Catch up!!!

Wow, I've really fallen behind on updating the blog! Here's the run-down on what's been going on with us.

The weekend before Thanksgiving we took a little trip out to Kiera and Mike's house. There wasn't much on the agenda other than celebrating my dad and my brother both turning a year older. It was fun to get to spend some time with them since we didn't make the trip out to Chicago over Thanksgiving weekend. We all went out for dinner one night, and attempted to do some bowling. Unfortunately, Samantha was in monster-mode that night, and we were only able to bowl one game. We have discovered that Samantha is a big fan of books. She likes sitting in my lap while I read to her before bed time. We found these touch and feel Winter and Fall books that she just can not get enough of. She absolutely loves the pages that have the crinkly spots on them. I'll do whatever it takes to get my kid interested in reading!

This past weekend was Thanksgiving, which was a lot of fun for our family. Some of Chris' relatives who live in Wyoming came out to Cedar Falls to spend the holiday with us. Let's see if I can get this right...Chris' grandma's sister's granddaughter Sarah and her husband Bryan (along with their two little girls) stayed at our house for the weekend. Their girls are 3 and 1 1/2, so Samantha had a couple of play mates this weekend!

On Friday night our town had a little Christmas deal going on downtown on Main Street. They called it the Holiday Hoopla, and I hear they're going to be doing Christmasy things all month. Friday night was the kick-off night where Santa arrived, the tree was lit, fireworks were involved, and so on and so forth. We took Samantha down dressed up in a little green & red striped pair of pajamas. My arm is in the shot because I was trying to get her to keep the hat on. She absolutely hates having things on her head. It ended up being pretty cold Friday night, so she was in her little teddy bear snowsuit, which I didn't get any pictures of because I forgot the camera in the car. I promise to do better next time.
Saturday we started decorating the house for Christmas. We're going to cut down our tree this weekend, so after that I'll get some pictures of the house.On Saturday night we went out to Chris' uncle Mike's house for a family gathering. Chris' grandma invited some of her cousins out for dinner because her mom & her sister were in town for Thanksgiving. We took advantage of the opportunity and captured a 5 generation family picture. Going counter-clockwise from the bottom we have: Samantha, Chris, Chris' mom Deb, Chris' grandma Shirley, and Chris' great-grandma Agnes. What an incredible picture to have!
It wouldn't be an evening at Mike's house if Samantha didn't get to crawl around on the pool table. I think we have a little pool shark in the making here!

I know I probably won't have your support on this one, but now I'm praying for snow! Every year we've had a snowy tree farm to cut down our Christmas tree in, and I don't want this year to be an exception.
Bring on the snow, and make sure it stays on the ground for Saturday!

Fabric Travel High Chair

Follow this link to check out my latest creation.

Fabric Travel High Chair

Is the weekend over already?

Well hello there, it's been a few days since my last post.
Samantha has made a 100% full recovery from her nose injury. Truth be told, she was fine before she even went to bed that night.
She's been a little crabbier than usual lately, which makes me wonder if we'll be seeing some new teeth soon. I know it isn't related to her nose, and I'm praying that this isn't going to be her permanent personality.
She's getting better and better at feeding herself. In the past, if I offered her a piece of finger food she used to just grab my wrist and pull my hand to her mouth. Now she will take the piece of food out of my hand and feed herself. She doesn't even seem to want me to feed it directly to her anymore. We're making progress!
She's also doing more cruising along the furniture and with her little 'walker' toys. They aren't the walkers that you sit her in, they are the kind that she can push. She has one at home and one at Great Grandma Shirley's, where she goes during the day. I'm not sure if my original prediction of her walking by Thanksgiving is going to happen, but we still have about a week and a half for it to happen. I'm thinking Christmas is going to be a safe bet. I'm not in a hurry for her to start walking, but she sure seems to be!
Oh, and please let us know if you need any pipe work work done. We'll send our highly recommended plumber over to you. She is going to kill me for posting pictures like this online when she's older.
On Saturday all of us girls (ladies? women? what do you call 20 something year old females without making them feel old? or like little kids?) from our small group threw a baby shower for Alicia (she's in the small group too). It was a smaller turn out than we had anticipated, but we had a great time. We played a few games, snacked on some food, and got to watch Alicia open some really fun baby gifts. I'm not going to post any pictures from the baby shower because I haven't asked any of the people in the pictures if it's okay to put them up. Sorry, you'll just have to satisfy your curiosity with a few pictures of the diaper cake and the food/gift table.
Now, back to Samantha, because I don't ever bother to ask her if I can post her pictures. :)Yikes! Another butt picture! My poor child...One final accomplishment worth mentioning, I cleaned and organized all my craft stuff in the office! I have had bags of fabric, scrap booking supplies, knitting needles, yarn, and countless other things all over the office for months. I've tried to clean it up, but have never really succeeded until Saturday. Now I even have a shelf for my sewing machines! Yes, I'm using garage shelving and diaper boxes to store everything, but it's organized and clean. I'm not the least bit worried about how fancy it is. I imagine that one day I'll have a craft room like my grandma does with cabinets and counter tops and a closet to store things in. For now I'm quite happy with my shelves.

