Grace's First Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!!  Grace had her fair share of celebrating - we had the Holleran Thanksgiving on Thursday, Thanksgiving at my mom's on Friday, and we hosted the Weidmayer Thanksgiving on Saturday.  It's been a busy weekend!  I thought it was interesting that the turkey we cooked for the Weidmayer Thanksgiving was bigger than Grace :) 

She had her six month check-up on the 15th, and she's still a tiny thing!  She weighed in at 15 lbs, 4 ozs and was 25 1/2" long.  Both were in the 37th percentile. 

Grace has changed a lot in the last few weeks.  She is starting to try to figure out the whole crawling thing - she likes to use the carpet to pull herself forward.  She mainly gets to what she wants by rolling - once she decides she wants something, she goes for it!  She is also super-fast at grabbing things.  It amazes me how quickly she sees something and then grabs for it.  We call her "Quick-Draw McGraw" :)  I think I won't have to diet once she starts crawling - I'll probably lose ten pounds just chasing her around!!

My sister, her husband, and her daughter were able to come up from North Carolina for the holiday.  Her daughter, Eliana, will be one on 12/24, so she and Grace are only about 5 months apart.  We haven't seen them since July when both girls were baptized, so it was great to see them, and to see the two girls play with eachother.  They still don't interact too much, but Grace was interested in Eliana's hair!!  Grace was also not intimidated that Eliana was bigger than her - if Eliana was playing with a toy and Grace wanted it, she just took it.  I think we'll have to work on the sharing thing once she's a little older! 

We tried to have the girls pics taken together in their Christmas dresses, but it was like they had planned on making it a disaster.  When one was happy the other was crying, and then they would switch roles.  We got a lot of pics of them crying!!  To be fair, they are both fighting colds so neither of them was at their best.

Grace has also started laughing more.  I had been disappointed at how little she laughed, since there's not much better than hearing a baby belly laugh!  I discovered that she's ticklish in her armpits, and she also cracks up when you throw food (like grapes or popcorn) and catch it with your mouth.  The other day Jeff and I were playing tennis on the Wii and she thought daddy was pretty funny looking when he played tennis! 

She's started making more word sounds - she says baba, lala, and sometimes mama.  She still doesn't have any teeth yet, so sometimes when she makes these sounds she looks like a little old man!! 

She is eating more solids too - she still prefers the vegetables over the fruit.  We also learned that bananas are a great cure for constipation in babies :)  And the biggest news of all - Grace has now slept swaddle-free both at night and during naptime for a week now - HALLELUJAH!!!

On Sunday we took my sister and her husband to the Red Wings game.  Her husband is in the Marines, and we've been to games before where they will show the names of all the servicemen and women that are at the game on the big screen.  We let them know that he would be there, thinking that they would put his name on the screen.  I'm not sure if that night there was a special tribute or if they've changed what they do to honor the vets that are there, but they lined all of them up and announced their names and showed their faces on the screen - it was awesome.  And the crowd is great about it, too - they all stand up and clap and scream.  I think my sister's husband thought it was pretty cool. 

Well, that's about it for now.  Hopefully I'll be able to post more soon - I just went through our plans for Christmas, and right now our next free weekend is in 2011!!