Another photo dump! Skip it, if you’re not interested. This is mostly here for posterity.

Some 9-10 months photos

Seen in the photos:

So we picked a nice overcast day ( those are the best for pictures, clouds act like one giant lightbox), found a random church-run pumpkin patch (mind you, I’d never been to a pumpkin patch before so I didn’t really know what they were supposed to be like), dressed Lexi into a cute coordinating dress and were off to take some pictures.

By the time we got there, it was getting dark from the thunderclouds and I had a feeling we had but five minutes before it started raining. I was right. So 200 pictures of my little girl, 2 pumpkins and soaking wet family later, we loaded ourselves into the car and left.

Did I get some cute first pumpkin patch pictures? Yes!

The best shot, being this: {click CONTINUE READING below}

The first video here is the highlights of everything that being a 6 months old entails. The second video is her highness playing with toys, mostly boring but with a few very cute/funny/adorable moments in between.

I am putting the usual disclosure of parents sharing home movies:

-Ignore my singing

-Ignore my overly excited exclamations

-Ignore any other babble coming from me that you might hear in this video

-Ignore anything anything else that comes with being a parent

Do enjoy the adorable goofball that is Lexi!

{Also, like previous videos, this was intended for friends and family, so it’s pretty long and for most will be pretty boring.  To us, of course, it’s the best video ever. :) }

 

 

Below is a compilation of videos of Alexis playing with her toys. All the above disclosures apply.

 

Dear baby girl,

You are 7 months old. The number blows my mind. I remember reading other people’s blogs and thinking how big their babies were at 7 months. And here you are, exactly 7 months old, and yet you’re still so little and at the same time so grown. You’ve gone such a long way. I could never imagine myself as a mom to a 7 months old and yet in a blink of an eye, you are 7 WHOLE MONTHS OLD!

I am most likely repeating myself saying that this month has been the most amazing one so far. When I day-dreamed about you, when you were in my belly, I couldn’t imagine that we would have times like this where every single day is unbearably precious and unfathomably fun.

There have been so many changes this month that I had to start a list, not to forget a single thing when it was time to write this letter. But the biggest change is that you enjoy life to the extent that I have not seen you do up until now. YOU ARE FUN! It sums up your whole being!  There hasn’t been a day this month that you didn’t wake up and gift me the most amazing day of them all. Each day, every day. I am not saying this to be sappy or poetic. I am not either of those. I am saying that because it is true.

You day ALWAYS starts the same. At 6 or 7 am you start moving around next to me, looking for my breast. Once you find it, you nurse for a bit until it wakes you up. You open your eyes suddenly- and there, you’re awake! Instantly a slew of babbles and laughs and screeches comes out of your cute little mouth, making it evident for anyone in the room that THE PRINCESS IS AWAKE!

Both mommy and daddy are usually way too tired from a poor night’s sleep to react to it immidiately. You continue playing with your toes and attempt to engage me by grabbing my hair or my earrings. At some point you get me to open my eyes and THERE- you give me the brightest happiest smile of them all! “MORNIN’, MOMMY! IT IS TIME TO HAVE FUN!” – it says!

Who can resist that? So we get up, and groggily change you and put some clothes on to go for a walk with you. In the meantime, you’re just a ball of ENERGY! You pump your legs, you smile, you laugh, ready to start the day. You look at me with a sly smile, jumping from joy every time I smile back at you. There’s just no way to resist that kind of positive energy- it wakes us up!

When we’re finally out, around 7-8 am, we take a nice 30-40 minute long walk, during which you relax and enjoy the views. By the end of it, you start to fuss indicating that you’ve had enough and you are getting hot ( which we have since remedied by buying a much better stroller fan).

You get hydrated, and then play a little bit and soon it is time for your first nap.

Your big achievement this month is growing out of having to be rocked. One day you just up and fell asleep while nursing, lying on the bed, and then you did it again and again. We stopped rocking you completely and now you purposefully turn to me to nurse to sleep for each nap and bedtime. I am absolutely over the moon about this big step you’ve made and I am so happy we’ve had the patience to let you do it on your own.

