Bethany's Baby Blog

Hi Everyone! Bethany is a whole two years old!!! She has made it through 24 months and what an amazing little girl she is turning out to be! I’ll cover her birthday in a bit, but I thought I would start with a few other things first. Earlier this year we were a little worried that Bethany wasn’t doing much for talking. Well I’m happy to say we have nothing to worry about!!! It’s almost like she flipped a switch one day and now she does not stop! And this is by no means a complaint, we love listening to it! She talks to herself, she talks to us, she talks to her toys, she happily say “Hi” or “Hello” to people on the phone, and she loves repeating everything we say, and I mean everything! We are constantly asking her if she can say one word or another. Normally we’ll stick to simple one or two syllable words, but sometimes we go for gold, “Can you say hippopotamus?” “Can you say rhinoceros?” She repeats each one! Not all of it may be perfect, but she gets the right number of syllables every time! She still misses out on the first part of a word sometimes. However, I’ve noticed it occurs with certain phonics that I don’t think she has figured out how to say yet.

Now that Bethany is talking she is really beginning to show off her reading abilities. When I can get her attention long enough for a reading “quiz” I haven’t given her a one or two syllable word she won’t tackle. If the word is difficult for her you can actually see her sounding it out, her lips make all the proper motions for whatever the phonics of the word are, then she’ll try and pronounce it. It’s really quite amazing to watch! She also sings a few songs like “Itsy Spider”, “Tinkle Tinkle Star” and, my personal favorite, “Row Row a dope.” She will also assist you in completing the alphabet song too! Oh yeah, she loves to count too! She counts to ten all the time, but for some reason skips four, so if I show her 10 things she ends at 11. We have even pointed to some larger numbers too, and she gets some of those correct as well.

One word Bethany has no problem saying is “no.” She picked it up one day and uses it all the time now. I think she knows what it means, but she uses it even when she should be saying yes. Something I love doing with her is yes/no wars. I’ll say “yes” and she says “no,” over and over and over again. I can go on for a while, much to Terri’s chagrin, but Bethany ultimately ends up winning….

Bethany also understands what it means to “watch TV.” She knows this by asking to watch “Einsteins” or “Mickey Mouse.” If you ask her if she wants to watch a movie it doesn’t mean much to her. I’m trying to fix this by getting her interested in various Disney movies, especially the Pixar movies, which are some of my favorites. We keep the amount of TV she watches to a minimum, but it is so cool to see her run all excited to the couch, climb into her spot, and ask to watch something. I still can’t believe that Terri and I have a kid sometimes!!

Something I can’t figure out about Bethany is where her love of cars come from. It doesn’t matter what kind of car, if it has wheels, then it is her new favorite toy. Isn’t this a boy thing? She loves going for a “car ride” and asks to do it all the time. She also knows the difference between “our car” and “Grandma and Grandpa Duppong’s car” which she’ll say is black or red respectively. She even gets the reverse, “whose car is that Bethany?” “Mima and Papa’s car.” Oh, yeah, those are the words she came up with for both sets of grandparents.

As far as her Birthday went, it was pretty uneventful actually. She turned a full two years old at 7:28 pm on Monday. This year it was also her Golden Birthday. We threw a Birthday party for her at our house on Sunday. Bethany received lots of attention and exploited it to her fullest. This year we made it easy for her to open presents too. Instead of wrapping paper, we covered gifts with tissue paper and placed it in a gift bag. Bethany would pull the tissue paper out of a bag revealing the new toy underneath. Unfortunately, she would just want to play with each new discovered toy. I hate to say it, but Terri and I may have gone a little overboard this year, but thankfully everyone else kept it to a minimum. All in all everyone had a good time and hopefully Bethany has enough new toys to keep her busy until August….

