10 Months Old

Not a whole lot has changed from last month. We've added pears to her food rotation, and she's been given crackers and waffle too. She also has decided that Cheerios are the best things ever! She pretty much just shovels them in. She cruises around furniture a bit more and is starting to tolerate bath time. She does a good job of sitting up (and has been for awhile now), but she'll only sit up if she really wants to (and usually Cheerios need to be involved). She likes to move around, for sure!

9 Months Old

Nine months old now! How can that be?

- Not only does she sleep in her own room now, but we finally put the crib together, so she sleeps in a crib (as opposed to just the pack n play) in her own room!
- She pulls herself up to standing like it's nothing.
- She eats peas and carrots now, too.
- She still hates baths. I give her baths in the tub now (not the sink) and she's still not a fan.
- She crawls on all fours.
- She is starting to settle into a pretty decent napping and bedtime schedule.

Karate Kids

At the end of September, Jonah brought home a flyer about karate lessons. He wanted to give it a try. Then Skyler wanted to join in too. The rest of us just watched from the sidelines, but Jordan especially thought it looked like a lot of fun. Once he saw another dad join in Skyler's class, he decided to sign up too. In January, he and Oliver started. Oliver liked it, but decided he wants to wait a little longer before joining the class officially.

Jonah and Skyler have already earned their yellow belts for their age groups (Jonah - under 7, Skyler - 7 to adult). Jordan had to miss the belt testing night, but should be able to test soon for his yellow belt. Skyler thinks it's kind of fun to be learning different things than Jordan now.

With their new belts on belt testing night

Jordan participating in Oliver's class, so Oliver wouldn't be so nervous

8 Months Old

In February, Georgia turned 8 months old

• She likes to be under the kitchen table, where all the cool stuff to put in her mouth is
• She can go from a crawling position to a kneeling position
• She has discovered that there is more to the house than the small carpeted portion where all her toys are and She tends to like the rest of the house better (see #1)
• She added applesauce to her food repertoire
• She doesn't like baths so much. She prefers to stand rather than sit. 
• She likes diaper change time, as in she likes to try and roll away from me as I change her diaper. She thinks it's hilarious to try and get away from me.
• She sleeps in her own room upstairs now.

Seven Months Old

Georgia is seven months old!

She:

eats rice and peas and paper (we only encourage two of those)

moves around in sort of a hybrid army crawl/real crawl fashion

seems to always be making noise of some sort

has two teeth

has gotten that falling down the stairs thing out of the way*

*She was by far the least traumatized. The boys were told to watch her while Jordan and I were cooking dinner. In there defense, I told them to keep her away from the fireplace, and well, she didn't go near the fireplace. We have taken sufficient measures to ensure it doesn't happen again.

Call Me What?

Oliver likes to play with my phone. He likes to ask Siri silly things and ask her to find pictures for him. I once heard him ask for pictures of wiener dogs. Not liking where that had the potential of going, I quickly grabbed the phone away and suggested he ask for pictures of dachshunds instead. Another time, he was asking for pictures of Wild Kratts (this is what he was looking for), but he just wasn't being understood correctly. He was doing it ever so politely and saying, "Siri, can you show me pictures of Wild Kratts", but Siri was having a hard time and at one point apparently heard "call me" instead of "can you" and we suddenly hear "okay Alison, I will call you 'pictures of wild crack'. So, now when I ask my phone "Who am I?" (which I normally don't, but um, yeah), I get variations of "You're Alison, but you asked me to call you 'pictures of wild crack'".  It's funny.

Visitors!

I wrote that nothing in December was really worthy of a blog post of its own, and then I felt bad including this among those other things, so I gave it its own post! My parents and my sister came to visit us in December. We had so much fun doing so many things that I didn't get a chance to take any pictures! Sort of. Not really. We mostly just enjoyed hanging out together while doing a few little things here and there. We did do a mini Christmas of sorts and exchanged gifts. We all had such a great time and next time they come, I'm sure I'll know what all the cool activities are!

See, we opened gifts! I actually didn't mean to upload this picture, but since I did, I may as well post it. This is Oliver opening up a nerf gun from Aunt Krissy

This picture proves they were here because that's my sister in the foreground and my dad in the background and why on earth would they come without my mom?

December, Christmas, and All That Stuff

At this point (as in, two months after the fact) not much of our December is really worthy of its own blog post. So, I shall combine it all. Here goes:

We got some snow. And with that snow comes snow days! There is a small incline (notice I did not say hill) in our backyard that the kids think is awesome to sled down. They've been to the big sledding hill in town, but still like our backyard because though the trip down is fast, so is the walk back up!

We walked down the street to the city's tree lighting ceremony. We saw Santa, made some crafts, listened to the high school choir sing, rode in a horse-drawn wagon and drank hot cocoa because it was cold.  

I dressed the kids up in Christmasy clothes because that's what I do. But I only took a picture of Georgia. Which is a shame because the boys looked quite snazzy in their red and green sweater vests and ties. Jonah and Oliver wore bow ties. I think. See, I really should have taken a picture because I can't quite remember what they wore.

We made Christmas cookies! Not a huge thing, but I took a picture, so maybe at the time I felt that it was?

During December, the kids made these lego trees. There were 24 steps and each day in December, they'd get a new step and the pieces to go with it. At some each kid said "heck with this" and just built it their own way. Usually that followed the tree breaking and the kid not wanting to take the time to follow the directions to get it back to how it was. Whatever floats their boat. They thought it was fun anyway and I imagine they will want to do it again next year.

