Our Funny Little Valentine

Happy Valentine's Day to everyone, and happy 9 month birthday to my little peanut!!  She's gotta be the best Valentine ever!  She has changed so much in the last 2-3 weeks that I feel like I'm writing about a different baby.  I'm not even sure I can call her a baby anymore :(  At least she's still little like a baby - we went in for her 9 month checkup yesterday and she weighs 18 lbs exactly and was 27 1/4" long - both in the 30th percentile.  Her head's still the biggest part - up to the 52nd percentile!

Here comes trouble!!

On Feb 6th we noticed her first tooth starting to pop through - the bottom right one.  It's been SLOWLY making it's way up, but is still now just barely clearing the top of her gum.  On Monday I noticed she's getting one on top, but it's not the very first front teeth - it's the next one over on the left, and when we went to the doctor yesterday, she noticed that the same one on the opposite side is coming in too.  I'm a little concerned that her very front teeth aren't coming in, but I'm hoping they make they're appearance soon.  She might start to look a little funny!!  The doctor didn't seem concerned, so I guess I will try not to be either.  It's funny how there were no teeth for so long and now there are three all coming in at the same time.
I think having her cousin Eliana around has been very good for Grace and is part of the reason she has changed so much in the last few weeks.  My sister stayed with us for almost a week and it was so great to watch the girls play together.  It was so funny to watch them fight over the same toys!  My sister went back to NC last week but we are looking forward to when they come back up for Grace's first birthday.  Poor Eliana was really missing her daddy!

I heard her crying and found her like this -
she couldn't figure how to get off the rungs!

Grace isn't crawling on her hands and knees yet, but is a professional army-crawler.  She can really move!  I'm almost wondering if she won't go straight from army-crawl to walking and not do the "normal" crawl.  She loves going up and down the step from the living room to the rest of the house and can now pull herself up to stand at the coffee table.  I guess our days of being able to put anything on the coffee table are coming to an end! 

We signed up for a swim class and Monday was the first one.  It's for 6 month to 2 1/2 year olds and it's not designed to teach them to swim but to get them comfortable in the water.  Grace had a blast!  She's the youngest one in the class but probably had the most fun.  The teacher had us dunk them under the water and I was a little nervous at first but toward the end I did it twice and Grace handled it fine.  The hardest part of the class is trying to get us both washed off and changed back into regular clothes - I think I'm going to have to work on my technique/logistics before the next class!

I also found out that I will be the assistant track coach for the high school boy and girl teams at Manchester, so I am excited for that to start up in March.  It will be great to work with the kids that are also on my cross country team and hopefully I can get to know other kids that might be interested in running cross country in the fall. 

Standing up!

I've been trying to get back into shape, but it's been a lot harder than I thought it would be.  Jeff and I are planning on doing the Dexter-Ann Arbor half marathon at the end of May so I've started running again.  Right now (since it's been SO cold) I've only been running on the treadmill at the rec center, and I'm doing more of a run/walk.  I've gotten up to being able to run for 5 minutes at a time, but it's a LONG way from where I need to be in just three months!  It's frustrating to think of how I used to be able to run a 5K in 21 minutes but now I can barely run for 5 minutes without stopping.  I'm trying not to get discouraged and take it one day at a time but it's hard!  It's also hard to find the time to do it.  I have to go when Jeff gets off work so that he can watch Grace and by the time I get done it's close to dinner and it eats into the few hours of the day that I get to spend with Jeff.  I'm also nervous about how much exercise I can do without it affecting my ability to nurse Grace.  I really want to nurse her until she's one, but not sure if too much running will affect it.  I really hope not!

My dad is still staying with us and recovering from his surgery.  He is doing remarkably well and seems to get a little better every day.  His first follow-up appt with the surgeon is next week, so hopefully he'll be cleared to do more. 

Well, I guess that's about it for now.  I still can't believe how fast my daughter is growing and changing before my eyes!

Update

Can I please have that camera?

Mommy's little helper

Well, I figured I would try to squeeze in one more post before the end of the month.  Let's just say I am glad this month is about over.  My dad had his open-heart surgery on the 25th and is still recovering in the hospital.  Thankfully, everything seems to be looking good and now he just has the long road to recovery in front of him.  He was in surgery for about 5 1/2 hours - even though they told us it would take 4-6 hours I wasn't really expecting it to take that long since my mom's only took a little under 3.  They had told us it would take 4-6 hrs with my mom and I will never forget that feeling of terror when they called us back so soon to talk to the surgeon.  I figured it had to be bad news if they were already done.  So when my dad's took so long I started really worrying that something had gone wrong.  Right now he may be coming home as early as Mon or Tues of next week.  It will be interesting taking care of both a parent and a child at the same time :)