Wow, I never imagined it would go nearly half a year between posts when I mentioned we wouldn’t be posting as much anymore! Hopefully we still have some people subscribed to the RSS feed…

Terri and I survived our first trip with Bethany to Walt Disney World, thanks to the help of Terri’s parents who happened to be staying in Florida. We spent the last week in January and stayed at the Wilderness Lodge! You should check out some of the pictures in the Disney 2007 album in our gallery. Unfortunately, we didn’t get a whole lot of pictures with Bethany while we were there, but we did get several while Bethany enjoyed a character breakfast at Chef Mickeys. Bethany got to meet Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Goofy, and Pluto! Every once in a while Pluto would get the kids dancing and waving napkins around in the air, and even though Bethany was a little to young to be placed on the floor, she did manage to get her napkin waving around while sitting in her high chair! It’s hard to describe her interactions with the characters, if I had to pick a word I’d say it was more curiosity then anything. The nice part is that the characters did not scare her at all! Plus, Bethany went on every ride where there wasn’t a height restriction. Not once did she get scared or even fuss while having to sit in some of the ride cars. She is just amazing. We all had a good time, but to be honest, we were glad to get home.

In other news, Bethany has really been working on her speech. We’ve lost track of how many words she can say. We are really encouraging her to read words out loud. Usually when I read her a story I’ll stop at the last word on the page and point to it waiting for her to say that word. More times then not, she gets it right! One thing that is a little frustrating is Bethany says the end of a word more then the beginning of a word. A good example is the world “light” which she has been saying for months. When she says it, it’s “ight” to her. Several words are like this, instead of “please” it’s “ease”, and “ar” instead of “car”, or “ur” instead of “fur”. She does say several words completely though, like people, hello, ‘how are you’, and apple. It’s pretty funny when we are out driving and she sees a word she knows, she’ll just blurt it out! We live right next to an Applebees and one night on the way home, it was silent in the car and all of a sudden Bethany just yelled out “Applebees!” She does that all the time whenever she finds a word she knows.

Bethany is really starting to pay attention to how things work too. If I show her how to do something, she never needs me to show it again. Even on her own she figures things out. I have water bottle that you twist to open the top, if I give it to Bethany she knows she has to twist it before she can get anything out! I never showed her that! Doors? She knows you have to twist the door knob to get it open. She even figured out one day how to open the doors to our entertainment center. We have those doors that you push in, then quick release and the door separates from the magnet. Bethany figured out one day that if she just backs up slowly into the door, she’ll activate the mechanism, then she turns around and opens it the rest of the way. It is really amazing what she figures out.

Television is something else she is really starting to take an interest in. We only let her watch about forty minutes of TV, an episode of Little Einsteins and then later a Micky Mouse Clubhouse episode. She really gets into the show. She’ll pat-pat-pat along with the Einsteins gang to get Rocket up in the air, and she dances around with the characters of MMC at the end of an episode. I can’t wait for her to start responding to questions that the characters ask viewers!

And last, but not least, what would 5 months of absence be without a few pictures? There are a few of Bethany in the Disney 2007 album, then we uploaded a few more here. And apparently, I never mentioned another album that was uploaded in January. This one has a few more.

We just uploaded a bunch more pictures of Bethany when we went to the Mall of America with her parents a couple weeks ago. The album does double duty since it shows not only Bethany and Terri’s parents, but Bethany and my Parents, and as an added bonus, you get to see the worlds largest ginger bread house too!

And for those that haven’t noticed, we posted an album a few weeks ago and forgot to mention it on the blog. Here is one of our favorite pictures of Bethany.

Doesn’t she look like a Who from Whoville?

Hi Everyone! I hate saying this, but as I’m sure you can see, the length of time between updates is getting longer and longer. If you’ve been following along then you already know that Bethany has reached a lot of the important, first time milestones in her 17 months of life. For the last few months we’ve been in the teach, teach, teach mode. She has an incredible memory and often remembers words that she has seen only a few times. This weekend we were at a store and I had a business card size piece of paper describing a product being sold. The paper was covered with seventy or eighty words of various sizes and fonts. I asked Bethany where the word “soap” was, but instead of pointing to the one I was expecting her to she pointed to the word buried deep within a paragraph of text! And it was quite small too! She also found the word “rocks” and, even more impressive, she found the word “nature,” which was part of a sentence and a word we have rarely used with her. She is always bringing books to Terri to read to her, and is sitting still for much longer periods of time. Even better, Terri found that if she gives Bethany a book during a diaper change, she’ll lay still for the entire operation. She had started to get fussy when it came time to change diapers.

