Photo Project 52.12: The Vacation Edition

Me 52.12: Spa Day

Elliott 52.12: Smirk*

Other 52.12: The Park**

*Funny thing when you buy secondhand clothes...and you aren't really up on the fashion world...you end up picking up something like these little jammies from this company. Ha! This will bring out Elliott's inner hip-hop, I'm sure.

**This photo makes me really happy. Not only because Jenny's happy, but the colors came out beautiful...with no help from PhotoShop. I swear!

Two nights in a row...

...Elliott has slept through the night. And I don't mean that loose book definition of 'through the night' that really only means 5-6 hours straight. (Because you and I both know that really doesn't count in the non-disrupted-parent-sleep way.) I mean 10+ hours. Solid. I'm still in shock. And its amazing how wonderful 6 hours of sleep feels when you don't have to wake up 3 hours into your own night.

I can only attribute it to those (magic?) bumpers Jena just sent us! So a BIG thank you!

Family Portrait

One of my favorite artists is AshleyG and Drew. I've purchased prints and button packs from them in the past and was even able to obtain an original painting a couple years ago. When I found out they were now doing custom portraits, I knew I had to find a way to save my pennies to make that happen.

I sent in several photos of each of us and this is what Ashley and Drew created for us:

(AshleyG if you see this and would rather I only link to your post here, please let me know and I will happily update my post!)

It arrived in perfect timing to celebrate our anniversary. I couldn't be more pleased with the results and it was such a great experience to work with Ashley during the sketching process. The final print is extraordinarily well printed on high quality paper, so now we are in the process of finding just the right frame for it. And heck, they can even print one for you, too! :)

Photo Project 52.11

Me 52.11: Vacation!

Elliott 52.11: Throne

Other 52.11: Garden

Elliott at 6 months

We finally had Elliott's six month check up on Monday. He's currently weighing in at 16 lbs 2 oz and measuring 2 feet 2 inches (I find the fact that he is about 2 feet tall extremely adorable). He is still mostly wearing 3 month and 3-6 month clothes with a few 6 month clothes coming on-line (most are still too big). This means a lot of what we have is very seasonally inappropriate, but it hasn't been a problem so far. Luckily he isn't (generally) a big spitter-upper or drooler, so most of the time he can wear his clothes more than once. He's even a pretty clean eater, so except for a very messy bib, he usually comes away from solid food meals unscathed.

Elliott's First Bite*:



As for locomotion, he's getting pretty good at getting himself where he needs to go by rolling and pushing with his feet. He's still quite a bit like a seal on land, but it really is impressive to watch him move about. He's lifting his whole torso off the ground and is trying to get his knees under him, so it looks like we should probably make an effort to put away the floor-prone baby hazards. He can also sit up on his own, but still leans forward to balance himself on his belly. I did notice yesterday, however, that he has started using his arms to keep himself in balance.

Now that we have our living room floor back and given how much more he can do on the floor, tummy time has increased to a significant portion of the play time during the day. In fact, yesterday I got out these printed blocks thinking he'd think they were fun to play with. Not only did he find them fun, he thought they were funny! He started laughing at them as soon as I started putting them out and laughed even harder when he knocked them over. I was able to get a bit on video (with a little giggle distraction from Jenny, too).

Giggle Blocks:



He's been talking more as well. He went through a period of time around five months where he didn't say a whole lot. He made lots of raspberries, but it was like he was trying to hard to make vocalizations, so nothing ended up coming out. Now, he seems more relaxed about it. We have lots of conversations after meals and usually after bath time while he's getting dressed for bed. More Ms and Ps are coming into play, so "mopah" has turned into something that gets said a fair amount.

Mopah:



As for things that he's into right now, here are a few:

1. He loves scratching things with his nails. Everything gets a good scratch to feel and hear the texture: the wall behind the changing pad, my jeans, the couch cover. You name it, he scratches it.

2. Playing with faces. He's always liked to touch my dad's face, but now he does it with just about everyone else, too. My face gets a good going over at pretty much every feeding.

3. He loves it when you make animal sounds...especially the ones he knows from the Einstein (cow, cat, duck, dog, lion).

4. He loves sucking the wash cloth during bath time.

5. He almost always will grab for whatever glass or mug you are drinking out of.

6. And Jenny. He can't get enough of her. He laughs and laughs when he sees her walking and running around.

He is however, not really into naps right now. We are trying to make napping in his crib the norm, but that usually doesn't go over all that well. Oh yeah! He's in a crib! We packed away the Pack and Play bassinet last weekend and set up the crib. He's done really well in it except for one night when he leg (up to the thigh) was stuck through the slats...we are working on a remedy to that solution that will make mama happy (so he won't get stuck) and daddy happy (so he won't suffocate on a bumper).

