- Height: 36.5 inches
- Weight: 31 lb
- She's in the 97th percentile for her height
- She's in the 94th percentile for her weight
Showing posts with label growth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label growth. Show all posts
October 1, 2013
Natalie's stats
On Sunday, Natalie turned 2. On Monday, she had her 2-year checkup at the doctor's office. Her vital statistics from that visit:
May 30, 2013
May 3, 2013
December 31, 2012
Another month, another year
First of all, a few days ago, on December 29, Natalie turned 15 months old. See what a big girl she's getting to be!
Sarah's sister, Miriam, spent Christmas with us in Iowa as well and came with her husband, Andy, and two daughters, Olivia and Nora. The cousins had a great time playing with each other, since they are close in age.
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| Nora, Olivia, Lexi and Natalie |
October 1, 2012
September 3, 2012
11 months
Here's Natalie on her 11-month birthday on August 29. Hard to believe she's almost a year old already.
Another sign of what a big girl she is: She's getting her eighth tooth in - another one on the bottom!
July 30, 2012
10 months old!
Natalie turned 10 months old on Sunday, July 29. She is fully into the crawling stage and needs to be watched constantly. She is also pulling herself up to a standing position on anything that will allow her to. I guess she's trying to race through the crawling stage to the walking stage.
July 2, 2012
Nine months!
Natalie turned 9 months last week on June 29. First thing that morning, I asked her: "Natalie, you've spent just as much time outside the womb as you have in the womb. Which do you prefer?" She just smiled.
Today, I took her to the pediatrician for her 9-month check-up. Her stats:
Weight: 21 lb, 14 oz
Height: 29 inches
The nurse was not able to tell me what percentiles she falls in.
She did not get shots, and the doctor did not have any concerns about her development. We just hope she starts crawling soon!
April 30, 2012
May 16, 2009
How Lexi changed in the nine weeks we were separated
During the time I was away from Sarah and Lexi, Lexi obviously changed. This is not surprising, given that, at this age, a child grows very rapidly. I left them in Nairobi on March 1 and did not see them for nine weeks and a few days.
At one point when I was alone, it had been several days between the times I had looked at a picture of Lexi. Toward the end of our separation, I had grown accustomed to not seeing Lexi every day. So this time when I looked at a picture of her, I saw her a bit in a new way, and I really saw a lot of myself in her face.
On May 7, when I met Sarah and Lexi at the Minneapolis airport, Lexi wasn’t afraid of me, but she wasn’t sure exactly who I was. She allowed me to pick her up, and she was neither scared nor delighted to see me. She was quite neutral. On the car ride away from the airport, she was playful with me, but not really in a familiar, father-child sort of way. It was within an hour after we arrived at Brian and Jen’s (Sarah’s brother) house that I came down the stairs into the basement where Lexi was sitting on an inflatable bed set up there. She saw me come down the stairs and yelled out "Daddy" with a big smile. I was delighted that she had remembered me, and it was okay that it took her a little while.
In the time we were separated, it seems that Lexi went from being a big baby – which is what she was when I left her – to being a little girl. She looked taller and more slender.
The biggest change in Lexi, however, is in her speech. Her vocabulary has grown so much. She is at the point where she is forming two- or three-word sentences – saying things that have a complete thought or an instruction. And she is repeating words and trying to remember them. This is taking little effort on her part, and she often thinks it's fun. She understands many more words and commands, even if some of them are in Kiswahili. She says and understands (and usually obeys) when others say “ka” (sit) or “kuja” (come).
The parts of her speech that have grown the most are her use of nouns. She must identify every thing she knows the word for, even if she sees it multiple times each day. Or she often repeats a word a few times when she spots an object she knows the word for. With one object in particular – water – she’s either very good at identifying its many forms or simply just doesn’t know the subtleties in differences and is very general. She’ll say “water” for wet ground, ice, rain, a puddle, a pond, a river, etc. A bed is still “la la” (Kiswahili for “sleep”).
