No, No, No!!!

As much as I hate to say it, we hear this a lot right now! The little monkey has picked up a few bad habits to which we respond "NO!" Now, on top of the habits, she also says "No, no, NO!" back to us, most often with a little finger wagging to boot!

Yes, she was telling me "No!" about her socks!

We have a climber! Alyssa has figured out that she can climb on the couch. This by itself is not a big problem. It IS a problem when she uses it to get on the end table (with the glass insets) or the half wall (Yikes!) Just today she decided to make a game of it... she climbs up high enough to get my attention, waits until I head over to get her down and then throws herself back into the seat, giggling the whole time! It is nerve- wracking (and funny, I can admit... just not to her!)

We've had a bit of trouble with mealtimes for the last couple of months. We're never quite sure of the reason, but she very often throws food on the floor. We thought we had thought of (and tried!) everything to fix the problem! We thought it could be just that she was testing us... a little bit of defiance (you can just SEE the gleam in her eye as she dumps some banana!) We thought she didn't like what she had in front of her (except she'd still eat some of it). We just didn't know!

Thank goodness for blogs! I happened to read my friend Rachel's blog... one of her kids was up to similar antics! Although we had tried (and failed) with munchkin utensils, we hadn't tried them again since the food- dropping began. Rachel said that they had started giving him a spoon just to hold during mealtimes, so we tried it. Bingo! Alyssa is getting good feeding herself if we help her get the food on the spoon and the spoon is enough distraction to keep her eating. Yay! Now we have a strategy! And we just clean her up and let her get down to play if she starts tossing food after she has eaten enough to be satisfied.

Oh, and she likes to play with light switches. She is fascinated with what they do! Such a smarty!