Lily James is 14 Months Old!

I'm thinking I'll still write these summaries so I can refer back to them, but probably not every month anymore. Hopefully I can still remember to do them every other month, but time is flying by so much faster now. Most of these pictures were taken on October 7th and 8th while we were playing outside at our neighborhood playground.

- She goes to daycare Sunday, Monday and Wednesdays from 8-12:30. She cries when Jim drops her off, but is quickly distracted once he leaves and they pull out her favorite toys. I think she likes getting out and playing with other kids and new toys. She's always happy when I pick her up.

- We are in the process of dropping the morning nap. She doesn't take one at daycare or on Tuesdays when we have swim lessons, but by the end of the week the lack of a morning nap catches up to her and she really needs two naps on Thursday, Friday and Saturdays.

- She says Mama, Dada, Bye-bye, Ball and Bottle.

- She signs milk, bye, more, all done, diaper, please, eat, and sleep. Last night we ate out at Chili's and we gave her one bite of mac & cheese and she got super excited and signed "more, please." We were so excited to see her put two words together!

- She can tell you what the sheep, monkey and elephant says. For elephant she doesn't make a sound but raises her arm like an elephant trunk.

- She can point to her nose, ears, head, hair, butt, toes, feet, hands, neck, lips and belly button. She can also show you where a bow goes.

- She still has 6, 4-5oz bottles a day. I thought about consolidated to 4 6oz bottles but I changed my mind. This schedule works and she's used to it.

- She's starting to pick up on patterns and does not like when we deviate. The biggest issue right now is bedtime. Jim doesn't make it home for bedtime during the week, so I always put her down. When the weekend comes and Jim takes her to bed she throws a fit sometimes and only wants me. I think she would be fine if I wasn't in the house but she doesn't like knowing I'm around and not putting her to bed.

- She's still doing swim lessons and is the most advanced in her class (in my completely unbiased opinion!). But I should add that everyone else in her class are first-timers so it's not a fair comparison :) We still love it and the best thing about Dubai is we can continue year round, even at the outdoor pool.

- Bedtime is about 7:30 now and she wakes up about 6:30am.

- It's finally cool enough in the late afternoons to go play outside at our neighborhood playground (and by cool enough I mean <100F). I'm learning that our girl is not shy at all yet and just walks up to every kid. She's usually the youngest one out there, but she loves running after the bigger kids (18-24 month olds) and helping them share their toys :)

- She's doing better at going out to eat. I think that's because she eats more and she takes almost as long as we do to eat, so she's not finished in two minutes and clamoring to get down and run around right away.

- She has 6 teeth! 4 top and 2 bottom

- She weighs somewhere around 25-27 lbs

- She wears size 18 month clothes, 24 month pjs and bathing suits, size 4 shoe and size 5 diaper.

I love watching her grow up and become more "with-it." I'm definitely not the type of mom that wonders every day "where did my baby go??" I love this fun stage of playing outside and watching her interact with other kids. Happy 14 months Lily Bug!!

Pictures from the Boat

Sorry about the blogging hiatus! I'm hoping to get back on track. I enjoy going back and reading about our life here, but I can't do that if I don't keep writing about it :)

Are you sick of seeing posts about the cruise?? Well this is the last one! I have just a few pics we took while hanging around on the boat. If you're not sick of cruise talk, there's one more new post below this about Naples.

Overall I thought the boat was great. The one area I would say was lacking were the pools. There were two main pools that were salt water, and were warm and small, and made you feel like you were taking a bath with a bunch of strangers. We lasted about 5 mins. 

We spent a lot of time on our deck, which was really nice. It was nice to sit and relax, and Lily couldn't get in to trouble or escape from us!

We had one full day on the boat, and we took Lily to a baby painting class. It turned out to be Dad, Mom, Granny and Grandpa doing all the painting, and Lily either eating the paint or trying to walk away. We left pretty quickly!

We made reservations at the Churrascaria restaurant on board, and it was delish! We told them ahead of time it was Lily's birthday, so they brought out this plate and a cake for dessert.

The munchkin enjoyed running up and down the hallways quite often.

We had a great time! However, if we do it again next year, we decided we are going somewhere cooler!

If you are wondering how Lily did....it could have been better, it could have been worse. One of the hardest things for her that I didn't think about ahead of time were eating breakfast, lunch and dinner at restaurants. She doesn't last very long in her high chair once she's done eating (what 1 yr old does?) and wanted out right away to either sit in my lap, or run around. Running around was not an option, so it was either stay in the high chair or stay in someone's lap, and she wasn't too happy about that most of the time. Being strapped in a stroller was a struggle as well, but most of the time she was in the stroller because it was too crowed to let her run around. However, she did great taking naps on the go, and even fell asleep in my lap quite often, which she hasn't done since she was probably 5 months old. She went right to bed every night too - I'm sure being completely exhausted helped.

Overall, if you want to see a lot of places with a baby, a cruise is probably the easiest thing. I think if we ever take a baby on vacation again, I will try to convince the hubs to stay in one place and leisurely explore one city. I think we could have spent just a week in Rome seeing everything there.

I hope we'll continue to be brave and take our kids on vacations in the future!

My Favorite Naples Pictures

What do I remember about our excursion in Naples? It was HOT! We booked this excursion through a separate company instead of the cruise line. It started out pretty chaotic as we were passed off between about 3 different tour guides before the tour event started. To make matters worse, it was extremely crowded, which I think made it feel even hotter. 

We started out in Pompeii.

This is us with Mount Vesuvius in the background. Pompeii was not what I expected. I thought it was going to have all the human casts from people who died in the eruption, but there were only two casts in glass cases. I guess you have to go to a city closer to the volcano for that, where everything was preserved better.

After Pompeii we were taken to Mount Vesuvius where we had the option to climb to the top. I didn't think we were going to do it after being so miserably hot in Pompeii, but Jim was really excited about it. Greg and Susan stayed back with Lily and Jim and I decided to try hiking up.

It's really not a difficult hike; it's paved all the way up, but I was carsick from the windy drive up, had no water and the sun was beating down the whole way up. I was going as slow as an 80 year old man smoking a cigarette (literally, he was walking next to me the whole time). It was pathetic, but I made it up and back down before the bus left!

Us at the crater! I didn't think I was going to make it! Jim made it before me because I told him to go ahead and I would either meet him at the top or on his way back down.

The next morning we got back off the boat, spent one more night in Barcelona then headed back to Dubai (and dragged Granny back with us!).