What’s next, girl?

I know what’s next! Next, you decided that you will gift me with normal sized naps for a few days. I am talking- napping for 1.5 hrs, without or, possibly, with one wake up. We are still working these out, but I have never had you just sleep for an hour on your own, so it’s a big deal for me. I have hope that with a few tweaks here and there, you will be napping good 1.5-2 hrs at a time. I can see you stir at the 30 minute mark on the monitor, but 80% of the time you’re able to fall back asleep. Hooray for that! {edit: you went back to 30 minute naps for a few days and then back again to 1.5hrs. }

After you wake up with babbles and big smiles  again, we get to play with your favorite toys. You love talking to them and playing, with me in the vicinity cleaning or doing a few things.  Your favorite toy of the moment is the Fish and Splish by BToys.

This whole month we’ve had different out of town guests  and you’ve been loving the attention and all the impromptu trips we’ve been taking.

Around this time of the day, we make lunch and something for you. You had started BLW last month and it’s going really well. You’ve been going through the “I’m not interested in eating, I am interested in playing, throwing food, dropping dishes and making a mess of myself” stages in the last two weeks. You have so much fun doing it that we don’t mind the mess and the waste- it’s all a part of learning. Even when I serve you a whole bowl of split pea soup and you promptly pick up the bowl and pour the soup over your head. Yeah…. That has happened! In the last few days, you suddenly started actually eating again. I cannot wait to write a post about your BLW adventure.

You LOVE drinking out of a cup or a glass! You’re obsessed with it! I’ve decided not to introduce you to a sippy cup, but instead wait till you learn to drink from a cup, since you love doing it so much. You need our help right now not to spill the whole thing on yourself, but you grab it with both your hands like a big girl and let us tilt it a bit.

You JUST figured out why we keep handing you a spoon and how to use it. Sometimes you get confused as to which end to use, but most of the time you actually get the right end with food into your mouth (and squint from the unexpected taste).

You’ve gone to restaurants with us on multiple occasions and each time I’ve ordered you steamed vegetables or  a bowl of soup and you’ve eaten them like a big girl, enjoying the taste of everything that gets served.

To my surprise and joy, you’ve become that proverbial baby that can be taken ANYWHERE! What a change from just 2 months ago when we couldn’t even take a car ride with you. Now? Phew! You go on boats, long car trips (not without some fussing), to restaurants, late night dinners, stay up happy and engaged till 10pm, beach, stores, you name it! You barely ever have a problem, you never want to sleep and will stay up as long as there is interesting things to look at and do. Again, Disney just can’t come soon enough. Seeing your personality you’re going to enjoy the heck out of it. Like one of my IG peeps said “Looks like you have gotten that baby you can take anywhere that you dreamed about!”. YES!  I know it can change, so for now I am enjoying every moment.

This month we’ve had the privilege to celebrate both our birthdays with you and you did so great! We had a blast dressing you up, staying at the beachside hotel, going to the ocean the next morning.

Speaking of ocean, this month signified your official beginning of becoming a water baby. You’ve been Floridified! You’ve had your first ocean swim, and second, and third, and ….. You get the point! You LOVED IT! Squealed from joy, mouth open, drinking salt water, kicking your legs, attempting to swim. Sand? You thought it was the coolest thing ever! Burying your toes into it, grabbing fistfuls and attempting to eat it. No fear of sand here so far.

Aaaand, get this, YOU FELL ASLEEP AT THE BEACH! And not once, but twice! Whoa! Must be the sound of the waves, but it was so cool to watch you sleeping while we’re out.

You can splash and jump on command now, you understand what those words are. You love going to the pool. Every time we swim, you get really sneaky. You pretend like you are splashing, but really what you’re doing is trying to grab some water in your palm and carry it straight to your mouth! It’s hilarious! If you’re lucky enough to be put into a floatie, you make no bones about just lowering your mouth and drinking the water pooled on the float.