Something we’ve noticed is that Bethany really likes cars, or, more specifically, wheeled toys. She loves playing with them, but we only have a few of these types of toys. She received an early Christmas present from my parents, a Geotrax train set. I must admit I was being a little selfish when I recommended it, but seeing as how she loves playing with that Thomas the Train set you see out at several toy stores, I thought the Geotrax would be perfect for her. The track is wider then Thomas the Train, the pieces are larger, and, best of all, there is a remote control! To my surprise she picked up the remote control and figured out how to “control” the train very quickly. She also figured out how to put the track together after watching me do it a few times. But, regardless of how elaborate a track setup I make, she spends most of the time pushing the train on small sections of the track. She’ll grow into it. In the meantime I’ve been adding to the collection so Daddy has something to play with after she goes to bed…..

We are really really anxious for her to begin talking. Several months ago she was doing a lot of babbling, but then it kind of stopped. The last couple of weeks she has picked it up again, and the last couple of days we’ve noticed her making a serious effort to talk. Several times we’ve asked her something and she’ll make eye contact with you and babble as a response. We encourage the babbling by responding back to her as if we understood what she said. In order to prevent the frustration of us not being able to understand her when she really wants something, we’ve been working with Bethany to sign. Milk was one of the first ones she picked up. She also understands and knows how to sign for “hungry”, “drink”, “eat”, and “more”. We hope she’ll keep picking up more Sign Language until she figures out speech.

Some other cool things about Bethany:

• Stomps feet when asked
• Dances to music
• Points to any number between 1-10 when asked
• We had to pay for a meal for her for the first time
• Has said “Hi dada” and “Hi there” a few times
• Accident or not, answered a very clear “yes” when asked if she can see in the dark
• Finally topped 20lbs, a few days ago she came in at 21.8lbs
• No longer uses the “baby” carrier as a car seat anymore, we’ve upgraded!
• Starting to take a single nap during the day, sometimes napping for 3 hours
• Sleeps about 12 hours at night
• Tries to open closed doors by standing on her tippy toes to reach the doorknob
• Can finally see out the window in the living room!
• Loves remote controls, especially those for our entertainment system
• Figured out how to open CD and DVD packages
• Tries to turn on the bathtub facet when we say she is going to get a bath

Probably the best news of all, we hope Bethany has finally gotten over the fear of the nursery. Terri attends a Mothers Group at our Church a couple times a month. The people in the nursery are wonderful, very patient and engaging with Bethany. Sadly, they have had to get Terri to pick up Bethany several times before her group is over. Even when they didn’t have to Terri would usually pick up Bethany crying and upset. A few times Bethany even started crying before they even entered the nursery room! As hard as it is for Terri to drop Bethany off she has toughed it out. Thankfully the last group meetings have gone off without a hitch! Today, Terri was able to observe Bethany playing very happily with other kids for several minutes. The time before that, Bethany ran up to Terri across the nursery floor with a huge smile on her face! So hopefully Bethany is over whatever fear she had and we can start attending Church again….

We just posted 17 of the best pictures we’ve taken during the last few weeks. During this time Bethany had a really runny nose for about a week, so a few of the pictures reflect that. If you are squeamish, don’t click here… Enjoy!

Hi Everyone! I’ll get right into it, since after more than a month of no updates, we actually have a lot!

I thought I would start the post off with a quick update on Bethany’s 15 month checkup. The short story, the doctor loved everything she saw with Bethany! We found out that Bethany came in at 10th, 25th, and >75th percentiles for her weight, head, and height. One concern that I’ve had with Bethany is that she isn’t gaining as much weight as I thought she should be, since Bethany has been the same weight for the past half a year. The doctor said she had no concerns, because Bethany is active, eats well (for the most part, more on this later), has plenty of dirty diapers, and is still in the normal growth curve for toddlers her age.

Now, about her eating habits. It is getting harder and harder to feed her lately. Her latest trick is to spit out anything she doesn’t want to eat. For instance, tonight, she wanted nothing to do with crushed pineapple or peas. However, after mixing the peas in with the macaroni noodles, she gobbled them right up! She used to be so good with eating!

