Eight Months

Dear Oliver,

You are eight months old (yesterday), and you are on the move.  You don't crawl yet, but you get onto your hands and feet (not knees, usually), down onto your belly, roll over, sit up... you are surprisingly efficient at covering ground in this way.  You will also lay on your tummy and push yourself backwards if you're on the hard wood floor.

You continue to prefer standing to any other mode of being.  Your daycare lady says you pull yourself up to standing in your crib, but I haven't seen you do it at home yet.  You will pull yourself up if we give you a hand or a knee to grab onto.  And you sit up in your crib as soon as you wake up, which was new this month.

Along with this moving thing, you have become very difficult to dress!  I used to be able to lay you on the changing table and get your clothes on with minimal fuss.  I mean, sure, your arms would go limp when I'd like you to push them through sleeves, or rail straight when I need you to bend them, and as soon as I'd try to get the second leg into pants you'd pull the first one out, but those things I can deal with!  (Someone once likened dressing a baby to stuffing an angry octopus into a very small bag.  Accurate.)  Now, though, you flip over and sit up and twist away.  You don't have time for clothes!  There are things to see over there, and... over there, and over there!

You are now efficient at getting small bits of food (avocado, banana, rice puffs) into your mouth with relative accuracy.  You have tried things like Indian food and grown-up soup (both a bit spicy!), and you loved them.



This month, there was Thanksgiving, fish-feeding, and meeting Uncle Nick for the first time.  You went to a holiday picnic with your baby-friends.  You decorated your first Christmas tree, "watched" It's a Wonderful Life for the first time, and met Santa!

It was a big month!

Love,
Mom

Giving Thanks

I love the Holiday season.  The weeks starting with Thanksgiving and ending with New Year's are my favorite of the year.  I love spending time with family and friends.  I love the music, the decorations.  I love the kind, giving spirit that's (mostly) all around.

It's true that you should be charitable all year round, and not just the last 1/12th of the year.  It's true that you should be thankful every day.  And I do my best, but let's be honest.  Sometimes life gets in the way.  It's hard to show gratitude when you're going on too little sleep, trying to juggle work stress and not-work stress, and dealing with your third diaper blow-out of the day, y'know?  So it's nice to have five or six weeks of the year when those things--charity and gratitude--are foremost in my thoughts.

I have a lot to be thankful for: the best family one could hope for; an amazing husband and partner; a pretty excellent group of friends; a job (and boss!) I do actually like, despite it not being the career I dreamed of; our health; and Oliver.  Definitely Oliver.

(This Thanksgiving, the baby we lost would have been a year old.  I'm thankful for that baby, too.)

Thanksgiving has become our holiday to host, Steve and I.  We bring out the fancy wedding dishes and have both family and friends over.

There was lots (and lots, and lots) of delicious food, good conversation, and laughter.  Holiday success!

Thanksgiving doesn't end on Thursday in this family.  My fabulous new boss let each of us choose to be on call ("working from home" in the sense that, if one of our offices needs us, we answer the phone) either the Friday after Thanksgiving or the day after Christmas.  Since I'm on vacation the week of Christmas, I chose Friday.  I had a few phone calls and had to run into the office once, but otherwise it was a relaxing day of lunch out and a trip to the park with the family.

With Grandma S

Is Daddy being silly?

Watch out for Uncle Tim!

On Saturday, we went to the Filmore Fish Hatchery.  Have you ever been to a fish hatchery?  I hadn't.  There are long canals full of fish (these were trout... I think?), and you get an overflowing handful of fish food for a dime.  The fish get so excited about the food that they end up jumping out of the water.

Full disclosure: I think fish are super creepy.  But!  It was pretty neat to see them clamoring for food, and Oliver was mesmorized.

Saturday night, Steve and I got to go out to dinner and a movie with some friends to celebrate my birthday!  (My birthday was Wednesday, but babysitters on Saturday are fine by me!)  We saw Catching Fire, which I thought was pretty excellent.  Especially now that we so rarely get to see movies.  I want to go back and reread the books, which I thought about doing before the movie, and decided against.  (If I've read a book too close to seeing the movie, I tend to get hung up on details that are changed and get mad.)  Enjoyed the movie, I'll enjoy the book again.

And then Sunday, we said goodbye to the family, farewell to Thanksgiving, and hello to Christmas!

The tree is up, the house is decorated (except for outside lights, which we'll do this weekend when it's light out again).  It's A Wonderful Life was watched by all, even Oliver.

Obligatory naked-baby-with-lights picture

Singing with Caitlin! (she voiced the small penguin)

I love the holiday season!

One Week in November

Or, Grandmas and Fishes and Mice, Oh My!

Before November's over, I need to get this post written.  My mom visited over Veteran's Day Weekend and we had lots of fun.  Then, later that week, I took Oliver to Disneyland.  Here, have some pictures and a little bit of commentary.

