Valentines Day - 2.14.12

Future Mr Right :)

Showing off his Valentine from Grandma

My beautiful Valentines flowers from my love.  Good one babe!

9 months

Huh....Looks like I'm 9 months old!
Daniel J, 9 months, 2.16.12
17 lb, 10 oz (10%), 27 3/4" (35%)

I'm still such a happy boy and I still drool like crazy.  Most days are 2-3 bib days.  I have one tooth on the bottom.

I pose as a crawler for pictures only - I don't have much interest in crawling in real life.  In fact, I much prefer standing, and when mom and dad try to make me sit down, I like to pull the ole "stiff body" trick on them.  I'm not sure why they don't think it's as funny as I do - especially when they try to put me in my car seat.  I really show them!

I do love my bath time!  It's really fun when I lay over the side of my little tub and explore that shiny silver drain thing.
1.31.12

Bath time is all good until mom makes me put clothes on.  I've got her pretty well trained to let me hang out in my towel and play for a while.
1.31.12

Just reading me a little book here
2.10.12

This was something new when mom started pushing me down this hall is this cool ride!
2.12.12

The boys

Last weekend, Sarah & Patrick had a date night and Cody and I watched the boys.  Both of them were so good, so it was a super easy night.  Here are the best buds:

And one with me and my grunty little snuggle bunny:

Horsing Around

Almost didn't catch this in time, but here's the tail end of Daniel cracking up at Cody's horsey noises.  LOVE that laugh!!  (Side note, my husband has mad horse-noise-making skills)

Daniel Facts at 8 1/2 months

-Sleeps 10 hours at night: 8p – 6a.  More often than not, he wakes up anywhere from 1-3 times a night (usually towards the end of his night, it tends to start around 4 a.m. or so) needing his pacifier so Cody and I take turns pretending we don't hear him to see if the other one will get up first, er, I mean, we enthusiastically jump out of bed to help our child.  

-Speaking of sleep, he's always fought it fairly hard, but this past week or two has been almost a struggle at times to get him to give in to sleep.  He'll arch his back super hard and thrash himself around in your arms, then he'll relax for 15 seconds, then just as he seems to be drifting off, he starts himself awake and we repeat the thrashing/fussing/arching business. 

-Along those lines, diaper changes are becoming more of a challenge, he just doesn't want to lay still.  There are so many interesting things he wants to roll towards, that laying on his back for a 30 second diaper change is just too boring.

-Got first tooth on Sunday January 29^th .  It was a fussy couple days, but so glad our sweet boy is back to his smiley, happy self now.  The tooth has most definitely broken through the skin, but it's tough to get a picture of it at this point. 

-Bought shampoo for Daniel for the first time last week – he finally has enough hair to actually lather up with shampoo!  Up until now we’d just been using the baby body wash:

-No crawling yet, really still not seeing any interest at all.

-He’s standing at his music table with a little help so he doesn’t topple over.  He isn’t cruising along furniture or anything yet, but he is able to stand at this little table for longer and longer periods of time (note, we are missing our pants b/c many of his pants are getting too tight in the waist, so after daycare we let our belly hang out a little more comfortably):

-LOVES to eat and LOVES his bottles.  Gets real mad when both are all gone.  But, give him his pacifier and he’s good again.  (I wonder when we need to wean him off the pacifier….eeks, doesn’t sound like fun)

-Daniel's absolute favorite thing to do right now is bounce.  His jumparoo keeps him entertained much longer than anything we try to sit him on the floor to play with.  

-Daniel's leave favorite thing is getting his face wiped - whether it's to wipe the mess off after he's done eating, wipe the snot from his nose (or elsewhere on his face....he tends to get it smeared all over...my kid is the kid with snot all over, great), wipe the crusties from his eyes, etc.

-In the last few weeks, he’s started lifting his arms to be held or reaching out to us when he knows we’re coming to pick him up.  LOVE THAT!

-Per our PAT educator, the next thing to work on is object permanence.  So far, when an object is removed from his sight, he forgets about it.  We’re working on taking a toy and putting it under a blanket and helping him find it again so that he starts realizing that the object still exists.  Here we are practicing, looks like he found it!

Once Daniel was sitting up nice and steady, we thought it was time for a bigger boy bath tub, something he could sit and splash around in, so we got a little inflatable tub for him and he's been loving it!  The first couple times he tried to eat the bubbles and wasn't quite sure what to make of them :)  Here's a sample of bath time for Daniel:

http://youtu.be/YatT5Bx8GDE

If you look closely, you might be able to see the two little teeth on the bottom that are trying to poke through.  We've been having some real fussy times lately and I have to think it must be those darn teeth.  Poor baby.  Cody and I are a little sad for him to start sprouting teeth.  It just feels like he's too big when that happens.  