I’m surprised at how many objects she knows the words for – moon, door, house, book, socks, shoes, jacket, airport, pocket, pillow, airplane, swing. She has learned and retained so many new words. Every trip outside the house – or even just staying in on an ordinary day – is a time for Lexi to exercise her mind and her vocabulary and practice the words she has learned, and she seems never to tire of pointing to and naming what an object is.
Before and after I left Nairobi, Sarah worked with Lexi on getting her to understand that I was leaving. Sarah told Lexi, “We took Daddy to the airport” a lot. This stuck with her. Certainly she calls me “Daddy” to my face, but every once in a while, Lexi will blurt out randomly, “Daddy airport,” even though she’s not at the airport, nor am I. Sarah thinks that when they took me to the airport that night in Nairobi that I left, Lexi believed I stayed there until they found me at another airport in Minneapolis nine weeks later.
Lexi’s next biggest growth in words she has learned are verbs. Even before I left Nairobi, Lexi had been saying "ka" for several weeks while sitting down on a stair or chair and asking you to come sit beside her. One of the funniest commands that Sarah told me she had started saying was, “Heat it,” but pronounced more as, “Eat it.” She said this when we handed her her sippy cup with milk. Jane had really waited on Lexi hand and foot and always heated Lexi’s milk, or perhaps it was just a holdover from the days when we prepared baby bottles of milk (it’s typical for an African person who is house help to follow instructions exactly until told otherwise – if we tell her to heat the milk, she will always do it, even when the child no longer needs it heated). So Lexi was handing back the sippy cup with milk and commanding, “(H)Eat it!” I did this a few times until I proposed to Sarah that we just stick it in the microwave for a few seconds but not turn the microwave on. This seems to have worked, and now we no longer have to heat the milk (she still asks this on occasion). Another well-worn phrase is “Cut it.” Lexi is good at identifying cutting, whether she sees me cutting something out of the newspaper with scissors or asking Sarah to cut up food that’s on her plate. Most of the time this command is used in the latter situation because Lexi is convinced that cutting up food into smaller bits will make it cooler. Lexi is good at understanding and obeying the command to "lie down" when we need to change her diaper on the floor of the bathroom (and she often says it back to us when we say it to her).
Another command that we're hearing from Lexi often is "sing." She knows that we now hold hands when we say grace before a meal, and now she is starting to request that we "sing" the grace all the time. But at other times, she asks us to sing. Upon her arrival back in the U.S., she was asking me to sing "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean" a lot (when she said, "Sing," I would ask her what, and she would say, "Bring back."). Sarah's mother must have sung this to her a lot in the two weeks that she was in Nairobi before she accompanied Sarah and Lexi back to the U.S. One song that Lexi heard a lot from Granny as well must have been "Are You Sleeping" because she can sing the opening notes to it herself now.
Lexi also regularly climbs up in a chair next to us while we're sitting at the table working on something or at the computer and asks, "Write...name." She likes to take the pen and scribble on the paper herself, and she even knows how to hold the pen properly (and holds it in her right hand).
Another favorite word is “more,” and Lexi is getting better at using this word – making it useful to her. She can ask for more milk or more crackers or more of whatever is on her plate at the moment just by saying “more.” But she also uses it as “a lot,” we guess, like when we’re at the airport and she says, “More airplane.”
She is also learning adjectives and can identify if something (like her hands or someone else's) are "clean" or "dirty."
However, Lexi is still learning about accruracy with words. One word she knows well is "poopy" and will say it sometimes, prompting us to ask if she has poopy in her diaper. Most of the time she doesn't, and we figure she's just practicing the word.
So, now that she has reached this new level with her speech, there is an additional area that an already active child is active in.
At one point when I was alone, it had been several days between the times I had looked at a picture of Lexi. Toward the end of our separation, I had grown accustomed to not seeing Lexi every day. So this time when I looked at a picture of her, I saw her a bit in a new way, and I really saw a lot of myself in her face.
