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

This is Halloween, This is Halloween

And this is a long and pictury-heavy update.  Fair warning.

Growing up, my mom always made my Halloween costumes.  Somehow, in my mind, it feels wrong to buy a costume for Halloween.  Halloween costumes are homemade!  No judgement on anyone else for buying theirs; I just see myself as a crafty-ish person who should be able to figure out how to make a costume.  Also, babies are expensive enough without spending tons of money on one day of the year.

I took to the internets for inspiration and came up with not one, but two costumes I wanted to dress Oliver in.  A Sock Monkey and a One-Up Mushroom.  Luckily, we had two Halloween-themed picnics and actual Halloween, so two costumes didn't go to waste.

I wish I'd taken before or in-process pictures!  I was grabbing five minutes here, a half-hour there to work on these.

For the sock monkey, I got an oversized, brown ribbed turtleneck sweater and a white ribbed tank top sweater from Goodwill for $2.99 and $1.99.  I turned the arms of the brown sweater into pants, the turtleneck part into a hat, and the body of the sweater into a tiny baby-sized sweater, all using clothes of Oliver's as size guides.  I used the white sweater to make cuffs for the sleeves, little sock booties, and a border for the hat.  To top it off, I made a pom-pom out of red yarn and attached it to the top of the hat.

Voila!  Sock monkey.

Cutest sock monkey you ever did see, no?

He was in a Very Serious Mood that morning.  I meant to go back and get smiling pictures, but I didn't ever manage to do it.  Not even on Halloween, when he wore this again.

(Blurry) Godzilla vs. King Kong!

Steve is a video game guy.  The only video game I really played as a kid was Mario.  (Okay, so I played a couple Mario games on the regular Nintendo at a friend's house, and Super Mario World on our Super Nintendo, so technically that was more than one game...)

So we decided to do a family costume.  Mario, Luigi, and a One-Up Mushroom.

I found an online tutorial on how to make a Mario hat, but I couldn't find a single suggestion on how to make a mushroom!  Every single mushroom costume I found relied on a giant hat.  I didn't think Oliver would be too keen on wearing a giant mushroom hat for any length of time.  So I decided to wing it and went in blind.  I found fleece fabric on an amazing sale, plus a 20% off coupon, and got all the supplies I'd need for hats for me and Steve and a mushroom for Oliver (plus a lot of extra... oops!  No pattern meant no real idea how much I'd need) for $6.

I again used a onesie of Oliver's as a size guide, as well as a base for the custome.  I cut out four rounded panels, sewed them together, and sewed them onto the onesie.  Stuffed the mushroom, hand-sewed the white dots and the eyes, and there you have it.  One-Up Mushroom!

Boy, do I wish I had a better picture of this!  We took some today with a photographer friend, so I should have some nice ones to share... soon.

~ * ~ * ~

And what is Halloween without pumpkin carving?

I took last Friday off work as a final hurrah before Oliver started daycare, and we went to the pumpkin patch.  Underwood Family Farms, to be exact.

We picked out our pumpkins, decided on our designs, and carved.

About to get started

What is in there?

Hmm.  It's kinda stringy.

Finished products!

We've been reading Harry Potter to Oliver, so Steve carved Harry and I carved a Golden Snitch.  I think they came out pretty well!  And, by some miracle, they managed to hold on from Saturday, when we carved them, all the way through Halloween on Thursday.

So!  Oliver's first Halloween was a success!