The doctor noticed that Bethany actually has two new teeth coming in, one on each side of the top, front two she has in now. Hopefully this phase in her bad eating habits will come to a close after the teeth push through a bit more. For those keeping count, Bethany has four teeth in, and two more that have just ruptured. On a good note, Bethany was weaned from the bottle since mid September!

The most exciting thing that Bethany has been doing is reading, reading and more reading. We have a white board, and write the words down in smaller and smaller letters, just to see how small the words can get before she isn’t able to read them. Basically, we can’t write any smaller- she is able to read words that are as small as newspaper text! She is also recognizing many more words.

We have lost count of the objects that Bethany can point out in picture books and flashcards. It must be well over 200! During her checkup I asked Bethany to point out the taxi on a page full of transportation items like car, etc. She pointed right to the taxi! The doctor seemed really impressed.

On the interactive side Bethany is really starting to engage us in playing with her. She brings toys to us for us to play with. She’ll play ball with us. She enjoys being chased or chasing us. She loves to be startled and usually giggles after realizing what just happened. Like many parents, we’ve search for ticklish spots on Bethany. The best one I’ve found is tickling her back, which caught me by surprise when I found it. I don’t know how she does it, but Terri seems to have a knack in tickling her.

Bethany is walking like a pro ,and added walking backwards to her resume. She has also been running for quite some time. She dances if we ask her to, and will often do it on her own if we are listening to music. She recognizes a lot of shapes and colors and even put together a puzzle a few times!

Bethany has also turned into a real ham. She makes us laugh all the time. She has done such funny things like squishing her face through the mesh portion of the playpen, resulting in funny faces!

Bethany is just such a joy in our lives. She is almost always so happy, just squealing with delight. She likes to grab hold of one of our fingers, just to snuggle, or to walk around. She is full of hugs, smiles and giggles. Besides the eating pickiness, the only other real problem with Bethany is that she doesn’t like the church nursery, so the nursery workers have had to come get us frequently. Hopefully she’ll grow out of this phase soon.

We hope you enjoy the new pictures that will be posted tonight-stay tuned!

Terri is so excited! Bethany proved to her mama just how much of a Disney fan she is by pointing to various characters when Terri asked her! She got Micky, Minnie, Donald, and Pluto correct, which happened to be the four of the five characters on the picture. She also did this for our parents too!

Bethany is really starting to expand her vocabulary, but it still continues to be in Bethanyspeak. We’ve managed to make out “thank you,” “good girl,” “OK,” and “I love you.” We can ask her to do things, “where’s mom” or “can I have that” and she’ll usually respond appropriately. In addition to her vocabulary, she has several colors figured out and she is starting to recognize shapes too. She even started doing some puzzles!

Bethany has been walking only a couple months, but she decided it was too slow and added running to her list of talents. Something else that continues to amaze me is her ability to catch herself when she stumbles. She has taken some pretty decent spills, but manages to avoid injury. I suppose one could say she doesn’t have far to fall, but I hope it means she has fast reflexes. Now that she is running she started playing tag with us, but she never wants to be “it,” so we always have to tag her. It is so much fun to chase her and listen to her laugh and giggle when you try to catch her.

We’ve been doing flash cards with Bethany for months now. We’ve tried a few times to create cards on the fly to see if she’ll read them, so the other night I was playing around with her magna-doodle and wrote down a word she knows. When I showed her the word, she performed the action! Terri got so excited! She did a bunch of words and Bethany did them too! The best part was that the words we were jotting down were very small compared to her flash cards. Now we know she can read small words! Here’s a picture of one of the actions she did.

Oh yeah, we posted 23 new pictures too.

Anyone wanting to use an RSS feeder to keep up to date with Bethany’s Blog is welcome to do so by connecting to the following feed, http://www.duppong.com/thebaby/feed or click here if your system will work with the link. Let me know if you have any problems.

Wait a month and you get two posts in a day, what a deal! Tonight Bethany did her best reading yet. She grabbed a pack of flash cards from her toy box and brought them over to me. I opened them and spread them out on the floor. After she sat down on the floor I asked her to find a card, which she did. Terri asked her to find a card, and she did. We each took turns asking Bethany to pick cards and she got 12 of 14 correct! The two she missed, insect and parrot, are not words she is that familiar with. She didn’t technically miss them either, she just never reached for them. Of the 12 she got, when I asked her to pick the “lamb” card, half of it was hidden under another card with just the word showing and she still got it! When Terri asked her to find the “apple” card it was upside down, but she still got it! She is just amazing!