On May 7, when I met Sarah and Lexi at the Minneapolis airport, Lexi wasn’t afraid of me, but she wasn’t sure exactly who I was. She allowed me to pick her up, and she was neither scared nor delighted to see me. She was quite neutral. On the car ride away from the airport, she was playful with me, but not really in a familiar, father-child sort of way. It was within an hour after we arrived at Brian and Jen’s (Sarah’s brother) house that I came down the stairs into the basement where Lexi was sitting on an inflatable bed set up there. She saw me come down the stairs and yelled out "Daddy" with a big smile. I was delighted that she had remembered me, and it was okay that it took her a little while.
In the time we were separated, it seems that Lexi went from being a big baby – which is what she was when I left her – to being a little girl. She looked taller and more slender.
The biggest change in Lexi, however, is in her speech. Her vocabulary has grown so much. She is at the point where she is forming two- or three-word sentences – saying things that have a complete thought or an instruction. And she is repeating words and trying to remember them. This is taking little effort on her part, and she often thinks it's fun. She understands many more words and commands, even if some of them are in Kiswahili. She says and understands (and usually obeys) when others say “ka” (sit) or “kuja” (come).
The parts of her speech that have grown the most are her use of nouns. She must identify every thing she knows the word for, even if she sees it multiple times each day. Or she often repeats a word a few times when she spots an object she knows the word for. With one object in particular – water – she’s either very good at identifying its many forms or simply just doesn’t know the subtleties in differences and is very general. She’ll say “water” for wet ground, ice, rain, a puddle, a pond, a river, etc. A bed is still “la la” (Kiswahili for “sleep”).
I’m surprised at how many objects she knows the words for – moon, door, house, book, socks, shoes, jacket, airport, pocket, pillow, airplane, swing. She has learned and retained so many new words. Every trip outside the house – or even just staying in on an ordinary day – is a time for Lexi to exercise her mind and her vocabulary and practice the words she has learned, and she seems never to tire of pointing to and naming what an object is.
Before and after I left Nairobi, Sarah worked with Lexi on getting her to understand that I was leaving. Sarah told Lexi, “We took Daddy to the airport” a lot. This stuck with her. Certainly she calls me “Daddy” to my face, but every once in a while, Lexi will blurt out randomly, “Daddy airport,” even though she’s not at the airport, nor am I. Sarah thinks that when they took me to the airport that night in Nairobi that I left, Lexi believed I stayed there until they found me at another airport in Minneapolis nine weeks later.
Lexi’s next biggest growth in words she has learned are verbs. Even before I left Nairobi, Lexi had been saying "ka" for several weeks while sitting down on a stair or chair and asking you to come sit beside her. One of the funniest commands that Sarah told me she had started saying was, “Heat it,” but pronounced more as, “Eat it.” She said this when we handed her her sippy cup with milk. Jane had really waited on Lexi hand and foot and always heated Lexi’s milk, or perhaps it was just a holdover from the days when we prepared baby bottles of milk (it’s typical for an African person who is house help to follow instructions exactly until told otherwise – if we tell her to heat the milk, she will always do it, even when the child no longer needs it heated). So Lexi was handing back the sippy cup with milk and commanding, “(H)Eat it!” I did this a few times until I proposed to Sarah that we just stick it in the microwave for a few seconds but not turn the microwave on. This seems to have worked, and now we no longer have to heat the milk (she still asks this on occasion). Another well-worn phrase is “Cut it.” Lexi is good at identifying cutting, whether she sees me cutting something out of the newspaper with scissors or asking Sarah to cut up food that’s on her plate. Most of the time this command is used in the latter situation because Lexi is convinced that cutting up food into smaller bits will make it cooler. Lexi is good at understanding and obeying the command to "lie down" when we need to change her diaper on the floor of the bathroom (and she often says it back to us when we say it to her).