Grace is so close to crawling on her hands and knees.  Right now she gets up on her knees and rocks back and forth - it looks pretty funny.  We call her our "Humpty Dumpty" :)  It's really funny when we put her in her crib to sleep and we can watch her doing it on the monitor.  Cracks us up every time!!  The other day Jeff was sitting on the floor of the living room trying to read the paper and, of course, Grace wanted the paper SO BAD!  He put it up one step on the hardwood and she actually almost crawled completely up the step to try to get it.  She couldn't quite figure out how to get her knees above the step.  We have learned that if we want her to do something new, all we have to do is let her think she can get something forbidden!

Going for it....

What?  I'm not doing anything!!

 My sister is still here from NC so I have been watching Eliana sometimes while she goes to the hospital to see my dad.  Watching the girls play together is so much fun!  Eliana has a little snuggle toy that she is really attached to, and Grace tried to play with it one day, and Eliana whipped it out of her hand and gave her THE LOOK.  It was hilarious!  It's so funny how even though they are still so young they already want the toy that the other one is playing with.  I wonder when the true fighting will actually start? 

Milestones and Memories

Both my babies had milestones this week - Toby turned 8 years old on Tuesday and Grace turned 8 months old on Thursday.  Every year for Toby's birthday we have spaghetti for dinner and he gets to enjoy the noodles as a special treat.  I think the noodles are eaten faster every year, too! When I think of how fast the last 8 years have gone by with Toby I realize that one day I'm going to wake up and Grace is going to be turning 8 too.  If you want to feel old really fast, have a baby :)

Grace continues to change all the time.  She is getting really good at army crawling and actually crawled across the living room the other day (our living room was the original garage so it's a pretty big room).  And, of course, she's finding all the things she shouldn't get into.  So far she's played with the curtains in the living room, the cable cord for the satellite, and the cord to her monitor in her room.  She's teaching us very quickly what we still need to baby-proof!  She babbles all the time, and has also added an "Incredible Hulk" routine to her noises.  Randomly she will have this really deep-voiced grunt/squeal thing and stiffen her arms and her face will get all red.  It's pretty hilarious!  We think she does it to intimidate other babies! 

Grace also can clap her hands and sort of wave bye-bye, imitate kissing noises, and loves to play with her blocks and bang them together.  She LOVES solids - we still haven't found a food she doesn't like!  At the beginning of the year we started her on wheat and just yesterday we started her on yogurt.  So far, no reactions to anything - I pray that she never has any allergies.  We also started giving her the little puffs and I'm really impressed with how well she does with them.  She's getting really good at picking them up and actually getting them into her mouth now.  At first she would pick them up and then not know where they went.  She is definitely quite a character and her personality develops more every day.  I'm still not worried about anyone messing with her as she gets older!

In other news, we found out last week that my dad will have to have open-heart surgery sometime this month.  This was completely unexpected - my dad has never had any major health issues, has never been overweight, and eats relatively well.  He hadn't been to the doctor in a few years so he went to a new doctor just to get a physical earlier this month.  He knew he had been born with a heart murmur, but no one ever seemed concerned about it, but this doctor suggested he go to have an ultrasound done.  When they did the ultrasound they had some concerns about what they saw so they referred him to a cardiologist.  When he went to U of M to see the cardiologist they admitted him right away and did a catheterization and found that one of the valves in his heart is bad and on of the main arteries to his heart is 80% blocked.  So he will have to have the valve replaced and a bypass done on the blocked artery.  He also has a blood clot inside his heart so the surgeon wants to wait a little while before doing the surgery to see if the blood thinners will help take care of it before they go in.  It's been a pretty rough week dealing with this, especially since it wasn't even a year ago that my mom had open-heart surgery (she has a whole different set of problems) and my dad had no symptoms at all that anything was wrong with his heart.  It's just scary that both my parents have always been relatively healthy people and both have had major issues with their hearts before they even turned 60.  Please keep my dad in your prayers as we go through this scary and difficult time.

January hasn't held good memories for me the last few years.  My first miscarriage was on January 27, 2008 when I was almost 9 weeks pregnant and then I had my second ectopic pregnancy and surgery on January 19, 2009 when they removed both the baby and my left fallopian tube.  When I was pregnant with Grace I couldn't wait to get through the month of January because I was so afraid something would happen.  Even though Grace can drive me crazy sometimes and there are days when I don't feel like being a mommy I will never forget what a true miracle she is and how blessed we are that God gave us such a wonderful gift. 