We try to read a ton of books to you. Every morning, afternoon and evening, before every nap. Between me and daddy, we probably go through 6 full length books ( Cat in the Hat length) and 6 shorter baby books a day. And you love it. It’s by far your favorite activity to do. No matter what kind of mood you’re in, if we pull out a book, you’re all smiles and attention. You have to have a book or two before naptime, it primes you for sleep. I love watching you react to what we are reading. You are not a passive listener, either. You attentively study every single picture in the book and react to our tone and certain words, smile, wiggle, kick legs, frown. You have favorite books, favorite pages of books, favorite words. You get a kick out of the word “GOO-GOO GOGGLES!” and you laugh each time. I can tell you’re going to have a huge love for reading when you grow up. I just ordered you 15 different Disney books from Amazon and a bunch of Russian books and you just have no idea what you’re in for.

You also love reading books with activities in them. You turn pages of board books and pull on tabs, touch the fussy parts, tear off heads of the paper puppets that stick out.

The car seat is no longer your enemy. You do pretty well in it, and I am starting to get a feeling that you get excited when we take you to the car, because you know we’re going somewhere. Again and again, every time I think about your car seat relationship, I want to kick myself in the butt for not getting you the one we have now, right away. It could have saved us a lot of stress and tears.

You’re almost exclusively in cloth diapers. We still use disposables for the night as we try to figure out what works for us, but I can see us switching to cloth for the night within a month. I love seeing your fluffy butt around the house.

You POSE! Oh how you pose! With the right lighting, I can take the most amazing photos of you. You’ve gotten into this cute little habit of twiddling your thumb on your leg whenever you’re feeling shy or contemplative and it looks adorable in photos.

You still play with your gym, but now instead of passively lying under it like you did at three months, you FIGHT with it! It’s hilarious to watch you struggle trying to push the arches above your head.

You’re the most expressive baby I know (I don’t know that many babies, though)! You go through a million expressions per second and, your arms, oh, your arms fly around like you’re on stage performing Cats. And those little hands… you make cute gestures with them that make me melt. You talk to yourself, me, daddy, your toys- using a trillion of sounds you invented, smacking your lips in a million cute ways. And those faces! Once in a while I’ll catch a face that I just can’t bring myself to delete, so I’ve started a FUNNY FACES folder for you to laugh at when you’re a teenager.

You know the word Kitty in Russian (KISA), and daddy in Russian (PAPA) and you always look for them if I ask where they are. You understand that very well. Kitties are your favorite things EVER! Like, seriously, you LOVE cats! Oh boy, do they not know what’s coming when you finally start crawling…. Brrrr….! And you think dad is alright too! LOL! No, you really adore him! If you see him somewhere in the distance, you stop doing whatever you are doing and just stare. Or if he’s close enough to see you, you put your hands in your mouth and smile shyly, sometimes hiding behind mommy’s shoulder. And then your eyes meet and it’s a giggle/kick fest.

Like I wrote in the mid-month post, you said your first word: MAMA! I have still not digested what happened, but it’s pretty darn cool. You haven’t said it again since then, so it’s quite possible it was just a sound you were making, but I will know that once you say it for real. For now, THAT seemed pretty real and different from a similar MAMAMAMAMA sound. I also think ( though here I am not sure) that you MIGHT have signed your first sign. I didn’t recognize it at the time, but you might have signed MILK. I am yet to confirm that, because signs are sometimes very hard to recognize. You keep signing it, but I am not 100% positive that you know what you mean. I think you’re just copying a gesture that you often see me doing.

Your sound repertoire includes the following: MAMA, DADADADADADA, TATATATATA, TITITITITITITI, PAPAPAPAPAPA, BABABABABA, BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH, WAWAWAWAWA, GOO-GOO, Ge-GE-Ge, AhGOO and a million others I can’t even repeat. But your favorite sound, by far, is BAH-BAH-BAH! You make it by smacking your lips together and I just DIE!

The biggest change in how you play is that I see SO MUCH purpose in it now. Everything you do is done with an idea or goal in mind. You’ve had such a jump in cognitive development this month, it’s crazy!