One other quick thing, over the last four weeks I had several opportunities to photograph Bethany. Terri and I went through the 160 photos and narrowed it down to the best 38. They are posted here.

Hello everyone! We’re still here, just more busy then ever. It seems like ever since Bethany has been able to walk we can’t keep up anymore. I’ve got lots to write about, so here we go!

Bethany is now the proud owner of four teeth! Her front two ruptured through during the last three weeks. With the bottom completely in, and top mostly in, she hasn’t been shy about using them. She splits cheerios like a pro and bites when checking for other teeth. She even grinds them which drives Terri crazy.

Bethany is experimenting with several new sounds, and has a few “words” that we know what she means when she says it. Three common words are “ight” for light, “og” for dog, and “at” for cat. To further the point about what she is saying, she points to various objects when she says them! She also tells us what she wants by pointing to them. If we give her the wrong object she just continues to point until we find the right one.

She’s reading really well, and does different actions when going through flash cards, even cards that she has only seen once or twice. She’s definitely proved she can read at least 20 words by doing the proper action, or saying the word. She signs for milk when shown the flash card or when she is hungry or thirsty. She’ll say “ight” while pointing at one when shown the corresponding flash card. “How do you say no?” and “shake your head” both elicit the same action from her.

She recognizes more body parts, like hair, nose, mouth, and toes. She puts her arms up, then down, when asked. If you ask her to laugh, or sees it on a flash card, she does it. She found a calculator in a room when asked to do so. She loves her comb and brush and will brush her hair if we ask her to. Her first Disney character that she recognizes is Bambi, which isn’t surprising since her room is decorated in a Bambi theme. She likes music, especially Disney music, and even dances when we ask her to! A favorite of mine is when she counts. She likes to point to each finger on our hands and then makes sounds for each finger as if she were counting. She also spins herself around in a circle until she gets dizzy and sits down.

A milestone she reached almost a month ago is stacking blocks. A lot of times if I’m stacking something, she’ll pay me a visit, knock over my tower, and try and stack them herself. She experiments with various toys trying to get them to “stack” on top of each other. Taking this new ability a bit further, while visiting my parents, Bethany walked over to some flowers, pulled off a head, and tried several times to “put it back on!” I’ve shown her how to turn her toys on and off, which she remembers.

Her sense of direction is incredible. For example, my Mom and Terri were at Barnes & Noble recently, and brought Bethany into the kid section. She found that little wooden train table set that you see set up in a lot of toy stores. When it was time to leave, they picked her up and set her down elsewhere in the store. Apparently, Bethany wasn’t done playing, because she navigated through all the different islands of books right back to the table with the trains! She couldn’t even see the table when they set her down! Needless to say, she has become very focused when she wants something.

Weaning her off baby food has been going great. She continues to have a very healthy appetite. She didn’t seem to like fruit earlier in her life, but now she can’t get enough of it, especially strawberries. Her favorite food seems to be pasta of any variety. Soup is something else she enjoys. We’ve given her several different varieties, french onion and broccoli cheese most recently.

This past week we just got back from our first vacation with Bethany. We went to Wisconsin Dells for four days with Terri’s parents, her brother’s family, and my parents. Bethany’s first swim in a big pool was just awesome, and she didn’t seem to mind it at all. She moved her arms and legs in an attempt to swim. She was able to walk in several inches of water. She even got to slide down a few kiddie slides with me. Even when Terri and I visited some of the big parks, Bethany seemed content sitting in the stroller watching us while we did the “big kid” stuff (no she wasn’t alone, that’s why we went with our families!). We were very pleased at how sunny Bethany’s mood was during the trip. She hardly napped at all, yet she was such a happy baby! We ate at several restaurants and Bethany did great sitting in a high-chair eating food from the table. It was a great vacation and we are looking forward to next year when we get to take her to Disney World!

Last but not least, I have a bunch of pictures that I hope to get posted later today. See you soon!