And his easy adjustment to his crib reminds me of another point I wanted to mention. I am still in awe at how well he adapts to change. When we moved into the hotel, I thought, man, there is no way he's going to sleep well tonight. It's a new place, we've only been here a few hours, the baby bed is completely different from his, etc. But the first night there, he went to sleep like a champ and slept 8 hours solid! I'm so used to Jenny and how sensitive she is to change that I guess part of me expected him to be the same way. But Elliott's a much more mellow soul. He seems to take things as they come and not get too worked up over changes and differences. And to that, all I can say is - thank you! ;)


*I'm trying a different way of uploading videos using Flickr rather than the Blogger uploader (which kept timing out on me and having trouble with these slightly longer videos). Let me know if this one doesn't work as well and I will go back to shorter videos using Blogger. I know when I've viewed Flickr videos before, sometimes you need to let it go through once and load all the way, then play it again for more seamless viewing.

So where were we...

A lot has happened since I posted last and I'm still trying to think of the best way to get you all caught up on things. We hit a couple major milestones as well as made some progress to getting our life back together after the flood. I'm thinking maybe I'll share my missing Photo Project photos and fill in the blanks where necessary.

On Sunday July 26th we finally got ourselves moved into a hotel (our local Residence Inn), because repairs were anticipated to begin on Monday.

Me 52.9: Hotel

It was a pretty nice place. We had our own kitchen which was such a relief from eating out the previous three weeks. It was also set up like a little one bedroom apartment. So we were able to put Elliott to bed his normal time and still have freedom to spend our evening without waking him up. The biggest problem: no internet! There's internet in every room, but ours was broken. The other problem? The price. The bill was $2400 by the time we checked out. Fortunately, the insurance company has a direct billing relationship with hotel and we didn't have to pay a dime.

Elliott 52.9: Hotel Towels

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, things were pretty rough...

Other 52.9: Hermetically Sealed

They took the opportunity while the drywall people were completing the repairs to also take down the nasty popcorn ceiling from our bedroom. The kitchen and bathroom looked pretty much the same way and the rest of the apartment was sectioned off with large plastic drapes making it look even more like E.T. than before. But, as we found out a little over a week later, that didn't really keep the mess out.

We also celebrated our 12th anniversary on August 3rd; our last night at the hotel. They had a really nice social hour weeknight evenings with food and free beer and wine. So we enjoyed that then fixed a nice steak dinner in our hotel kitchen.

Me 52.10: Anniversary

By the time we moved home on August 4th, our entire place was covered with a thin film of drywall dust. There were big globbers of putty on top of the fridge and texture over-spray on the counters, appliances, toilet seat and even our light switch. We thought we could move back in and get on with things, but its taken more than a week to get things all cleaned up and back to normal. (We had to wash everything in the kitchen cabinets...which meant we couldn't put the stuff back in the kitchen from the dining room, since we needed the counters to hold all the cabinet contents while we ran load after load in the dishwasher. Ugh.)

Once we got everything cleaned up, things pretty much returned to normal. And a certain little man celebrated his 6 month birthday! And with that came his introduction to solid foods.

Elliott 52.10: Love at First Bite?

Well, he was a trooper, but his first taste of rice cereal wasn't exactly the best thing he'd ever had in this life...especially after a small round of profilactic antibiotics because of his kidneys. It was one of the sweetest things I've ever smelled, so its no wonder its taken him a week or so to get used to non-sweetened food. But since he isn't starving and doesn't need the solid food for his calories right now, we aren't too concerned if he doesn't eat much at each sitting. We didn't want to start the 'sweet food spiral' and now he's used to the taste of his cereal and last night even openned his mouth willingly several times.

Oh yeah, so the antibiotics! Well, Elliott had a follow up ultrasound for his kidney on July 24th (the same day I had my first mommy's day out by going to Long Beach for the International Quilt Show with some friends). Turns out his left kidney is still enlarged and that he needed to have a procedure done to make sure urine wasn't backflowing into his kidney...that would be bad, hence the profilactic antibiotics. He had that procedure done on August 3rd and found out everything was fine. They've now got him on the list to see the pediatric urologist (who will also be seeing him about his undecended testicle at the same time) as a next step.

Finally, we had a very social weekend last weekend. We were able to get together with some of our friends who were visiting from Japan. We had dinner at Suz and Kanji's so that we had more freedom with Elliott. We had a great time and Elliott did amazing despite being up significantly beyond his bedtime.

Other 52.10: Friends

Then the next night, Brad and I celebrated our anniversary properly with our first evening out together sans baby. It was so nice! My parents came down, hung out, played and handled getting Elliott to bed. We opted for dinner and a movie. Needless to say we had a great time and we didn't freak out once! ;) We knew he was in good hands and he did awesome. He didn't even cry when they put him down to bed. He just rolled over onto his side and went to sleep. (And yes, my dad has a video of it! ;) Apparently, he only cries for us ;)

Okay, that's more than enough for now. I'll have more photos to share from this week, a more in-depth 6 month post for Elliott and a contest coming up so stay tuned!

Happy Birthday Brad!

Please join me in wishing Brad the very best on his...um...26th (yeah, that's the ticket! ;), birthday!

Brad, I love you and I am so fortunate to be spending my life with you!