You play so fabulously on your own! It’s definitely something that happened this month. You talk to your toys, you bang them together, you grab plastic cups and make sounds. If you are holding one toy, you try to hit it on something that will make a sound.

Your favorite game is when you pull one toy after another out of the bucket, inspect it, and chew on it, and then put it back. You love fishing in the full bucket, making sounds, until you find THE toy you were looking for. And no other toy would do. Other times, you take the bucket and just EMPTY the whole thing on the floor.

You have so much dexterity. You reach, pull, bang, grab, move in any way and direction you want. You get from sitting position into crawling, you flip from sitting up to your tummy and play there for a bit. You pull up on your knees, you try to crawl but you just haven’t figured out how to do it yet. You get to your toys one way or another: shimming down the carpet, reaching while straining, squrming- anything to get to your goal, especially if that goal is kitties. You do this hilarious move when you’re sitting and see kitties and you want to get to them. You basically attempt to move while sitting, shimmying really fast. You do the same thing when you’re on your tummy. So funny!

You hold your arms to be picked up, you say NE NE NE NE or AH-YA-YA-YA-YA-YA when you’re upset. You laugh when I laugh. Like literally, we’d be lying on the bed together and you’ll look at me and laugh and I’ll laugh back and you’ll laugh back… And we’ll just lie there laughing at each other for no apparent reason :) I really love when you laugh and smile- your eyes sparkle and you get the most adorable look  on your face. You say “Eh! Eh! Eh!’ at the end of each giggle and I just can’t handle the cuteness.

You play all kinds of silly games with me. Our favorite is Rumble- Tumble that we play after each nap.

When your daddy holds you, you sometimes twist and turn until you find me. And when I run up to you excitedly and get my face into yours, you grab it with your little hands and then happily “slap” me all over!

You’ve dropped your third nap completely, unless your first two sucked, and then you do need a cat nap around 5 pm.

A recent development is you’ve figured out how to take your clothes off. It’s virtually impossible to put anything over your head, because you will fight and fight to take it off! I was dying watching it the first time.

You love using your open palm, splashing, banging on the table, aaaand CLAPPING! You now clap! It’s so cute to see! Sometimes you clap on your own when you’re excited, other times you copy us! But you definitely know it’s a happy thing! You smile and laugh when you see us clapping. Just in the last 2 days, you’ve been clapping to the songs “If you’re happy and you know it” and “Ladushki” (russian clapping rhyme) whenever we recite it. You even clapped with grandma over skype when she sang Ladushki to you and completely blew her mind and made her eternally happy (it’s something she did with you when she was here). You clap on your own when you hear Ladushki rhyme too. You are one smart cookie, let me tell you!

Most of your “achievements” are recorded on video and played over and over again by different family member ( aka Grandma from Russia). {Click here to watch}

For readers:

Items seen in this post:

Blue boat with toys: Fish N Splish BToys

Yellow Giraffe: Lamaze

White tank top onesie: Polarn O Pyret 

Hairbows: Hopscotch Boutique

Highchair: Boon Flair

Chemical Free Rashguards: Tuga

Red Romper: Polarn O Pyret

Here is what you’re about to see:

• her first crawl-like move
• lots of playing
•  attempting to grab kitty’s tail and laughing her butt off
• hilarious peekaboo
• talking to grandma over skype
• stealing mommy’s drink
• first swing ride
• and more more more

 

The video is pretty long and was not made for the blog but for us, so if you sit through the whole 10 minutes, I’d be surprised. I did leave the funniest thing for the ending.

{all music is by Disney}

{Written on 5/25/2012}

If you hate getting up a few times a night to soothe/feed your baby, take heart in this: someone has it worse (and also the obvious: your baby NEEDS YOU). The night log below is surely going to make you count your lucky stars. And this post will serve me as a reminder to keep things in perspective!

{Play suit by Polarn O Pyret}

Just when I thought we were doing better with night sleep, the 4 months wakeful hit. I remember saying that we had hit the wakeful period at 2.5 months because she went from 1-2 wakings to 4-5 and someone commented “Just wait till 4 months, it’ll be like having a newborn” They were right. She soon started waking up EVERY HOUR. But it was nothing we weren’t used to. So I managed that just fine.

