Stella and Leapfrog

 Here we are with Stella playing over at our house.  Holly loves having her over.  She has been missing seeing her as she has been away on an extended trip.  We also spent that afternoon doing some play testing at leap frog.  It was a super fun time.

Leapfrog Play Testing

Today we headed over to leapfrog to play test a new game.  Last time we went it was really neat building blocks, another time it was a Monsters U game

This week it was a new leap pad game, Disney Planes.  Parts were a little advance for Holly but included scientific and math learning.  But what they were really looking at was the flying component and testing out flight controls to see which were more intuitive.  Holly had lots of fun and as a reward she took home a box set of activities books to practice writing and drawing with her tag pen.

Playdate @ Chloe's

On Tuesday we went on a play date at Chloe’s house. We had a lot of fun. There were about 8 moms’ there with their babies, but Holly was the oldest and only cruiser. Well, towards the end a mom with a 9 and ½ month old, Mackenzie came with her mom Amy and she was able to cruise, but she seemed to mostly stay in one place. She actually could stand independently, like if you pulled her up to a stand she would just hang out there standing and eventually sit herself down, but not take any steps. It was pretty cool to see.

There were a few 8 months old who had the crawling and sitting down mastered, but they didn’t seem to want to wander off and crawl anywhere either. Then, there were a few littler ones who were just getting the hang of sitting. Holly I guess is a very independent baby, she is not afraid of other people, and as long as mommy is within her range of sight, she is happy to be off playing on her own.

It was fun to see all of the babies interact with each other, and Holly is definitely a social butterfly. She goes right up to the other babies and tries to make friends, she of course wants to see whatever it is they are playing with, but then gives it back after she “takes” her turn and she moves on to the next thing. She was friendly with the moms too using them all as a means to travel to wherever she was going simply cruising right onto them and over them and climbing wherever she needed to go.

She loved playing with all of the new and interesting toys, and Chloe has gotten some new ones since our last visit. I decided to get one of those leapfrog tables after playing with it at Chloe’s house, she had two one up on its legs and one on the floor, (which I didn’t realize was the same toy at first, so it sold me that the legs were removable) Chloe’s mom said they are on craigslist pretty cheap, I found one for only 10$ so I am hoping that they sell it to me, but the lady did have some other inquiries. There was also this cool front door toy, that was big and something you could use for Cruising. The door open and closed which she loved and there was a little mail slot with an opening and closing cover that said, you’ve got mail and she did that one over and over. She is starting to understand that she was controlling that sound and making that noise, and loved it.

There were a lot of neat musical toys and new things to chew on of course. It was funny as we had to extra baby proof. Holly found all kinds of neat ways to escape from the play area, like going under an end table into the other part of the room. We also had to move the fence, since she is a wanderer. The other moms like to say that Holly is a very “busy” baby, which is sweet, but what they really mean is that she doesn’t sit still for a second, and is extremely active. She is hard to keep up with sometimes.

We had fun overall. I am starting to try and teach Holly gentle, and she doesn’t really know her own strength and has no notion of where her body is in space. She tramples over all things, be it toys or other babies, sometimes even trying to sit on them, and scotch them out of her way. I think one of the babies pulled her hair, but I can’t recall for sure if it was here or somewhere else we played this week, but I thought it was good for her, she is always in there face, and tries to pull on them and grab there hair. Maybe she isn’t sophisticated enough yet to understand that it hurts, and that is what she does to them, but she is tough, and it took about 3 seconds of me holding her before she was pushing mommy away so she could go and play some more.

Video Trifecta

Mommy doesn't ever get to eat in peace any more. I suppose if I sat at the table maybe I would, but Holly likes to linger and cruise back and forth on the couch whenever I eat and grab my plate and get a bite for herself. This time I decided to let her go to town eating the rice. She sure made a huge mess.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TiSSwfzHd4



Holly's new thing is snorting like a pig. it was not easy to catch on film and way cuter in person. I think this might have something to do with being congested, but it is so darn cute. She goes through a wave of various emotions here from snorting, to laughing, to chewing, to whining, to crying when she doesn't get her way. She also babbles some. It is a very close up take on her face so a little shaky.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-kgmi385mo



This video was taking while we were waiting to playtest at leapfrog. Holly actually really liked this play table. While this video doesn't really show Holly interacting with the toy - she stopped by the time I got it rolling - it does show her crawling, standing up, and cruising which is also pretty cool.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVw0nRCNGO4

Leapfrog

Wednesday night Holly got to bed pretty late, I think it was around 11:30. I expected her to sleep long and planned on having to wake her up around 9:45 to go to an appointment. Much to Joel’s dismay she woke up at 7:00. She was fussing and had wedged herself into the corner and was pretty uncomfortable, so he nudged her out of it and it was enough for her to turn and look at him wide-eyed and awake, so he tried to coax her back to sleep eventually picking her up and rocking her but in the end it was a no go that was crowned with her needed to be completely undressed and changed because she peed all over him and her cloths while being changed.

They ended up having a nice morning together but I had plans and needed her to be well rested and well 7.5 hours is not enough sleep. So around 8:45 she had a bottle in bed with me and fell back asleep. She stayed there until about 10:00 when I transported her to the car and she woke up slowly watching the world go by.

