9 Months!!

My baby has been here for the same length of time as I was pregnant with her... actually, I guess even longer, since the first two weeks you aren't really pregnant. Anyway- that seems really long to me. She seems really old already!! I thought I had at least a year before she became a toddler instead of a baby, but she already seems to have outgrown the "baby" title. Everything she does is so intentional. Every look she makes has so much meaning. Sometimes, even her babbling seems to be genuine attempts at communicating! She seems like she barely even needs me anymore- she always wants to be on the ground doing her own thing, she prefers to feed herself, although she will let us feed her now, she even seems to be able to communicate which books she wants read to her (and which she doesn't). It is crazy how grown-up she already seems. I actually get really happy when she is sleepy or fussy for whatever reason, and comes to me to cuddle and be held. I am hoping the next three months go by really, really slowly and I can keep the few baby tendencies she still has for just a little longer...

Age: 9 months!

Stats/Size: Still wearing 6-9 month clothes, 9 month clothes, 6-12 month clothes, and even some 12-month pants and 9-12 month clothes. Will find out her official weight and length on Friday.

Sleep: Pretty good. She still can't go all night without getting hungry, but she usually goes a good 6-8 hours before waking to eat, and has been going right back to sleep after eating again. We've been having some trouble getting her to fall asleep at night, and have started putting her down awake. She is usually okay for about 5-10 min, and then starts crying. We go in, pick her up and rock her to sleep,then put her down again. Then she wakes up again. We wait for her to start crying- usually she just fusses and complains for a little while. Sometimes she falls asleep, sometimes she cries again and we repeat the procedure. I can't let her cry- it is just too sad- but I am able to let her fuss and complain. She fusses and complains when we hold her, so it's not really that different. So far she seems to be getting better at falling back to sleep on her own, and I'm hoping that she eventually learns to fall asleep on her own from the start. If not, I have to admit that I really don't mind rocking her to sleep, and usually don't want to put her down right away when she does drift off :)

Eat: doing SO much better now! She eats whatever we eat that I think is healthy enough to give her, and also has some rice cereal or oatmeal with fruits or veggies in it once or twice a day. I love dinner time when we all sit together and enjoy our food! Now I think I need to get her on some kind of eating schedule, and I think the doctor will tell me that she needs to have more (quantity-wise) solid foods during the day. She still nurses 4 times a day, once at night.

Getting Around: She crawls way too fast. Maybe I'll do a short post about baby-proofing so far... we haven't done enough. Cruising has been getting more adventurous. She goes from table to puzzle cube, couch to wall, etc. She lets go for seconds at a time to clap or hold something, and is great at grabbing back on or getting down on her own. It is crazy.

New People: Mr. Beaver's cousin and his fiance came for an unexpected visit, so she finally got to meet them! He was the best man at our wedding and is like a brother, so it's nice she finally got to meet this uncle.

Best moment this week: Hmm... hard to pick out a moment. It was fun to see the excitement on baby's face when she started walking with her walker, although I was pretty scared it was going to get away from her and she would fall flat on her face (it didn't). I guess seeing her dance for the first time the other night was pretty great :) I'll have to try and post the video below.

Worst moment this week: One night she woke twice to eat... that's all I can think of. It's been a pretty good week!

What I miss: sleeping in! Every now and then drinking alcohol... especially when my mother-in-law visits ;)

What I am looking forward to: My girls-weekend in less than a week!! They are awesome and coming here so I don't have to leave or travel with the baby alone. It is always a great time! Hopefully we don't get a blizzard this time. Oh, and related to this, seeing my friend for the first time since she has gotten pregnant! Soon our baby will have a new friend!

Weekly Wisdom: always have a video camera ready:

Happy New Year!!!

Finally an update :)

I can't believe that it is already a new year... this past one has been pretty great, but it flew by. I can't believe we have had our baby girl for almost 9 months already. I can't believe how grown up she is. I can't believe that she will be turning a year old so soon, and that any day now she will be walking and will start talking.

Every day Mr. Beaver and I marvel over how much personality she has, how happy she is, and how smart she seems to be. She copies almost everything she sees us do (which has been great for getting her to eat!), and she loves when people copy her or react to her actions. Her favorite things to do are waving, clapping/patty cake, and playing peek-a-boo with anything big enough to hide her face. She is so cute- she does it so fast sometimes when she is excited that we don't even have time to play along :) Sometimes she will find ways to play even if she doesn't have a blanket or something to hold up- she will hide behind something, like my shoulder if I'm holding her.

Other things she does all the time is clapping- she is able to make noise- and she shakes her head "no" because it usually gets some laughs. She has started standing on her own once she gets her balance, and she is really good at "cruising", or walking while holding on to stuff. She can walk forward and backward pretty quickly when just holding onto our fingers, and she gets so excited. She babbles a lot now, finally making "mama" sounds! She loves to watch us dance, and tries dancing along or drumming her hands on things to the music. Her favorite thing to play with is the dog (lili), especially her tags and her feet, and she loves to give her kisses, which makes it hard to keep lili from kissing her back. I could go on and on about her, but I think this is enough for now! We just can't get over how amazing she is, and how much she seems to learn and do every day.