+ We went to the park to take pictures.  It was much fun!

Just swingin' with Barkley

Build-a-Bear glasses.  Don't judge.

+That Sunday, we went to the Aquarium of the Pacific!

Penguin photo op

Na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-BAT RAY!

This picture here is of Oliver petting a bat ray.  We were at the petting pool, but all the rays were hanging out along the bottom.  I stuck my arm in past the elbow just to touch one.  Oliver, as you can see, could barely touch the water with his fingertips.  All of a sudden, a bat ray came right up to the surface.  He even poked his head out of the water!  He flapped his wings and propelled himself high enough for Oliver to touch.  It was so cool!  He came out of the water four or five times, but I have four or five pictures of him just going back under.  Haha. 

After the aquarium, we walked around the harbor and hung out for a while before meeting some friends for dinner.

Mmm, foot.

Oliver and Grandma M

 Grandma Melanie had Oliver all to herself that Tuesday while Steve and I were at work.  What fun!  And then she had to go home.  Sniff.

But the fun didn't end there!  Oh, no!


+ On Thursday, we went to Disneyland!

A friend from our mommy group was able to get the four of us (and our four babies) in to Disneyland for free (she gets an employee pass through her husband).  We had a BLAST!  We bought little costume onesies on sale at the outlet before we went, and our babies were a hit.  People stopped us all day to comment on their cuteness.  I have to agrree: pretty adorable, no?

Sulliver with Mike Wazowscup

First carousel ride!

At the Haunted Mansion

So tuckered!

Oliver actually woke up from that little snooze after about an hour, and it was the only nap he took ALL DAY.  He doesn't want to miss a party!  He was awake until we got home at 11pm.  Yowzers!  He was zonked the next day.

Seven Months

Seven Whole Months! (11/17/13)

Dear Oliver,

You're more than halfway to a year old now!  Your seventh month was fun.  Your personality is really coming out.  You have definite Likes and Thinks and Feels and Opinions.

This is a new perspective...

You Like food.  A lot.  Pretty much anything we give you, you'll gobble up and look around for more.  I'm not entirely sure what's new over last month, but you eat squash, zucchini, green beans, sweet potato, apple, banana, avocado, pear, carrots, and broccoli.  We gave you MumMums for the first time, and you adore them.  You can feed them to yourself, and you think that's pretty darn awesome.

Giggle fit!

This is perhaps my favorite thing from this month: you laugh when I waggle my eyebrows at you.  And you laugh when I make a big, throaty hooowm biting sound.  A great belly laugh, even.  It's the best!

It's finally autumn.  I like autumn.

I've been slow at blogging all the fun we've had this month, but in a nutshell:

You got to spend four fabulous days over Veteran's Day Weekend with Grandma M.  We took you to the aquarium for the first time, and you got to pet your very first bat ray!  (More on the aquarium in a later post.)

Oo, can I eat the leaves?

And then, as if that wasn't enough, you went to Disneyland for the first time!  (More on Disneyland in a later post, too.)

But WHY can't I eat the leaves?

Before that was Halloween, and Halloween picnics with your baby-friends and the pumpkin patch.

And no sickness at all!  (Knock on all the wood!!)

Even better than fun (for Mom and Dad, anyway), you're (mostly) sleeping through the night again!  We cold-turkeyed your mid-night feeding--the one you didn't used to need but got accustomed to for comfort while you were sick--and do little check-ins when you go to bed or wake up in the middle of the night.  You almost never make it to your first five-minute check-in.  You've (again, mostly) learned to self-soothe, and you did it without having to resort to letting you get to the angry cries.  SUCCESS. (I'm sure I've probably jinxed it by posting it to the internet... hope not.)

I think you're going to walk (at least around furniture) before you crawl.  I've thought that for a long time, actually.  You want to stand ALL THE TIME.  If you're laying on your back and I give you my hand to pull yourself up into a sitting position, 90% of the time you pull yourself right up to standing.  And then you'll take tiny, wobbly steps if I hold you up.  You're really wobbly and unbalanced standing, still, but you want it.   You don't want to crawl. Which is okay, because you still mostly stay put. :)  If you're on the bed, though, you'll roll around until you're right at the edge, so there's no turning away from you there.

Let's just go for a stroll.  A wobbly stroll.

You have definitely found your voice, and you love experimenting with it.  There are lots of high-pitched squeals and yells.  You're still saying "Mamamama" but I'm beginning to think it might be "Mumumum" and you want your MumMums to munch on. (I don't really think you're attaching meaning to your babbles yet.)  The one thing I think you've picked up from daycare is a whine when you're not 100% happy.  I don't care much for that vocalization.  But the rest?  Adorable.

And that's pretty much that.  You had an awesome seventh month!

Lots of love,

Mommy