big girls and binkies

Pita and I had nothing special to do today. I was a little tired after a sleepless night, so we just had a relaxed morning. Celia got to stay in her pajamas for a while, which she loves. She ate some cereal and an entire banana for breakfast! That's a lot for her. Celia had a bath and got dressed, and we went out to get her some new shoes. She grew out of size 5 1/2 awfully fast! She seems like such a big girl now. It's not just shoe sizes that have reminded me lately that Celia is growing up fast. The past few days, Chris and I have looked at her and realized that she suddenly looks like a little girl to us. She has gotten so much taller and her baby chub has mostly disappeared. She just looks so big.

Today she even sat at her little table to have a snack by herself. Of course she was coming over to me every thirty seconds and saying "Hi Mommy!" across the room the whole time.

The only thing that's not so "big girl" about Celia is that she does not want to give up her binky. This morning I was telling her that someday we would say goodbye to the binkies, because they're for babies and Celia is a big girl now. Celia thought about that for a minute, looking very worried, and finally said "Me need binky!" Later in the morning she must still have been thinking about it because she told me "Only Celia need binky. Not babies." Ha! She is too smart and strong willed sometimes. 

After we got shoes this morning, Celia wanted to "play trains" at the bookstore. She now knows when we're near the "train store". A story time had just ended there and the kids' area was a little crazy. The train table was moved to a different spot, it was noisy, and there were kids crying and having tantrums all over the place. Celia didn't want to play there after seeing all that! She's very sensitive about conflict and about other kids crying. We just walked around the store and she said hello to some stuffed animals, and then we went home. In the car she said to me: "I love Mommy. I love Daddy too." I thought it was the sweetest thing until lunch time when she also said that she loved ham and mustard. Hopefully Daddy and I are at least a little higher on the totem pole than the lunch meat.

Celia's nap time is around 12:30. Instead of going right to sleep today, she spent twenty minutes singing, talking away, and being silly in the crib before I finally took her back downstairs and decided to try the nap later. 1:45 rolled around, and Pita was starting to get cranky. I put her down for a nap again, and she cried and screamed. You would have thought she was being tortured in there. I went in a couple times, told her it was time for a nap, and had her lie down. It only took about ten minutes for her to calm down and go to sleep, but it felt like forever. I'm so relieved that she's getting at least part of her nap because the afternoon wasn't going to go well without one! We may try to shorten her nap a little and make it later in the afternoon. I don't think she needs as much sleep as she's been getting, and maybe she would sleep better through the night if she weren't napping as much.

This afternoon we're making a short trip to the grocery store, and we're getting a little snow tonight. I'm hoping Celia will want to play in it this weekend.