Even though I am sad that 2010 is over and seemed to go by so fast, I know that this is going to be such an exciting year for our family! I will hopefully be graduating and getting a job, Mr. Beaver will be transferring full-time to a more challenging position within his company, as I mentioned before- our baby girl will be 1!!, and many other fun family happenings. I just hope that we can find a way to make time go a little slower :)

I don't usually do resolutions, but I do have a few goals for this year: improve my work habits so that I can finish my dissertation and move on with my career, get better about doing all of the things I'd always planned to do with our baby (sign language, play groups, etc.), learn to use the new camera I got for Christmas(!), and get more organized in all areas of my life. There are tons of other things I could list, like posting here more often!, but I think this list is pretty ambitious already.

I hope that everyone else had great holidays and a wonderful start to the new year!

My baby is sick :(

We woke up to our poor baby girl crying last night and went in to find her bed drenched with vomit :( It was one of the saddest things ever!! I cried over the thought that she could have choked, but luckily she was fine other than being sick. We cleaned her up as much as we could, she threw up a couple more times, I finally got her back to sleep in bed next to me so I could make sure if she was sick again that she would not choke. She woke early this morning and I was sure she was starving, so I nursed her just on one side. She was acting like her normal, cheerful self- babbling, smiling, cooing, etc. but within a few minutes of eating, all contents of her stomach covered our dresser ("projectile" is an accurate description of this event). She still got up and acted pretty cheerful, but after a bath and tiny one-minute nursing sessions to try and keep her hydrated, we went to the doctor.

(bad phone picture, but she was being so cute despite being sick!)
Of course nothing terrible is wrong- she has some kind of stomach bug, which will hopefully pass quickly... I knew this but had to be sure. Luckily she never had a fever, and still hasn't gotten sick again since this morning, but I still feel so sad for her!! I hope this is not something we have to deal with again any time soon. For now, I'm trying to keep her comfy as she sleeps (almost all day now).

Pictures!!

Our adventurous crawler:Fun bath time!
Thanksgiving with her favorite blanket and the card "she" made us at daycare... I've always loved hand-tracing turkeys :)
I realized I never posted a halloween pic! This was taken during the daycare H.ween parade.

First Christmas lights with her buddy

and that's enough for now!

Still here!

I'm not gone!

I can't believe how bad I've gotten about updating this blog :(

I really do want to keep a record of everything happening with our baby's first months, but they are flying by!! I can't believe she is already almost 8 months old. She definitely acts older than her age- she doesn't even seem like a baby anymore. As much as I loved my tiny baby, she is so much more fun to watch and play with now! Nobody can believe how much personality she has, and how happy she is (almost) all the time. She has the best expressions- it is hilarious to just watch her. She is such an adventurous little girl- she crawls so fast and goes room to room looking for things to explore. She wants to grab and feel everything she sees, and she flips things over and back and forth between her hands, and looks at every little part.

Standing...almost on her own already!?

When she isn't exploring, our baby is doing everything she can to learn to walk!! She spends a lot of time every day standing, using anything and everything in her reach. She doesn't need any assistance getting up or supporting herself, but she still hasn't mastered balance. She likes to stand against walls (especially of her pack-n-play or crib) and practice letting go. It's amazing watching her get her balance, and then slowly pull her hand back. Sometimes it takes a few attempts, she'll put her hand back on the wall after a second to regain her balance, and sometimes she'll stand with just a finger supporting her for a while, and then she lets go and stands there on her own! It is terrifying but so much fun to watch her face look so excited and proud. She is standing longer and longer each time. Luckily she doesn't do this much outside of the crib and pack-and-play, unless we are right there and she knows we'll catch her. She is also very good at falling on her behind and avoiding head bumps. A while back I went to a parent-teacher conference at her daycare, and they told me they expect her to be walking by Christmas. Back then I thought they were crazy, but now I'm seeing that it is actually a possibility. I don't think we are ready for that!!

Talking!! (well, babbling...)

Baby Beaver is doing pretty well in other areas as well. We finally have the joy of listening to her babble... and babble and babble and babble on and on. I was so anxious for her to start practicing consonants and was so excited to hear her first "dada" sounds (no "mama" yet), but now it seems I never have to go more than a few minutes! I love imagining what she is saying and having conversations with her. Mr. Beaver loves hearing her yelling for him ;). It is fun!

Eating... not being fed

The only skills our baby doesn't seem to be in any rush to master are eating skills... or at least that's what we thought. The first time we offered food (rice cereal), she was excited, eagerly swallowing spoonfuls and even grabbing the spoon and feeding herself a bite! After that, however, she did not have much interest, and pretty much refused to eat anything we tried to feed her (and we tried a lot- every single day). After more than a month of this, our doctor referred us to a food specialist- but I thought this was a little ridiculous (and we never went). She had eaten before, she has no issue with gaining weight, and she is interested in our food, just not in being fed baby food. So I took another approach... we started giving her table food to munch on, which I guess is called "baby led weaning".