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Happy New Year everyone!  This is the first year that we have started with a child (on the outside that is!) and it sure is great to be so blessed.  Although I will admit that I am sad that it's no longer the year Grace was born (I'm know, I'm weird!).  Everytime I sit down to write in this blog it hits me at how fast time is really going.  Next week Grace is already going to be 8 months old. 

We had a great Christmas and New Year.  Jeff and Eliana's (my niece) birthday is on Christmas Eve so that makes it even more fun, and this was Eliana's first birthday; which is also hard to believe.  I was able to be in the room when she was born and I can't believe that it was already a year ago.  My sister, her husband, and Eliana came back up to MI on the 16th and we had a first birthday party for Ellie at our house on the 18th.  She was so cute - I made a smash cake for her and when we gave it to her she wanted nothing to do with it.  My sister put frosting on her fingers to try and encourage her to dig in, and she got the most disgusted look on her face and tried to wipe the frosting off!  Of course, if we hadn't wanted her to get into the cake she probably would have smashed it all over :)  The party turned out great, and even though I was SO nervous about my sister asking me to make and decorate the cake, I think it turned out even better than I exepected - what do you think?

On the 22nd I threw a surprise dinner for Jeff at The Blue Tractor in Ann Arbor.  There were 18 adults, 2 kids, and 3 babies there, so it turned out great.  I even think he was surprised!!  If anyone hasn't been to The Blue Tractor, I highly recommend it - the food is great and it's not your average bbq place.  Unfortunately I didn't think to bring my camera, so I don't have any pictures :( 

We celebrated Christmas with my dad on the 23rd at our house and Grace got the cutest little airplane toy from him (my dad is an aircraft mechanic for Delta).  We then had Christmas Eve with my mom and sister at our house (it was crazy how many gifts Grace received!) and then we had a Christmas Day celebration with my grandparents and then we headed to Jeff's brother's house in Blissfield.  They have three kids so it was great for the cousins to have a chance to hang out.  On the 26th we had a party for Jeff's mom's side of the family and then another party in the evening for Jeff's dad's side of the family.  We have one final Christmas party here on Sunday and then we will finally be done.  Whew!!  Thankfully, Grace weathered all the celebrating relatively well.  I felt really guilty about how screwed up her schedule got but she handled it well for the most part.  There were definitely some cranky days!!

On the 27th I got together with two of my best friends from high school - one of them had a little boy last September and the other had a little girl in February.  One lives in CA and the other over by Detroit so we don't get to see each other very often.  It was so great to see all our babies play together, and so weird to think back on all our times together in high school and now we are all moms!! 

The big news in our house is that Grace has started crawling!  The first time we saw her do it was on the 18th - and I got her to do it by holding my cell phone out :)  It's not an official crawl - at first she would kind of roll up on her side and then propel herself forward by pushing her feet on the carpet and then rock to the other side and do the same thing, but now it is more like an army crawl and I have a feeling we will see the "normal" crawl within the next week or so.  Thankfully she doesn't crawl too far yet so we have some time to get used to having a mobile baby!  We did start doing some baby-proofing in the kitchen and still need to do more in the rest of the house.  It's hard to know where to stop in the baby-proofing - on one hand you want to make sure she's safe but on the other you don't want to lock up the entire house. 

I also think that Grace has truly started teething.  The last few nights have been pretty miserable - we went from having a baby who slept for 10 hours straight to having one that woke up every 45 minutes to hour and a half.  UGH!  Hopefully we can get through this soon and go back to the old schedule!!

A Busy Seven Month Old

My, how time flies!!  It's hard to believe it's almost Christmas, and it's hard to believe that Grace is already seven months old. 

We have been extremely busy the last few weeks.  The first Saturday of December our church always holds a bake sale, and the day before the sale everyone gets together to make German pretzels.  This year Grace was able to come - she didn't help roll any, but she provided the entertainment!  She even had a front row seat - in a few years she'll be a professional pretzel roller.  She spent her time finding out what would happen if she dropped her toys in the container of flour :) 

She's gotten so good at sitting by herself that we stopped using the baby sling in the bathtub and now she gets to sit in it like a big girl.  She looks so stinking cute sitting in there with her chubby little legs balancing her!  I'm not sure if there's anything cuter than a baby in a bathtub or a baby sleeping!

We put the Christmas tree up two weeks ago, and I thought Grace would be more impressed with it, but she doesn't seem to care too much.  She was able to put her "Baby's First Christmas" ornament on the tree (with daddy's help!) that we bought for her in Frankenmuth.  Even though I was surprised at how little interest she showed in the tree, I have a feeling this is the last year that this will be the case!

