Moving Right Along

Hannah has been a very busy baby since my last post. She is currently hosting her Grandpa at the house because he is not feeling well. She went to pick him up at the hospital on the 10th and he's been with us ever since. Hannah loves having Grandpa here and they are getting lots of bonding time. She is also enjoying Grandpa's dog, My, because she has a long furry tail that is oh so fun to grab!

As for Hannah's newest accomplishments there are many! She's now eating 3rd stage baby foods that are very chunky. She likes them quite a bit and as always never bats an eye at new foods. She's been eating so much solid food lately that we actually cut back her formula an ounce on each bottle! She really does like her food :)

The most exciting update is that Hannah can now sit herself up from either her belly or her back with no trouble at all. She really surprised her grandpa and I one night by starting out across the room from me sitting up and then all of sudden I felt a tug at my leg and Hannah was sitting at my feet yanking on my pant leg! We thought, "How on earth did she get over here!" Until then we did not realize she could sit herself up.

Ok, it's been a few days since I started this post and I have a new and exciting announcement, Hannah crawled for the first time!!!!!!!!!!!!! She has not really duplicated this amazing feat yet, but we have her first time on video as proof! She's working really hard at it every chance she gets and the pets are a huge incentive for her. She can now get into sitting and crawling position quite easily and goes absolutely everywhere she wants to go quite quickly. Once she really gets the hang of this crawling there will be no stopping her!

She's also into absolutely EVERYTHING! Nothing is safe anymore as she pulls things off of tables, opens doors and cabinets that aren't locked, pushes things out of the way and tries to pull herself up on shelves to get coveted objects. It's amazing how much progress she's made in just a few days. She seems more and more like a toddler every day. She even had her first table food yesterday. She ate some pieces of a biscuit and some mashed up banana. She LOVED the biscuits. She kept giving us the look like she thought she was hot stuff for feeding herself the biscuit like she was getting away with something she shouldn't be doing! :)

Hannah is such a joy in my life. I can't imagine what I ever did without her. Every day I thank my lucky stars that God blessed me with such an amazing little girl. She's growing so fast. I wish she would slow down, but it is amazing to watch her grow and develop into a beautiful little girl on the inside and out.

Oh, here's an update on the cutest baby contest. The voting starts tomorrow and you are able to vote online as well as through the paper ballots in the newspaper, but there is a catch. All votes (except for one vote per person per day using the newspaper paper ballot) are by donation only. It's $0.25 per vote and the minimum online donation is $5.00 (20 votes). The money all goes to fund the newspapers in education fund, but still I think it's a bit fishy that the voting actually costs money. Instead of the cutest baby winning it's going to turn into who's family and friends have the most money to spend on the voting :( I thought the donations were just the entry fees, but I was mistaken. I'll post the website where you can vote on here, although I don't expect anyone to feel like voting since it costs money. Looking at all the cute babies might be fun though, so take a peak and enjoy all those smiling faces since there were over 700 babies entered! http://www.jconline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/frontpage

I have many more updates to post, but I want to be sure that I post this blog tonight so that people can see the baby contest tomorrow when voting starts. I'll try to get back to this sometime later in the week.

PS. Here are the before and after pics for my hair (finally!)

Working Hard

Hannah has been working really hard this past week to learn lots of new stuff. On Friday alone she managed to learn several new tricks and kept me hopping the entire day. First off, she's turning into quite the eater. She's now had sweet potatoes and carrots and loves them both. Tomorrow she starts squash and then I think we are done with the orange vegetables and will probably move onto the green ones. Those won't be quite as sweet so I'm curious to see if she will still like them. I figure pretty much anything has got to be better than her cereal so they probably won't be a problem.

Hannah has gotten much steadier standing over the last week and really enjoys standing holding onto the couch. I was using the coffee table, but she almost cracked her head on it the other day so now I'm sticking with the couch which is much softer until she is just a tab bit more stable. Going along with standing, she's learned that she can pull herself up from either a laying or sitting position using my thumbs as something to grab a hold of. She needs absolutely no help from me at all to get up either. I was absolutely shocked the first time she did it. Of course I then tried to get her to pull up on the couch or coffee table, but she just can't quite do that yet. I think the difference is that if I offer her my hands to use, my hands are at the same level as her hands as opposed to the coffee table which is above her head and she has to reach her hands way up to grab it.

Now that she's a pretty stable sitter she's been playing lots and lots with her toys in the sitting position and doesn't like to be on her back playing as much. Yesterday while sitting she learned how to point at something she wants me to look at and look at something that I point at! She also started raising her hands up above her head as I walk by when she wants to be picked up. I nearly cried the first time she did it! She's been reaching for Kyle when I am holding her for quite some time now, but this was the first time she ever reached for me! She's really been getting some mileage out of that new trick. She's definitely learned that she can manipulate mommy to do what she wants if she does that. Along with the reaching to be held, she's also started to give hugs. That of course melts my heart as well.

She got a rock-n-stack for Christmas from Uncle Kevin and she's really been enjoying playing with it. Lately she's been running experiments with the rings. She's testing them out to see if they sound different when she bangs different ones together. Also, she's quite confused by them because one ring has balls in it that roll around and make noise when you shake it, but the others are just plain plastic. She can't quite figure out why it makes noise, but those other stupid rings don't do anything when she shakes them. It's funny to see her test them all out and get disgusted as one by one she tries them each and throws them to the side until she finds the one ring that does make noise. She hasn't quite figured out that it's always the same ring and which one that is yet, but I'm sure that will come.

Today she was running experiments on some balls that she got for Christmas from one of Kyle's aunts. They all make different noises when they are shook, dropped, or twisted and she loves to do side by side comparisons of them. She'll have a different ball in each hand and shake the right one first. Listen to it and think about it. Then shake the left one. Listen to it and think about it. And finally shake the right one again to make sure that it really was different! Then she drops them both, and picks up two different ones and starts the process all over again.

