G's First Christmas!

Besides giving us an early gift of self-feeding, G also gave us the gift of sleep Christmas morning. For the past few weeks, G has been waking up at least once during the night... every night. We've commented that it feels like we have a newborn all over again. Anyways, this morning, G let us sleep until around 8, then went back to sleep after nursing (her usual routine for the middle of the night feeding as well as the early morning feeding) and didn't wake up again until 11:30! What a nice treat for us!

Anyways, so G loved ripping open the paper wrapping. We actually knew that from an earlier holiday party where, after all the other bigger kids opened their presents and ran off to play with their new stuff, G was left there in the room mostly by herself, and had a great time playing with some torn wrapping paper, and an opened toy package (made up of a cardboard backing and a molded plastic front that was half torn from the backing). 

Yay! A new 49ers outfit for next season! And with Singletary as their coach, a new era dawns!

Sigh, G insisted that we buy this for Daddy. And this was in addition to an A's book, to go along with the Giant's book G already had.

G's first bass guitar. It's stuffed, not electric, but she can still learn some cool riffs.

G got lots of cool toys and books, but her favorite thing was this paper tag that she pulled off the first present. She didn't let go of it the entire morning!

Here we are at our friends' house for Christmas dinner. Our Santa hat family portrait.

G's self-feeding skills are amazing! Here she is picking up some egg to go with her cracker, how clever! Yum, tastes good together!

Merry Christmas to Mommy & Daddy! I can feed myself!

Massive update with photos (I've given up on photos from our Breck trip, you'll just have to wait for the scrapbook and come over to see them, sorry!)

This was about a month ago, at her friend R's house. R's been using these to help her walk for quite a while now, so we thought we'd let G have a try.

Here we are picking out our Christmas tree, Thanksgiving weekend. Daddy, I like THIS one:

Playing with her favorite friend:

G likes her friend so much she decides to kiss her:

One of our early feeding attempts, organic buckwheat soba noodles, brought us back to the early super messy days. Here she actually managed to grab some noodles.

G loves playing peek-a-boo, especially with her pei-pei and her toys. However, she hasn't quite figured out that part of the game involves hiding, this little Chinese book is one of the toys that doesn't work so well for peek-a-boo, but she still looks cute playing!

At home, since we don't have any fancy walkers, G uses the ottoman to push all over the house. Sometimes she enjoys herself and squeals out in glee and pride, other times she complains that we make her work hard.
G definitely has the crawl mastered. Sometimes, because of the hardwood, she does a modified crawl with one leg up (so one leg she's using her knee, and the other leg she's using her foot).
Here we are visiting Swing Central for the last time, they are changing locations because the building has a new owner. This was their holiday party. E & S met here, so we made a special effort to go for this final farewell. We actually had to leave for G's bedtime before band even got started! I think next time we will put her to bed and have a friend stay home with her and then we can go out to have some dancing fun!

Here we are at B's holiday playdate, another of G's friends. This is the contraption they used to help him learn to walk. E decided to give G a test run in it, quite funny, actually!

Here's a close-up of her in it. Note her fancy outfit, one of the few times we put her in a dress or skirt. Don't you just love her stockings?! Yes, those are stockings, NOT SHOES! Too cute!

And the biggest news of all. For Christmas, G decided to give us the gift of her self-feeding! This was last night when we gave her a big piece of a brioche dinner roll (we're supposed to be aggressively trying to gain weight with high fat foods). She used one of her hands to stuff the piece into her mouth.

This was this morning at breakfast, feeding herself organic Ritz-like crackers. It's like a switch turned on inside her and BAM, now she can feed herself!
Whew! What a whirlwind! I'll be back to post Christmas day photos...

G visits Santa

G's friend R (whom we stayed with when we first left the hospital) had Santa visit her house and invited a few of her friends to come over as well. There were about 6-7 babies total, and Santa's visit was 15 minutes. We had to be efficient in order to get all the babies photos taken with Santa. More babies were invited, so initially we estimated one minute per baby, which isn't really a long time for a baby to get to know a total stranger (that's huge and has this ginormous beard with his face all hidden, kind of scary, actually) and let that stranger hold you on his lap. A lot of the babies cried. G just had this serious look on her face, like when we introduced her to snow, sort of a, "what is this that you're making me do?"

Anyways, G ended up getting two turns on Santa's lap. Here are some photos, but we won't post the one we're using for our Christmas cards. Yes, you heard it first here! After getting home from Santa's visit, we were busy selecting photos and uploading to print them out, in addition to writing some text to go with it.

This is one of G's friends from my mom's group (I didn't ask permission but figured it's ok to post it  b/c you can't see her face, but it was cute that G was smiling and trying to touch her):

There were originally 3 babies standing by this coffee table, but here's G, the only one left. She still does her goofy squishy-nosed smile.

Here we are, G's checking out this Santa guy she's been hearing about. He seems ok.

Hi Everyone, look, we match!

busy, busy

Sorry everyone for not posting much lately...

After we recovered from the prunes, G got constipated again. Then I had a run-in with some bad milk, then G exploded poop all over herself and her carseat in the Target parking lot, and now she has a fever. Oh, and don't forget Christmas decorating, including cutting down our Christmas tree. I've just been too tired to post, but I promise I will get around to posting some pics soon, plus I haven't forgotten about posting some more

 pics from our Breck vacation.

Here's a teaser, G with her "toothbrush":