What a night

Samantha had her first bloody nose last night. She and I were sitting on the floor next to our little brown ottoman that her toys are stored in. Somehow she must have smacked her nose on the corner of the ottoman without me seeing it, because one second she was playing and the next she was hysterically screaming.
This is a very unflattering picture of her, but you can forgive her because it was right after she had been crying for about 5 minutes straight.

There is still a trace of blood around her nose, but it had stopped bleeding by then. Forgive me for not getting a picture of the blood actually coming out of her nose, I don't know where my priorities were.
Of course the second we saw blood coming out of her nose I wanted to take her to the hospital. I overreact pretty easily when it comes to Samantha.
Instead, I flipped through our Baby's First Year book and read up on nose injuries. At her age her nose is all cartilage, so all she really did was bruise it. There was no swelling, and the bleeding didn't last for more than a minute or two. We cleaned her up, gave her a bottle & some Tylenol, and she was good as new this morning.
Here's another very unflattering picture of her cheesing it up for the camera.

Perfectly happy, like nothing ever happened.

9 month check up

Yesterday was Samantha's 9 month check up at the doctor's office. Unfortunately her regular doctor is on maternity leave. Okay, unfortunately for us, I'm sure she's enjoying it.
Because she is gone, we saw a different doctor who works in the same office. Ugh, did not like him at all. We picked the pediatrician that we did for a few reasons. She came very highly recommended by some friends of ours who go to her, and she has a litter of her own children at home. No joke, I think this new baby is number 8 or 9. By today's standards they could have their own reality show. Thankfully she isn't going in that direction and is going to continue on as a doctor. There is just something comforting and reassuring when your pediatrician can talk to you about what's going on with your kid and tell you what her experience has been with her own children.
Example: Samantha is a small little girl. She was born a week early, so she wasn't premature. It's just in her genes. I'm pretty small, and Chris isn't a linebacker by any stretch of the imagination. Our pediatrician knows this, and has never once expressed any concern about Samantha's size because she is a super healthy and happy baby.
This other doctor we saw yesterday said that we need to feed Samantha more because she is so small. If my kid wasn't eating 30+ ounces of formula on top of solid foods and little Gerber puffs every day I probably would have taken him a little more seriously. I think if we tried to cram any more food down this kid's throat it would start to ooze our of her pores like one of those play-doh spaghetti making toys (you know you had one, and you know you loved it!).
She eats plenty, and she is gaining weight. Granted, she's not gaining a lot of weight, but she's healthy. He even said that himself, he said she's a perfectly healthy baby, but she needs to eat more. We'll give it a try, but I'm pretty darn sure her little stomach reaches its maximum capacity every day.
She got a couple of shots while we were there, and she handled them quite well. Of course she screamed for a few minutes, but she calmed down pretty quickly afterwards.
Once we made it home she was 100% back to normal, chewing on everything she could get her hands on.
Of course the night wouldn't' be complete if she didn't try to rip all of Tweek's fur off. He is such a patient cat, I actually think he kind of enjoys it when she grabs him.
In response to the question I was asked after the blog post with the leaves, nope, it wasn't a skunk in that picture. It was our nutty husky Bandit, who was diving in the leaves the way she dives into piles of snow.

