariah

Saci Lloyd’s The Carbon Diaries 2015

Lois Lowry’s The Giver

Gemma Malley's The Declaration

Susan Beth Pfeffer's Life as We Knew It

Cory Doctorow's Little Brother

Jean Ure's Plague 99

John Wyndham's The Chrysalids

M.T. Anderson's Feed

Patrick Ness's The Knife of Never Letting Go

John Christopher's When the Tripods Came

John Marsden's Tomorrow, When the War Began

Robert Cormier's I am the Cheese

Victor Kellehr's Parkland Kazuo Ishiguro's Never let me go

Nancy Farmer's House of the Scoprion

Pam Bachorz's Candor

Jill Hucklesby's If I could Fly

Mike Lancaster's 0.4

Lauren Oliver's DeliriumCaragh o’Brien's Birthmarked

Calais' First Year

Seriously, a year has passed? How did that happen?
The first three months went by in a haze. Then our little girl started to morph into a little person. By 6 months she was sitting up and interacting with us and the dogs. Then we blinked and it was 11 months and our BG started walking. Now it's been a year!
Here are BG's stats from her 12 month checkup:
Height: 29.5 in/63 percentile
Weight: 20.19lbs/35 percentile (she's always been small, our goal after 1 year was to be above 20 pounds, she did it!)
Head Circumference: 69th percentile
Calais is now officially a "toddler" gone our the days of our "baby". She will become a "child" when she turns 4.
We recently introduced Calais to moo milk. All seemed well at first. She was taking to her milk and her sippy cups. But we noticed she wasn't acting happy and seemed to get cranky a lot easier. She was also super gassy (burps and toots). Joe was playing with her one afternoon and she just started bawling. She wasn't extremely unconsoulable, but she definitley wasn't our happy girl! We ended up calling the on call doctor that night and scheduled an appointment for the following day. I did a bunch of research that evening and narrowed it down to that Calais is either lactose intolerant (just like her dad!) or she is allergic to the protein in milk. We also started thinking about the previous week and realized that she had a whole lot more poops than normal. She normally has 1 1x a day, but now she was going at least 3 sometimes 4 a day! When we met with Dr. Pham (our family doctor) he confirmed that she probably has some sort of intolerance of moo milk.
So.....Calais is back on mommy milk/formula for two weeks...then we will start her back SLOWLY on moo milk. If she is acting just as cranky/gassy etc. then we will start her on either goat's milk or soy milk.
Calais has also developed these small red dots on her belly and back. So we are calling her doc again in the morning to see what's up with those. She doesn't seem to be too bothered by them, so hopefully they are nothing too serious. I'm sure we will be back at the doctor for him to check them out!Other than that, our little BG is becoming quite the little person! She loves books, loves to be outside, loves her baths. Lately she likes to be held more, so that's nice (especially since normally all she would rather be doing is walking). Sleeping is still going well. We put her down around 7 pm, and she'll sleep at least 12 hours, waking up sometime after 7. She naps twice a day, but I have a feeling we will be giving up that second nap anytime soon!
I always say I'll get better on blogging, but really....time is short :) With working full-time and being a mommy, in my free-time I spend it cleaning, making Calais' food and trying to get us to eat more local and healthier foods, so that doesn't leave much time for anything else! So enjoy the posts when you get them!

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