Day 12 of mother-encouraged weaning

Well, it certainly doesn't feel like I'm weaning the girls. While we are making progress (I think), it's mostly at bedtime - and they are nursing more at other times to make up for it, so they don't actually nurse less. The advantage is that bedtime is the hardest time to distract the girls from nursing, so if they quit nursing at bedtime I just need to focus on distracting them from nursing during the afternoon to go nursing-free. Now we are offering them a choice of pacifiers, or milk right before bed - seems to be working, although we'll have to wean from the pacifiers later.

I think once they are routinely skipping the bedtime nursing, I'll probably try to have them skip nursing all day one day a week, then two the next week, then three days, and so on until they are just nursing on weekends.

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Some neat things the girls have started doing:

Lenora is learning her colors. I thought she might be starting to grasp them about a month ago, so Bjorn and I have been working with her (and a little with Iliana, but she doesn't seem to get colors as well). She now recognizes purple easily, and requests purple items and orange items specifically. She is starting to get green, and yellow and will occasionally recognize red or blue correctly.

Iliana, on the other hand, is practicing another skill: Asking, "Why?" This one blind-sided me. I simply wasn't prepared to have to start justifying our rules to our children quite this early. The first time she clearly asked it, she wanted to know why she shouldn't go downstairs after her bath. I fumbled out something about how it was inconvenient to have her downstairs while we're upstairs and how we were busy trying to get pajamas and diapers on her. I needn't have bothered working at it so hard - she was more interested in getting any explanation at all. She looked so pleased with herself by the time I was done talking!

Lenora has started singing her "AFB's" - that is, the Alphabet Song, but a bit tuneless and with random letters that she likes alternating with F. "A, F, B, F, Y, F, A . . . " Iliana isn't as good, but does sing her "UBU's" - mostly just alternating between U and B, and with absolutely no tune at all.

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And the big anecdote . .. We were watching an episode of Full House from the season with the twin boys. In this episode, Jess has to punish his toddlers, and during their time-out they call him "mean Daddy." Ouch. I joke to Bjorn that if we're not careful, Lenora will pick up on that and start saying it. About two minutes later, she does just that - "Mean Daddy!" and laughs.

But it gets better . . . when I start encouraging her to say "Nice Daddy" instead, she first repeats herself for a bit - then starts saying "Nice Mommy". If she weren't a toddler, you'd think I'd have set this up ahead of time and bribed her.

And a little more . .. we finally get her to say "Nice Daddy," so in the interest of equal treatment (or something), she spontaneously decides to also throw in "Mommy bad."

Definitely a story worth writing down and saving for when she gets older.