I did not do much research into baby led weaning, but I read enough to feel confident that it is safe to give our baby healthy food without pureeing it, as long as we are right there carefully watching. She loves it! We haven't been at it for long, but so far she seems to really enjoy large slices of yellow carrot, avocado slice (with peel still on- otherwise she has no chance holding it), baked sweet-potato slices and sticks, chunky mashed butternut squash or slices of it, and her two absolute favorites- turkey and broccoli. She LOVED the turkey we deep fried for Thanksgiving... we give her a large piece, and she just holds it and sucks on it, kinda chewing small pieces of. With the broccoli, the floret part goes in her mouth and comes out missing all of the little bud pieces! It is fun to watch her figure out how to eat, and I really love sitting together having family dinner, with her eating some of the same foods we have and feeding herself.

Favorite things!

Our daughter has many favorite things, but just to mention a few for my own sake of remembering down the road...

Comfort item: a hand-made blanket. A friend of my mom had it made for our baby shower, so it is a pretty tan and brown pattern to be gender neutral. It's small -- a great size for cuddling with while we rock her to sleep or in the crib.

Toy: our Imaginarium Puzzle cube is played with the most- but this is like 6+ toys in one... and she can use it to stand up and scoot around on her feet. To narrow it down, the magnetic shapes on this toy are her favorite. She loves pulling them off and chewing them, banging them on stuff, and just crawling around holding them.

Play activity: crawling around outside and playing with grass and leaves. Unfortunately it is now waaay too cold for this, so we're going to have to find a fun alternative.

Thing we do: she LOVES when we count to three when doing anything... picking her up, bouncing her in the air, clipping her nails... it doesn't matter!

Routine activity: bath time is by far a regular, favorite part of the day. We use it to get some energy out before bedtime, and it works! She is great in the tub. She usually just sits and scoots around that way, but maybe once each night she crawls around a little bit. Unfortunately she has started standing in the tub, which we are working on stopping. We give her one warning ("No standing in the tub, or bath time will be over") and turn her a different direction with a toy distraction, but typically bath time ends after about 15 min because we can't keep her from standing any more.

Book: This is a toss-up... she loves Dr. Seuss's A B Cs, but at bed time it's between one of the "Goodnight" books... either Goodnight Moon or Goodnight San Fransisco. My favorite is Guess How Much I Love You :)

Food: I'm gonna say Turkey.

Song: Anything we sing! She seems to like when I change words to songs to include her name, or make up songs about her.

I'm sure there are many other things that I could think of favorites for... she is such a happy baby she seems to love everything!

And finally, to make this post just a little bit longer, the survey I haven't done in so long:

Age: 34 weeks now!

Stats/Size: She's wearing 6-9 month clothes, 9 month clothes, 6-12 month clothes, and even some 12-month pants and 9-12 month clothes. Not sure about weight/length, but I'd guess around 18.5 lbs?

Sleep: Still waking once a night, sometimes twice. Naps are harder to begin, but once she's asleep she's out for a good amount of time... usually closer to two hours than one! She sometimes even hangs out playing in the crib for a while after waking and I don't even notice she's up :)

Eat: I went into a lot of detail above, that about covers it.

Getting Around: Also see above!

New People: She already met Santa, twice! Once when we went to get pictures with him for our Christmas card, and then another when he just happened to be out while we were shopping.

Best moment this week: Hmm... well since I haven't done this in a while, I'd say a few weeks ago it was hearing Dada... I know she isn't actually referring to Mr. Beaver but it's still great to hear. Last week it was Riley's first Thanksgiving and then getting our Christmas tree up and decorated (we do it the day after Thanksgiving). This past week, I guess seeing Santa and the huge smiles that came with it.

Worst moment this week: .Thursday night, we had a two-hour wakeup (3-5) when I had to get up at 6 for work :( Not fun!

What I miss: sleeping in! Every now and then drinking alcohol... especially when my mother-in-law visits ;)

What I am looking forward to: My girls-weekend in less than a week!! They are awesome and coming here so I don't have to leave or travel with the baby alone. It is always a great time! Hopefully we don't get a blizzard this time. Oh, and related to this, seeing my friend for the first time since she has gotten pregnant! Soon our baby will have a new friend!

Weekly Wisdom: hmm... I guess maybe to be open-minded about things like eating. I never really considered skipping baby food, but it seems like that might make the most sense for our situation.

Stay tuned for pictures! I think this post is long enough on it's own :)

Sorry for the lack of posts...

Hopefully I'll get some time to write an update this weekend. I haven't even uploaded pictures from my camera in weeks... Here's a couple from my phone for the time being! Happy Thanksgiving!!!

Quick update

Two exciting things happened right before our trip to FL this weekend...

Baby's first tooth!! (this picture was taken yesterday, the second one showed up on our trip, which made for a sleepless couple of nights!)

and hands-and-knees crawling!! Her school thinks I'm crazy to be so excited, since she's really been crawling for a while, but it seems like such a big deal seeing her moving like this! I had a whole plan of not telling our families, so that when they saw her they would think they were seeing it for the first time... but nobody saw it because they refused to put her down. Their loss! J/K.



Pictures from her great-grandpa's surprise party, first halloween, etc. to come!