Her favorite thing to do these days is spit all over the place.  It's cute, until she starts doing it while we're trying to feed her :)  She says "mamama" and "lalalala" but still no "dadada", much to Jeff's disappointment.  She also rolls all over the place, and she's started to kind of play peekaboo.  I don't think she necessarily knows what she's doing, but she'll hold her burpcloth above her head and then pull it down.  We think she's starting to wave some too.  When she sees me or Jeff she'll hold out one of her arms and kind of point/wave it around.  I have to say every day just gets better and better with her.  I read somewhere that colicky babies turn out to be good problem solvers when they are adults, so I figure Grace will be a genius :) 

Yesterday was a big day for me - it was my official last day as an employee of Visteon Corp.  I've decided to be a stay-at-home mom.  It was a scary decision to make, but it really wasn't necessarily a hard one.  It's scary to walk away from a decent job that pays well, especially in this economy, but I can't say that I have missed the job at all while I have been on my leave.  The only thing I've really missed is the people.  But in the end, I know being Grace's mom is the most important thing I can do, and after everything I went through to have her I can't imagine leaving her with someone else all day long.  I don't want to miss a moment of her life!  There have been days when taking care of her seems impossible and never-ending, but I know that every job in life feels like that sometimes, and I don't know if there's any other job that is more rewarding than watching your baby grow.   

I've been taking a Wilton decorating class at JoAnn's the last two weeks.  I had done some cake decorating in 4H when I was a kid, but that was more years ago than I care to think about!  I'd been wanting to take these classes for years, but with work schedules, etc. I never had the time.  I figured this could be "mommy's evening out" and I could finally take them!  I just finished the basics class and will be taking the fondant class in January.  What do you think of my final project (ignore the non-smooth icing!!)?

Hopefully I'll have a chance to post at least one more time before the end of 2010.  Lord knows I'll have enough to talk about - this Saturday we're having my niece's first birthday party at our house, Jeff's birthday is on Christmas Eve, we have two places to go on Christmas Day and the 26th, and we're having a New Year's Eve party at our house.  I'm not going to know what to do with myself once the holidays are done!!

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!!

Happy Six Month Birthday Sweetie!

It seems like I was just posting that it was Grace's four month birthday...now she's already six months old!!  I can't even imagine that six months from now will be her first birthday - AGH!  She sure looks different that her one month picture - this was the first time she was actually taller than the stuffed animal.  She's also a lot happier in the six month picture than the one month :)  She sure was a cranky baby those first few months.  There were times when I didn't think either of us would make it to six months.  Thankfully things have gotten (relatively) easier.  She still is a hothead but finally seems to be calming down and realizing that her needs don't need to be met instantly.  I do still feel sorry for any future boys she decides to date - weak men need not apply!!

Speaking of boys, we've had our fair share of baby boys being born these last two weeks.  Grace's godparents welcomed a little boy on 11/3, and Jeff's cousin just had her second boy on the 5th.  Some friends of ours just had twins on Tuesday, so it seems to be baby season around here.  I wonder what was going on nine months ago? :) 

Grace still continues to change almost daily.  She does a lot better at sitting by herself when she's propped up against something - she tips over pretty fast when she sits up alone.  We've also broken her of needing to be swaddled, at least at night.  We still have to swaddle her during the day if we want her to take more than a half hour nap.  It was a pretty painful process at first - the first night she woke up 25 times, at least.  The next night she went to sleep right away, but I think that was because she was so exhausted from the night before.  Since then she usually cries for 10 minutes or so before falling asleep, but I can live with that!  The interesting thing is that she likes to sleep on her stomach a lot or her left side.  She spent most of her time in the womb on her left side, so I guess that makes sense.  It's still hard not to freak out when I see her sleeping that way!

She's started eating more solids - so far she's had sweet potatoes, peas, and carrots.  She's not a big fan of the peas!!  We bought a high chair for her and she enjoys sitting in it, but I think she enjoys eating the straps more than the food.  Pretty much everything goes in her mouth these days.  She thinks we're pretty mean parents because we don't let her eat paper!!

On Thursday we traveled to Bay City for a cross country coaches clinic - we were supposed to stay both Thursday and Friday night, but Thursday night did not go well so we came home on Friday afternoon.  Thanks to some rude people at the hotel, Grace woke up at 11:30 wailing and we had a hard time getting her back to sleep that night.  I think I ended up sleeping about 3 hours and don't remember much of the clinic!!  We did stop at Frankenmuth on our way home and got Grace her first stocking and her first ornament. 

Well, that's about all the news from here.  I just realized that after next weekend we have something booked for every weekend thru the end of the year.  I guess we'll have to enjoy our last free weekend!!