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...

8 months (late)

I know, it's several days past her 8 month birthday, but oh well.

So, I think can rule out separation anxiety, as we were at a Halloween playdate and G was the only baby that didn't cry when all the moms (10+) wanted a group picture of the babies in costume and put them all down on the floor to take pictures. She just smiled at me and looked around wondering why everyone was crying (and all the mommies laughing). Too funny, it was the most chaotic few minutes I've experienced recently. However, G still tends to be more fussy when tired or hungry, but I guess that could be normal. She still could be teething or having a growth spurt. Also, within a few days after S's parents left, G was back to sleeping 11-12 hrs. She still woke up at 6am once, but I think she's back to a 10-12 hr schedule, plus her 2-3 naps during the day. And she isn't crying anymore during her bathtime.

Ok, so back to G and 8 months. She's crawling now, we realized that it's the hardwood surface in our house that's holding her back. She's been doing a hybrid crawl that looks like an inch worm where she comes up on hands and knees, then goes flat on belly, then back on hands and knees, etc, but she's still very reluctant to go from sitting to on the belly when on the floor (she'll do it on her bed, our bed, the couch, etc). However, on Saturday at our church's Harvest Festival, she crawled the entire length of the picnic blanket (maybe 6 feet) several times without going flat.

Stats at 8 months: 27 inches tall (I think we can say tall now, instead of long, since she's starting to stand), 14 pounds. For those tracking, yes, she lost some weight from last month. We think it is a combination of her getting sick last week and her becoming much more active.

Besides crawling, G loves to climb. I think she actually likes it more than crawling. She's also getting a little better at eating, and will actually open her mouth and lean her head forward for grapes and rice noodles. Her current list of foods: rice, oatmeal, zucchini, spaghetti squash, sweet potato, spinach, peas, avocado, grapes (once I let her suck on a piece of honeydew, so I'm not sure if that counts). Coming up of things to try: artichoke (I will steam whole ones and just mash up the hearts), apples, pears, butternut squash, broccoli, carrots.

We have also completed G's transition to cloth diapers. She just completed 24 hrs of all cloth. When we first started , it was only at home and during the day, then, last weekend, we tried overnight, and this week we have kept her in cloth going out on short trips where won't need a diaper change. We have not yet changed a cloth diaper outside of the house. G has been successful pooping on the toilet too, except for a tiny bit that got on her diaper once.

Here are some pictures of her Halloween costumes (yes, we borrowed a few):

This one was a bit small for her (and she didn't seem to like it), so we decided not to use it, but she still looks cute.

Here she was on her first Halloween playdate. There were two other ladybugs there but we think she was the cutest one! This is the one we will probably use for Halloween.

Here she is dressed up for our church's Harvest Fest & Pumpkin Patch! We took home the same pumpkin that we brought. What a bargain!

Locomotion!

G is officially on the move! Today, after her Little Gym class, we went grocery shopping (well, I shopped while she napped). When we got home, I turned on the front sprinklers, took out the groceries from the car, took G out of the car and put her on her playmat, put away the groceries, went out to turn off the sprinklers, came back to get G on the playmat only to find her totally NOT on the playmat. She was about 6 feet away from where I had placed her, off the mat by several feet, next to the sofa. Does she look happy to see me or surprised that I "caught" her? Yes, we will be baby-proofing and keeping a closer eye on her.

You may be wondering how exactly is she moving? She's rolling, which is old news. She's also scooting or creeping, which is the new news. Picture a soldier creeping around flat on the ground using his arms, and that's what G is doing. She uses her hands and arms to pull her body along. Her legs are trying to help, but it's mostly the arms at this point. We always knew her legs were strong from all her jumping and standing, but we never realized how strong her arms were!

Yosemite update: We stayed 2 night in a tent cabin in Curry Village. Our cabin was in a different area from everyone else's, which turned out to be a good thing. We hiked with G in her backpack carrier along the bottom of the Half Dome trail, to the second bridge. E was disappointed that we didn't go up the Mist Trail, but it was hot, he looked tired, I was tired, and I just felt that we weren't really prepared. Later that night, I woke up to rangers outside our cabin with flashlights. I didn't see or hear any bears, but I can only assume that was the reason. Apparently it was enough to wake up G and she was really upset. It took a long time to stop her crying, and after one failed attempt to put her back down in her mini-tent, I realized that I had to just hold her all night long rather than risk keeping everyone else in the camp awake, so E helped me put her in the carrier and I sat on a chair with her sleeping on me like that the rest of the night. Later, I heard what sounded like two gunshots, which we found out later were air rifles that the rangers used to scare away bears. I was so tired from sitting in the chair (that wasn't very comfortable) with her all night long, that I sent E with G to breakfast with the others while I stayed behind to sleep.
And as promised (only 3 weeks later), the pics from her first Little Gym class:

2024 Olympics, here we come...

Stay tuned for her feeding update...