A blogging Dry Spell Comes to an End

Oh my goodness.  I have to take a deep breath and figure out how on earth to catch up out of the tremendous blog back log I’ve got going on.  I need to tell myself I don’t have to go chronologically with posting about the past few months, although, my brain (which doesn’t seem to have anything but a left half) doesn’t like it when I go out of order.  Oh dear, I feel like I’m spinning in circles figuring out where to begin.  So my excuse is that work has been ruling my life.  I hate that excuse.  Hate. It.  I am vowing not to use that excuse anymore – and if work continues to rule my life and impede on my time with my family and my time to do things I enjoy to do, then I need to reevaluate my work situation.  I’m giving my job until March to prove to me that I can have the work/life balance I’ve been missing since I came back from maternity leave. 

Enough about work.  Work shmirk.  Let’s talk about happy things, like my happy little guy. 

For goodness sakes, it’s been since Halloween since I’ve posted?  Good grief.  Well, a lot has happened since then and there’s no way I’m going to remember everything.  One of the most major milestones was sitting up…that happened about a week before his 7 month bday, which, being a couple weeks before Christmas made it totally fun for gift opening purposes.  Speaking of Christmas, we had such a wonderful holiday with our families.  I was so grateful that Cody was able to take off 4 straight days in a row (seriously, this never happens) and we were able to travel as a family and have that much time off work together.  We spent Fri/Sat in the ville and Sun/Mon in B-town.  Daniel did an awesome job of pulling the tissue paper out of the gifts and waving it around in the air :)

A few Christmas photos:

Hmmm.....who'd you say this guy is, mom?

D was such a good paper puller outer:

Thanks for my piggy bank and helping me fill it, Grandpa!!

The Lewis 3

Aw man, I'm so tired, don't make me take any more pictures mom!

4 Meyer generations

My sweet snuggle bunny Will:

Mom and her boys:

LOVE

What else….Daniel’s been babbling for quite some time now – probably at least a couple months.  I think started jabbering around 6 months or so.  For about the last month’s he’s been saying “da-da” all the time, it’s his favorite thing to say.  Darn it that those M’s are hard to say! 

Right around Thanksgiving (so almost 6 ½ months), we introduced rice cereal.  It was a no go.  He wanted nothing to do with it.  In fact, he’d start crying as the spoon would come towards him.  We tried for a few nights in a row, only to get the same results.  I wondered if my child would ever want to eat and I started visualizing my adult child drinking from a baby bottle.  I started to feel really anxious about him not embracing food right away.  

We gave it a little break and came back about a week later and kept trying, but we scrapped the rice cereal and gave him sweet potatoes and guess what?  He sort of ate it!  Each evening when we’d get set to eat (which entailed getting entirely stripped down to diaper only), it would take him a few bites to remember that he liked eating.  But now, at 8 months, he’s eating like a little champ.  And most times it’s not even that messy of an ordeal like it was in the beginning.  Seriously – a couple times we had sweet potatoes in the back of our hair, in our ears, in our eye brows.  Quite an adventure :)  

So, Cody has been super dedicated to making Daniel’s food.  Thank God for Cody.  Seriously, these past 2-3 months he’s been pulling more weight for our little team than I have.  But anyway – on the food front – Daniel has been getting a nice variety of fruits & veggies.  We’ve tried sweet potatoes, carrots, zucchini, butternut squash, apples, pears, peaches, mangoes, bananas, and prunes.  He is not a picky eater at all, yay Daniel!  We’re to the point now that he loves eating so much that he gets upset if I don’t get the spoon reloaded and back up to his mouth quick enough.    

 In the beginning, when we didn't like eating:

 

Discovered we liked it, but couldn't keep it in our mouth very well:

 Yummy sweet potatoes!

We are waiting for the day he decides to start crawling.  He’s just pretty content the way things are now and we haven’t noticed too much interest from him in chasing after a toy that rolls away or something.  His legs are getting really strong from bouncing and jumping in his exersaucer and on our laps.  So I’m wondering if he isn’t just going to do everything at once.  We’ll see!  For the time being, I’m enjoying not chasing him all over the house. 

So far no teeth either.  He’s been drooling to the point of needing a bib since 6 months and it hasn’t let up at all.  I kind of hate putting bibs on him b/c they hide his cute clothes.  :(

Daniel continues to be just the happiest little guy most days.  He has so many smiles to share and his little laugh is the best sound in the entire world.  Cody and Aunt Sarah are the best at getting him laughing really hard.  It’s just priceless.


Well, for now I must hit the hay.  More posts to come and with much more regular frequency.  Good night from the Lewis 3.