When did you grow up?

Went out to eat at one our favorite restaurants, the Jade Palace, on Sunday (01/29/12) and wondered what we should do with Abby. Most of the time she stays in her car seat and when she fusses we end up holding her the rest of the meal. This time we decided to put her in a high chair.  Low and behold, she sat there the entire time, and just looked at the world around her.  We did come prepared with high chair cover and a small pillow to proper her up a bit more.  She is a bit girl, but still small for those seats.  So there they were Grace and Abby, both in high chairs, sitting next to each other on once side of the table while Kristy and I flanked them.

Amazing how quickly they get big.  It is hard to believe that Abby is 6 months of age.
Rolling over (check)
Cut teeth (check)
Sitting up supported (check)

I will not be giving an allowance and the keys to the car anytime soon, but it feels like it may be right around the corner.

All I want for January is my two front (bottom) teeth

Well it is official, Abby got her first two teeth. Right there on the bottom gums, right in front.

I remember when Grace got hers, and she was only 4 months.  What a miserable time it was with the sleepless nights and trying to make her feel better.  Abby, now 6 months of age, cut her first two and seems to be handling things rather well.  Something that this has enabled her to do is bite down on the spoons we use to feed her with and makes it a bit challenging to feed her with any expedience.  And don;t put your finger in her mouth, it hurts.

The first snow fall of the winter...

Today there is new fallen snow, the first of the winter.  Not the first of the year, considering that we did have snow on October 30 and took the kids trick-or-treating with it still blanketing the ground.  Of course, that time of year, it quickly melted and we were back to on and off mild weather since.  Today, at 4 am it began.  Pretty, and pretty messy considering that there is a lot of slushy snow associated with it.  Our forecast is to get rain later, so this being the first snow may not last very long either.

Total Eclipse...

Well it is official, Abby is now larger than Grace.  We knew that she was getting close and the fact that both are in the 9 month clothes (Abby wearing clothes twice her age at 5 months and Grace wearing clothes half her age at 18 months) there was some suspicion.  The only means of weighing the girls effectively is on our bathroom scale me holding them and then not holding them and doing the simple math.  What initiated this discovery was that Grace, over the weekend, was feeling very poor.  Kristy took her to the doctor and low-and-behold, she has double ear infections.  Bring on the antibiotics.  But at the doctor, was weighed and came in at 17.1 lb.  This was an increase over her last visit and we were very pleased.  Last night before getting the girls in to their PJs, I did the weighing on our scale.  Grace was 17.1 lb and Abby came in at 17.7 lb.  There may be no stopping her now.

I like you better when I get a full night's sleep...

Well the title of this entry sounds cruel, but it is just a funny observation on real life with kids.

My daughter Abby has been sleeping in a bassinet in our room, next to our bed since she came home.  The idea is that we did not want to disrupt Grace who had been sleeping through the night and doing so rather well.  Once Abby gets to a place where she is sleeping soundly through the night we would put her in her crib in the girl's room.  Abby has been tapering off with the frequency by which she has been waking up at night and on the 19th of December we did the terrible deed of letting her cry all night to break her of the midnight feeding.  Much to our surprise it only took one night.  She began sleeping through the night after that.  At that time we were still swaddling her and nothing but the sleeping habit changed.

For the last week or so, she has started to get fussy at night, sometimes starting as early as 10:30 pm and it lasts all night with a frequency of every 30-45 minutes.  We try giving her a pacifier but that does not buy us much time.  What changed around this time was that we began sleeping her in a sleep sack, as opposed to a swaddle.  She was fussing with the swaddle a bit too, so we decided to change to the sleep sack, thinking it would give her more range of movement and comfort at night.  She is still eating well during the day with three solid meals consisting of cereal and some puree foods.  She naps during the day, but not to excess.  It is worse than having a newborn for us right now!

Finally after about two weeks of this she has started to taper back down to fussing only a little bit.  Despite all efforts to get a long restful night's sleep, having it broken in the middle of the night is maddening.  Hopefully the next few nights will prove better for all of us.

 

Three days late and a three dollars short...

The title of this post means nothing except alluding to the fact that I would have rather posted it on New Year's Eve.  Because it was on that day that my daughter Grace took her first steps on her own.

Officially on 12/12/11 she took her first steps walking independently from one person to anther but from that point on, through the 31st she had only taken 2-3 steps and it was always with coaching and assistance of some sort.  On New Year's Eve however, I was in the kitchen and Kristy was in the living room and out of the corner of my eye I saw Grace pulling up to stand using the activity center in our dining room, all normal things that we have seen her do before.  Then, out of nowhere, she was standing in the middle of the dining room.  No one coached her to come to them, no one helper her stand or to start walking, she was just exploring this new mode of transportation on her own.  Then, as I was calling to Kristy to see if she saw it happen, Grace plopped down on her bum.  She did it, she walked on her own!!!  Right after, she was getting up with assistance of a stool we have at the kitchen counter and walked 10-15 steps to Kristy in the living room.  We were both in tears.  What a proud moment for us.

Not to take anything away from our other daughter, we had a proud moment with her as well over the holiday break.  Abby for the first time rolled over from back to belly.  This was more than Grace did at first.  We were doing lots of belly time with Grace and she rolled belly to back first, and really struggled with the other.  Abby did this on the Monday after Christmas.  Since she has rolled both was and has put rolls together going 3 or 4 times, before being stopped by an obstacle.

Our girls are really making great progress.