What's on the mind of this Mama...

I have had two things constantly rolling around this Mama Mind of mine lately and they both have to do with the fact that Cole is turning one in 6 weeks.  6 weeks!

 

The first is how to wean Cole off the bottle?  How do you do that?  It's supposed to be done on or around his first birthday.  I've been trying to pick the brains of my friends and family for the last few weeks, and the responses are as varied as the people.  Of course, I want it to just be black and white with a formula to follow.  I don't want to mess up.  As I research, I'm beginning to realize that it's hard to mess up, it probably will happen somewhat naturally, and I should stop stressing about it. 

 

Last night I finally googled it to see what I could find and up popped this huge discussion/debate about sippy cups.  Should you give your baby a sippy cup or just skip it all together and go to drinking straight from the edge of a cup?  Is a sippy cup just a glorified bottle?  Will it hurt their teeth just like a bottle will from the sucking motion?  I had heard mutterings of this sort before but hadn't really read much about it.  It's crazy how everything baby seems to be controversial (I wonder if just everything in general is controversial...you can always find people who back up both sides of any issue.)

 

But, one of the websites had a review on sippy cups with straws (which "they" say is better because of the type of sucking the baby is doing) and I happened to have a few of the cups that got some of the best (meaning easiest to clean, best value, easiest to drink from, etc.) reviews.  So, I tried it at breakfast this morning and was so surpised how Cole picked right up on it!  I have been giving him different sippy cups with water for the past few months, and he has gotten pretty good at getting a drink from them (though his latest trick is to let all the water ooze out of his mouth, down his chin, and collect around his neck), but this was the first time he had tried a straw.

 

Don't know if this solves all our weaning/sippy cup problems, but it was a fun little discovery!

 

 

The other thing I keep thinking about is Cole's first birthday!  What do I do?  How big do I do it?  My personality isn't big, but I do want to make it special.  I have heard quite a few stories of moms going all out and it not being worth it.  I don't want to do that, but I also want to push to think things through ahead of time so I'm not rushed at the last minute or come up with a good idea that I want to do without the time to do it.  So, I've been picking my friends' and family's brains on this too. 

 

So far, I am pretty sure I don't want to have a theme or very many decorations.  I do want to have a cake for him to dive into. (As a sidenote, whenever I give him a big piece of food that I usually only give him small pieces from, like bread or something, Cole stops, looks at it, looks at me and smiles the biggest smile ever, and then grabs it with glee.  I imagine this happening with his cake.)  I also want helium balloons behind his chair and maybe party hats, for him and the guests.

 

I'd love to start some traditions.  I talked to Marc about finding a wall some place in the house that we could measure and label his height every birthday.  I also want to do something with the pictures I took of him every month this past year.  I bought a Groupon for a JC Penney photo shoot.  Maybe I could do something birthday with that?  I like that my friend Katie videos her kids answering questions about what they like and what they want to be when they grow up every year.  I'll tuck that away for the future.

 

Any thoughts on these things that are bouncing around in my mind?