Another command that we're hearing from Lexi often is "sing." She knows that we now hold hands when we say grace before a meal, and now she is starting to request that we "sing" the grace all the time. But at other times, she asks us to sing. Upon her arrival back in the U.S., she was asking me to sing "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean" a lot (when she said, "Sing," I would ask her what, and she would say, "Bring back."). Sarah's mother must have sung this to her a lot in the two weeks that she was in Nairobi before she accompanied Sarah and Lexi back to the U.S. One song that Lexi heard a lot from Granny as well must have been "Are You Sleeping" because she can sing the opening notes to it herself now.
Lexi also regularly climbs up in a chair next to us while we're sitting at the table working on something or at the computer and asks, "Write...name." She likes to take the pen and scribble on the paper herself, and she even knows how to hold the pen properly (and holds it in her right hand).
Another favorite word is “more,” and Lexi is getting better at using this word – making it useful to her. She can ask for more milk or more crackers or more of whatever is on her plate at the moment just by saying “more.” But she also uses it as “a lot,” we guess, like when we’re at the airport and she says, “More airplane.”
She is also learning adjectives and can identify if something (like her hands or someone else's) are "clean" or "dirty."
However, Lexi is still learning about accruracy with words. One word she knows well is "poopy" and will say it sometimes, prompting us to ask if she has poopy in her diaper. Most of the time she doesn't, and we figure she's just practicing the word.
So, now that she has reached this new level with her speech, there is an additional area that an already active child is active in.
February 3, 2009
Diagnosis: Good Kiswahili speaker
Lexi had her 18-month check-up at the pediatrician’s office yesterday afternoon. Perhaps the most telling thing I heard during the visit about her development wasn’t from the doctor himself, but from the receptionist. As she called us in to the doctor’s office, she asked me, “Where did she learn all that Kiswahili?” I told her that Jane, our nanny/house help taught her and that we had instructed Jane to speak only Kiswahili to Lexi. The receptionist said that she is speaking very well. She had heard Lexi speaking to me while we were playing with the toys in the waiting room. I replied that Sarah and I don’t know what Kiswahili words Lexi is saying, much less when she’s actually speaking it because we know so little of it (anything other than the several English words she speaks to us is just gibberish). The receptionist just laughed but seemed delighted and amused that such a little girl was progressing so well on her African language skills. Lexi seems to be doing better at 18 months than we were in our early 30s in learning French while living in a non-English-speaking country.
Health-wise, Lexi is doing well. She got two more immunizations yesterday and cried for each of them and then was shy with the cashier, as if she was angry at me for allowing someone to poke her with needles (OK, as someone who hates needles himself, I can understand if she was angry). Her vitals:
Height: 81.5 cm (32 in.)
Weight: 10.3 kg (22.7 lb)
She has shot up in height a few centimeters since her last doctor visit six months ago. Will she be a tall girl? Looking at her growth over time, for her weight, she has been at or slightly below the 50th percentile (although she’s just above the 25th percentile at 18 months, so she’s now skinny for her height) and, for her height, at or above the 50th percentile. So much for being an above-average Lake Wobegone child.
Health-wise, Lexi is doing well. She got two more immunizations yesterday and cried for each of them and then was shy with the cashier, as if she was angry at me for allowing someone to poke her with needles (OK, as someone who hates needles himself, I can understand if she was angry). Her vitals:
Height: 81.5 cm (32 in.)
Weight: 10.3 kg (22.7 lb)
She has shot up in height a few centimeters since her last doctor visit six months ago. Will she be a tall girl? Looking at her growth over time, for her weight, she has been at or slightly below the 50th percentile (although she’s just above the 25th percentile at 18 months, so she’s now skinny for her height) and, for her height, at or above the 50th percentile. So much for being an above-average Lake Wobegone child.
August 10, 2008
A year in pictures
Over the past year, we've taken a photo of Lexi on the ninth day of every month - the day of the month she was born on. We try to take it in the same spot every month for scale (although we've lived/been in too many places this past year). This continues a bit of a tradition we started when Sarah was pregnant with Lexi. We took a weekly photo of Sarah in profile with her growing belly.
So for Lexi's birthday yesterday, I put together all of these monthly growth photos so you could see the growth she's done all in one place.
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