We were on our way to Leap Frog where Holly was scheduled to be a play tester for a new toy. This was very exciting. We got there and first thing was first, she had that morning Poopie and had to be changed, it was messy but mommy was smart and brought extra diapers. We ran into Alex another little boy we know from swim class, and just the waiting room was tons of fun. We met 4 other babies and played with two different activity tables and even got to meet a giant sized tad.

Once it was our turn we went into a room with a two way mirror and I let Holly crawl around the floor and she played with the new toy. It was an electronic Book. It was pretty cool. As you turned the pages it lit up and made music and read to you. She loves turning pages so she had fun getting all the feedback and getting to control the sounds by her movements. It was made of a plastic material so was very durable and chewable. It only had 3 pages so I recommended that there be a few more. Also I thought the phrases it was “saying” were too long. They were like a sentence. Each page in addition to the little story had a color and shape on it and when you hit the button that was making the music and light it would say that, “red triangle” I felt like maybe it should do that when you turn the pages a more basic and simple thing, and then read something more complicated when you hit the button, so that as you get older it does the more complicated thing. So far none of the babies had figured out to hit the button on their own.


We also played with a big round “pen” that when you hit it on the page of a book it reads to you that page. It was a 2+ toy and they were just curious to see what she would do. She turned the pages and she hit the pen on the book, but never got the “right” angle on her own to get a response, but she did like it when I showed her it and it made noise. This book however had pages with several sentences on them, which I again thought was too long.

Finally she played with what I think was a prototype because it was just solid white plastic. It was like a mixing bowl for a cake with a whole in the middle. And the middle part was a stacked with these flat rings and there was a spoon. She really wanted to chew on the pieces of this one and was not able to stack, but she did put the spoon “in” the bowl, and tried to pull the rings off the stacker, but they were very hard for her to grab onto.

The whole thing only lasted about 15 minutes and we got a 20$ target gift card which was exciting, but I went more for the fun experience of letting her test out new toys and being able to provide feedback to the people who make them, I thought it was very cool. Since their offices are less than 2 miles from our house I hope to be invited to play test again.

After this we originally had plans to go and see the free Mom and baby movie in San Francisco with Lucian and Tracey. But they were sick and canceled. I thought about going on my own, but the movie was Pink Panther 2, and I never saw the first one and I am not really a comedy fan, so it hardly seemed worth the travel time if we weren’t also getting a chance to hang out with friends.

I instead was responsible and spent 45 minutes at the AT&T store trying to get them to get all of my data off my old phone before mailing it back in, this was unsuccessful. Holly was hungry and cranky so we headed over to star bucks and I fed her some bananas and gave her a bottle. Then we went to Costco. Holly was such a trooper sitting in the cart being a good girl, but by the end of the very long shopping trip she was having no more of it and was very cranky.

She was playing the lets throw mom’s sigg bottle on the floor game over and over.. Then it was lets dump my toy out of the cart, oh ok, let’s reach behind me and throw whatever this thing is that I can reach and watch it fall. At one point I had not even realized she throw her loopy toy and a few minutes later the Seafood guy found us and said, Is this yours little miss and gave it back to her. I was so grateful, as she loves that toy and I would have been very unhappy to have lost it.

The other really cool exciting thing is the free samples… Well yes I enjoyed them, but no, so did Holly! They had one with dried fruit, craisons, raisons, and cherry bits and I gave a few to Holly, she only made an almost gagging but not face once and ate about 4 pieces and sucked on them for a while, they were pretty flavorful. Then the best part was the Strawberry yogurt Smoothy sample in these little paper cups. Holly drank the whole thing. Granted it took me about 5 minutes to give her baby sip after baby sip holding the little cup up to her lips and letting her sip and slurp it out, but every time I pulled it away she whined and fussed and grabbed the cup back. She really liked it and drank the whole thing.

I bought her these new sippy cups too. One was like a sports bottle and the other has a straw, so I am going to see if she can figure out how to drink from a straw. I have so yogurt drink and juice I got the other day at the store so now that I know she likes it and will drink it I am going to try it again in her cup at home.

After Costco we went to Albertsons to get a few other items like Holly’s YoBaby and Half and Half and then we picked up Daddy and made him come and bring all the groceries upstairs and put them away. He is so good like that. Holly was exhausted and I was trying to get her to stay awake in the car so she would sleep when we got home but she was relentless even when I took her out of the car seat she was asleep or trying to be in my arms in a sitting position. So then when I got upstairs and put her in the crib she immediately cried and woke right up. It’s like a queue to be awake! So I made her a bottle in hopes that she would drink it and fall back asleep, but alas it simply gave her the energy to play and stay awake. She was so tired though that by 5:00 she finally passed out for a nap. Sadly it was so late in the day that she didn’t want to go to bed tonight until almost midnight again. We tried to put her to bed at 9:45 and 10:45. The second time we even let her “play” in the dark in her crib thinking she might eventually settle and lay down and go to sleep but after about 10 minutes she started to cry, so Dad when and tried to rock her and get her to settle but that didn’t work, so we waited yet another hour and then by 11:45 I laid down with her and another bottle and she fell asleep.