And then it was Christmas! I won't bore you will all of our gift unwrapping pictures, just this one. The boys made Georgia some hairclips out of felt and were so, so excited to do it and had so much fun thinking of designs (Jordan had to do most of the work when it came to making the designs a reality). She is eating one, so that means she approves! She doesn't have enough hair for a clip, but I clip them to headbands and they look very cute. My favorite is an elephant one.

Get used to the non-feminine snow clothes, Georgia! I hope you like Spiderman boots!

Georgia was not impressed

This right here sums up our Christmas quite nicely. Screens. Because we needed more, you see.

Six Months Old

At six months old Georgia -

-tried her first bite of food, a mum-mum
-can pull up on all fours and rock back and forth
-loves playing with toys
-likes to stare at the TV regardless of what is on it
-weighs about 13 lbs. and is 26 inches long. She's still just an itty bitty girl. 

She is such a happy baby and we are so lucky to have her!

Did I mention she likes to put everything in her mouth?

Oh, you're going to take away my bunny? I'll just eat your backdrop.

I'll just take that!

Six Months Later

In honor of Georgia almost being six months old (though, doesn't it seem like just yesterday that she hit the five month mark?), here are some pictures that we had taken in the hospital the day she was born. I intended to put these up awhile ago, but was having trouble uploading them and the the disc became unreadable! I was recently able to recover the files from the disc (is there anything that wasn't destroyed in the move?) and here are some of my favorites

Five Months Old

Georgia turned five months old in November. Not much has changed from four months. She's found her toes, is usually smiling or laughing and her sleep is hit or miss (mostly miss, but we deal). She likes to sleep on her stomach with her bottom in the air (you know, just like every other baby out there). She's showing some interest in table food (spoiler alert - next month she gets her first bite of food) and is starting to really like playing with toys too.

Some photo shoots are better than others

 

Halloween

Halloween is not my favorite holiday. At all. Under normal circumstances, if had Jonah told me a week before Halloween that he wanted to be a character that would require a lot of work on my part, I would have told him no way! But in this case he chose Jack Skellington from The Nightmare Before Christmas and I absolutely love that movie, so I was so excited for this project! While perusing the internet for ideas, I came across Zero (Jack's ghost dog) costumes too and decided that Oliver would be the perfect Zero. He sort of agreed. He didn't wear it for the church party, but did wear it to trick or treat. 

I wasn't too thrilled that he insisted on wearing his Superman shirt underneath, but whatever. There were three groups of people we ran into while trick or treating - those who had no idea who he was, those who knew exactly who he was, and those who thought he was Beetlejuice (right director, wrong movie). It was a pretty rainy Halloween night, but that really didn't stop the kids (it did male their time out a little shorter, but I wasn't complaining!). However, I used cardboard to stiffen up Oliver's Zero nose, so yeah, that didn't end up working out too well. 

Skyler was a detective and he put his costume together all by himself. There was a hat, too. He did a great job with it, and was really proud of himself.

And finally, the little princess. When I asked the boys what Georgia should be for Halloween, they all said a princess. And they each said it as if it was a no-brainer and with a "uh mom, what else would she be?" tone in their voices. So, she was a princess. I had no choice!

600th Post

I found these pictures on my phone recently and they made me laugh. They have nothing to do with the fact that this is the 600th blog post, but that's as good a title as any, right? I am fairly certain they took these of each in June after soccer one day. I don't know why they are so mad. Maybe I was taking too long gathering all of our stuff? Maybe I was making them go somewhere horrible afterwards? Who knows.
 

Four Months Old

At four months old, Georgia:

• Rolls over
• Laughs
• Prefers that her longest block of sleep go from six in the morning until 10:30ish
• Weighs 11 lbs. and is 23.75 inches long

This has also been an important month for her in that I've started putting headbands on her much more frequently.  I've been having a hard time sorting out my feelings regarding headbands on bald babies, but finally decided that a simple little headwrap looks pretty adorable.

Yup, We Moved

Here's the home we left. It rained the entire day that we were planning on loading our truck. It never does that! Usually it rains for just a short time and then moves on. We were extremely blessed that the rain stopped just when we needed it to so we could load our belongings without worrying about then getting all wet! It started up again just as we were finishing up. 

And then, just about a half hour into our trip, we were on the side of the road. The transmission was giving us issues. Thus, the next day, we ended up at a U-Haul in Oklahoma City where we amused ourselves for several hours watching the surveillance cameras and playing with this super awesome contraption that actually proved to be quite the lifesaver as we all really enjoyed playing with it. 

And then there was Oliver and his special little box. There was a spot full of used boxes for people to 'take one and leave one'. Oliver decided he was particularly fond of this one and begged to take it with us. I decided that even though we didn't have one to leave, it still wouldn't be too big of an issue. 

Our truck could not be fixed so we got a new one. A crew was supposed to help us move everything from one truck to the other, but they never showed so we did it on our own with the help of some extremely kind employees. And then it rained. And the rain pounding down on top of the truck was pretty loud. I guess all of our stuff was destined to be rained upon. 

It was smooth sailing from then on out. Check out this way cool playground in Joplin, MO. It was very tall. 

And then we met my friend Sarah for dinner. She took us to a super cool restaurant where she showed my boys the finer points of pinball. 

Skyler wanted to visit the arch in St. Louis, so we did. 

And then we made it to our new home!