Indian Summer-ish

We have had some incredible weather the past few days! Today I'm pretty sure my thermometer said we had gotten up to 71°! We took full advantage today and spent a good portion of it outside. After all, today is Samantha's 9 month birthday! And no Chris, I don't care that you think there is no such thing as 'month birthdays'.
This morning we went to church, which is always an awesome time in itself. I was volunteering in the infants room for the first service, and then Chris & Samantha came for the second service.
I may be jinxing myself here, but ever since I've started volunteering in the infant room on the yellow team I have had nothing but great Sundays with the kids that come in. The first time we had about 5 or 6 kids, and they were all super happy babies. No melt downs, just little babies who wanted to play on the floor.
The second time we had two kids, and one of them was mine. Oh, and they both napped. All I could say was wow.
Today we had 5 kids, 3 of them napped, and the other two were happy to just play and be held. Amazing. I keep waiting for the winds to change where we end up with 15 babies who are hungry and cranky all at the same time, but so far, we're in the clear!
If you have a few minutes, you should totally check out this video. It's what we heard at our church last week, and something that I think everyone should hear, whether you go to our church or not. Seriously, take half an hour and listen.
A Call to Decision
This afternoon we raked up some of the leaves in the front yard so Samantha could have her first experience 'jumping' in the leaves. Bandit literally dove into the pile of leaves and buried herself. You can kind of see the end of her tail here. I love that crazy husky. We took the bike trailer out of hibernation for a trip to the local dairy store. They have homemade soft serve ice cream, and we've never tried it before. I'm pretty sure we got a pint of a flavor called raspberry rocky road. I actually completely forgot it's in my freezer until right now, so I'm going to cut this blog post short and go give it a taste test.

Teeth!

We finally were able to snap a shot of the ever elusive bottom teeth!

Mohawk

We took her out of the bath, towel dried her hair, and she ended up with a sweet mohawk. What a rockstar.

Frosty Morning

Today was one of those days where you wake up and feel like Christmas is right around the corner. Literally. I turned the corner and thought Christmas was going to jump on me and try to scare me like I used to do to my sister Kiera in the basement when we were kids.
Everything was covered in frost. The cars, the houses, the leaves, the grass, everything. Even the smashed pumpkin I saw in the middle of the road while I was driving to work was frosty. I really shouldn't wish for this, but I can't wait for the first real snow of the season. Not those lame flurries, I'm talking inches of snow that you can go sledding in. There's something so peaceful about an entire neighborhood covered in piles of fresh white snow.

Two nights ago we gave Samantha peas for the first time. At first she looked at the green mess in the bowl and seemed like she wasn't going to try it. This may have been because of my failed attempt at making her green beans a few weeks back. They were awful, and she let me know it. Thankfully, she tried the peas, and she liked them. She kept letting them ooze out of her mouth a little bit, so it looked like her bib was coated in dragon slime when it was all said and done.
Oh, and just to clarify, we don't normally eat in the nude at our house. She is wearing only her diaper because Chris was about to give her a bath when I snatched her up and started to feed her peas. I'm glad we're clear on that. This morning Samantha and I were hanging out in the living room watching the news. She was standing up next to her bumbo chair, and then she leaned over like she was going to pick something up. I thought that was pretty normal, usually a pacifier or a toy finds its way into the bumbo chair. She stood up and looked like she was chewing on something. Hmmm...strange. I fished around in her mouth and didn't find anything. Then she held up her hand and was about to stick it in her mouth when I saw a dark little spot on her palm. I picked the thing off, and it was a ladybug! This time of year we get a lot of these little buggers in our house. I blame our old windows, but there is always the possibility that they can magically transport themselves in from outside like Harry Potter and his gang. Needless to say, Samantha thought she needed more protein or something and tried to eat one of these nasty crunchy bugs. Gross. She survived her ladybug taste test, and managed to smile for the camera too.