And then it hit: TEETHING. For the past 3 days I’m pretty sure my little girl has been teething based on all her symptoms (pulling on ear, chewing everything in sight, grabs our knuckles and rubs them on her gums side to side, drooling like a mad woman, chin rash from drool, refuses boob until really hungry, bites, all the usuals). She’s miserable at night, she’s miserable during the day. All we can do is manage her pain/symptoms and give her as much love as possible, even in light of her new night “schedule”. But then again maybe I am wrong. I don’t see any teeth or swollen gums, but I hear it takes a while to see those. I’ll give it a few more nights to find out, but so far we’re going under the assumption it’s her gums.
Update: she seems to have calmed down a bit and doesn’t appear in pain. Nights are still iffy (4-5 wakings) but that’s normal for 4 months regression. So still exhibiting symptoms of teething but she’s not in so much discomfort. And I’m loving having this log to show her when she’s ready to have her own babies (to scare her off haha)

It was the worst night from the “number of wakings” standpoint since Lexi’s birth. And it will serve me as a reminder for when Alexis goes back to waking up a mere 2-3 times a night that I should be happy, that it could be worse, that IT WILL PASS and most importantly that what will matter years from now is HOW WELL and lovingly we handled it (because any sleep deprived parent can tell you – it’s easy to build up resentment on little sleep)

So Self, come back to this post often, every time you feel like Lexi should be sleeping, every time you get upset she isn’t.

And everyone else, feel free to bookmark/pin this if you feel it will help you keep things in perspective.

{This is written purely for entertainment purposes. I’m not looking for sleep advice. It is simply a stage we have to go through and keep Alexis as comfy as possible.
I WOULD, however, love to hear about your first teething experience- age, what helped, how it manifested, how long it lasted, how you knew she/he was teething, etc…
Teething isn’t something a lot is written about, as it’s individual so I’d appreciate any insight. }

Have fun reading the log! This is how it has been for the past 3 days give or take a few wakes.
*Crying in this case means constant whimpering. We try to never give her the need to outright cry.

{This is taken from my nighttime log as part of Pantley sleep system}

Nighttime routine:
Bath, massage, say good night to items in room, read 2 books, swing in the swing a bit, rock a bit.
7:19 Asleep in bed ( we co-sleep)
7:49 Up nursing (this is normal. She treats anything before 10pm as a nap and wakes up every 40 minutes)
7:55 Removed nipple, falling asleep…
In and out of sleep, rooting, with and without nipple
8:13 Awake, rocking.
Put down in bed
8:25 Awake, won’t nurse, rocking
8:33 Asleep
10:23 up, crying. I nurse.
10:32 asleep
Fidgety
Calmed her down a few times by putting my hand on her belly
10:45 Up crying, rocking
10:50 asleep
11:00 crying/whining, rocking
11:11 Asleep
12:00 Up crying, nursing
12:10 asleep
12:16 Up fully awake, change, rock for 29 min until asleep
12:45 put her down
12:50 awake crying, rocking
1:05 asleep
1:10 Up again, whimpering for 5 min, rocking, nursing
1:30 still rocking
1:50 down, asleep
1:55 awake crying, changed again, tried rocking, tried putting in a swing, let her chew on a chilled teether, rocking again
3:00 Finally asleep
3:30 Up crying, nursing
3:31 asleep
5:38 up crying, rocking
5:45 asleep
6:37 fully awake for the day, won’t got to sleep, won’t nurse, smile central.

Total snooze time for mommy and daddy: 4 hours 40 minutes with a million interruptions.

Now she spent all morning whimpering on and off (more on than off) unless she’s chewing on something or being bounced and thrown up in the air at which point she is as happy as a clam as long as it continues.

So what’s keeping me going even though I am running on 4 hours of sleep today and less than 6 each night for the last 2 days?

This little face! How could you not!?

{a little preview of her 3-6 months video. I know I still have to do the 0-3 months one too}

Comment: Tell me about your child’s first teething experience.