Samantha: 15 Months, Week 5

Samantha enjoys spending time outside.  In fact, most nights she will ask to go out and play.  So when the weather is nice, we have been taking advantage of that.  She likes to get in and out of chairs and also to smell our butterfly bush.  Plus, we got a slide from our friends in Chicago when we were up for Christy's wedding last weekend.  She is still learning how to climb up the ladder, but really enjoys going up and down the slide.

Samantha and I get to spend Monday evenings together while Ben is in class. This Monday I received my new computer in the mail, and Samantha enjoyed playing with the box.  Who needs fancy, new toys when you can play with a box?

I had been nursing Samantha three times a day: morning before work, when I get home from work, and then before bedtime.  I had been thinking that I would go down to two times a day and using the wedding weekend as the beginning was a good time to start.  I have now dropped the nursing when I get home from work, and Samantha is doing just fine.  I already think it's amazing that she is still nursing at 16 months old, but I am wanting to start winding down our nursing time and wean her sometime in the next couple months.  She gets hungry in the afternoon and often needs a snack after she wakes up from her nap, but it doesn't seem to be bothering her at all to not be nursing at that time.

Friday night we had a games night with our friends.  It is the last one we will have before they have their baby, and hopefully we will have another chance to get together like this before they move out of the country.  Samantha always enjoys herself playing with the boys and does fine sleeping there in a pack and play while we play games after bedtime.

We had a very busy weekend as Saturday there was an IU football game at 8 p.m.  We decided to take Samantha with us as an experiment to see how she would do out that late.  We stayed in our seats up in the stands for maybe half of the first quarter, and then decided we were tired of wrangling a wiggly toddler.  They have an area for kids called "Knot Hole Park," so we went down there and let her walk around for awhile.  We tried putting her into the backpack carrier and walking around with her to see if she would fall asleep, but we should have known better.  There was just too much going on for her to fall asleep even though she was extremely tired.  We stayed until the beginning of the fourth quarter and then decided to leave and put our sleepy girl to bed.  Even though she was tired, she enjoyed herself and particularly enjoyed walking around the child football field for children under the age of six and watching and listening to the band play and march before the game.  The next day was sort of rough, so I'm not sure if we would take her to a game this late next time, but it was good to see how she would react when going out after her bedtime.  She is such a flexible, easygoing baby who loves experiencing life.  We are so blessed.

Sunday afternoon after her long nap recovering from staying out late at the football game, we took some cute pictures of Samantha playing with Daddy's Cubs hat.