The almighty bottle and some book recommendations

Bottle weaning is killing me!!! Ok, not really. The almighty bottle is actually proving to be much easier to break than I thought. As I said yesterday, I stopped any and all daytime bottles and as of today, she no longer gets her "after breakfast" bottle. The toughie will be weaning the night time bottle. I may give it a whirl tomorrow because the day time has gone off without a hitch.  What did I do? I just put milk in a sippy cup only and she was fine with it. I still don't give her cold "right out of the fridge" milk yet. I do warm it up just slightly or let it sit out so it's room temp but either way, she drank from the sippy all day, no issue.  Yes, it's me who misses it more. Clearly.  Gone are my little 5-10 minute breaks throughout the morning and day when she'd snuggle up against me and quitely enjoy a bottle while I recharged my batteries. Now we're full on all day. She's "wide open" as one of my former (southern) bosses would say. Wide open! (insert southern drawl to truly get that one across.) It fits perfectly here because she's truly non-stop these days. Hence my bottle addiction.  Anyway, this really has been a much more pleasant experience than I imagined. And perfect timing with shutting down the breastmilk operation because that is almost officially done. I only ever pump if I'm completely dying uncomfortable, which has only been maybe once every day and a half or 2 days. That to me means I'll be packing up this pump in a week or so. Awwwwweeeeesome! I can't tell you how nice it will be to no longer be tethered to that thing. Hooray!

For today's playdate (I told you I was really cranking it up this month) we met at the Chantilly Park for "Mommy and Me" class. It was hosted by some local organization that has a studio on Tyvola. But for today, they came to us and set up shop in our park. I thought it was pretty cool. They danced and marched with the kiddos. Blew bubbles and gave them all ribbon sticks to play with. It went on for about an hour and apparently, they'll be back if enough of us enjoyed it. Other than the gnats swarming all of our heads, I'd say today was fun and we'd do it again.

For pics today, I share two "must have" book recommendations for the kiddos.  First is a book called "Trucks" as seen here when Eloise opened up some birthday gifts from Mommy and Daddy. She LOVES this book (and saved me from the traffic jam we were in coming home from visiting the Proctor twins.) It's officially called a "slide and find" book because the Monkey can slide open and find 4 different kinds of trucks per page. For any kid as obsessed with trucks as Eloise, this book is a big hit.

Next follows suit with Eloise's (new) obsession with Curious George. She realizes that he looks just like her monkey lovey (is what I surmise) and therefore, she loves him. And it also may or may not be helping the situation - her Dora the Explorer sippy cup has Dora on it, of course, and who is Dora with?? Her monkey, Boots. To Eloise, everyone has a monkey in their life.  My mom got Eloise the next book and at first I was afraid to give it to her because it has paper pages. She's learning to be gentle with paper pages but every once in a while she has a crazy streak and therefore, I'm afraid the book will be the casualty. As of now, this particular book has weathered the occasional Eloise storm. And what book is it??  Curious George's Big Book of Curiosity. This one is really cute and is a fantastic picture book with all sorts of fun stuff to look at. George is of course all over the place as is his frog friend that the kids can find hiding on each page. Every few pages is dedicated to a new theme and labels every thing on the page for the kiddos to learn. It's nearly one of my favs, I love it so much. Eloise cruises on over to this book multiple times per day and will spend at least 10 minutes with it each stretch therefore, the Monkey and I highly recommend this one!