She's also been looking quite cute in her new Christmas clothes. Once again our friends and family really came through for us and managed to set Hannah up with a whole new wardrobe just in time. She was on the verge of out growing pretty much her last set of clothes that she had received from her multiple showers and then Christmas came around and she got lots of 12 month and 12 -18 month outfits. So, now pretty much everything she wears is size 12 months except for onesies which are nice and stretchy and 9 month ones still fit. It's so hard for me to believe that she's only 6 months old (today actually is her half birthday!) and already wearing 12 month clothes. At Clod Christmas we stood her up next to her cousin Makinley and she was already taller than her and Makinley is a year old. If she's this big now I can only wonder what size she will actually be wearing when she does turn a year old, 2T maybe!

PS. I just want to be sure that if you are reading this Becky that you notice that I finally got that picture up of you and Hannah playing on the floor!

Happy New Year!

Well, the Christmas season has come and gone and a wonderful time was had by all. We feel so blessed to have experienced our first Christmas as parents. Hannah had a great time socializing and even got into unwrapping her own gifts! She just couldn't resist all that shiny, crinkly paper! I spent a good amount of time making sure it didn't end up in her mouth! Besides surviving the holidays in one piece I have many new Hannah updates to share. My little girl has really been growing up and the past few weeks she has really matured. Even her personality is maturing. She expresses many more emotions now than she did a month ago. It's amazing how much she has changed and how fast she's done it!

First off, Hannah has now mastered sitting on her own. I still place pillows around her if I'm going to be further than an arm's reach from her to cushion her if she falls, but she pretty much can sit for as long as she wants. She actually thinks it's pretty funny to let herself just fall back onto the pillows when she gets tired of sitting or when she's feeling feisty :)

With her new sitting skills a whole new world has opened up to Hannah and she's been having a blast playing with toys and reaching for things that she couldn't get to before. It's also made her easier to dress and her hair easier to brush and style. It's also allowed her to move up into the big tub and ditch her infant tub altogether which is good because the last time I tried to use the infant tub she kept sliding off the seat because her butt was too big to fit on the seat anymore! Now that she can sit in the big bathtub with more water she has really been enjoying splashing with her hands and kicking with her feet and generally getting as much water as possible out of the tub and onto the bathroom floor. She's also decided she thinks water pouring or dripping out of a cup is VERY funny and goes crazy every time I do it.

Her hair continues to grow and grow and she already needs another haircut to keep her bangs out of her eyes. The sides are so long that they are even getting in her eyes now too so I've started putting the sides in mini pig tails. Kyle's not real impressed by them because he thinks she looks silly with the pig tails on the side and the back left free, but hey, it works! I can't wait until her hair is long enough to put in a real pony tail or to braid. That will really be fun.

Now that Hannah can roll all over the place I had pretty much said goodbye to her play gym, but yesterday I found a way to bring it back from the dead. I hung the toys from the arches and then instead of laying her underneath them I sat her down in front of them and she had a blast batting at them and grabbing them while I played with her hair. Now if she'd just show some interest in crawling we could set up the tunnel portion of the play gym so that she could crawl through it. Unfortunately Hannah seems to have no intention of crawling any time soon. She'd much rather roll around to get where she wants than even attempt to get herself up onto her hands and knees. She does think it's pretty funny to watch me crawl around the floor trying to show her how to do it though!

Another big milestone Hannah hit the other day was her first taste of strained baby food. We started off with sweet potatoes and she really seems to like them. They were lots runnier than I thought they would be so that has made feeding them difficult since Hannah is used to much thicker food because I make her cereal about as thick as oatmeal. Along with eating new foods, Hannah has started to throw tantrums when it's time to eat her cereal and will grab for the spoon or the bowl and knock it out of your hands. I'm not happy about this new development and am doing my best to stop it in it's tracks. What worked for the other day was giving Hannah her own spoon to hold. She then paid attention to the spoon in her hand instead of trying to swipe mine. Maybe the same thing will happen with the spoon as it did with the sippy cup. Maybe she'll teach herself to feed herself. Speaking of the sippy cup, I think Hannah is addicted to water. She LOVES to drink it out of her cup and would much rather drink her water from her cup than eat her cereal at meal times.

5 Months Old

Wow! Hannah is now five months old. Time really has gone by too quickly. It seems like just yesterday I was bottle feeding her using the boppy as a support and now she's sitting in a highchair eating oatmeal cereal! Hannah's developing at an astonishing rate lately. Her newest accomplishments are sitting up unassisted for short periods of time (2-5 minutes), standing by holding onto the coffee table, rolling all over the house to chase the cats, and babbling so loudly that it's impossible to hear anything other than her! She is continuing to have sleep issues which make things rough for Kyle and I as well as her, but we have reccently decided that we think it is related to teething. We still don't see any teeth, but the other day when she was crying inconsolably and chewing hard on Kyle's finger we gave her some teething tablets and she was immediately knocked out. The funny thing is that there is a warning on the box that says that the child may fall asleep quickly after their pain is removed and we thought, "Yeah, right!" but it's true. Those tablets have brought almost immediate paccification and sleep each time we have tried them reccently. We tried them about a month ago when we thought her teeth were bothering her, but they had no effect. It must not have been her teeth that time, because this time they really worked! Hannah has been having lots of fun rolling around the house and chasing the cats and keeping me hopping. Twice now she has bit Sadie's tail (our cat) and continues to light up every time she sees one of the cats. It's quite cute to see her arch her back to see them and then roll around trying to get at them as they walk by.

I've got several new videos for your viewing pleasure. Just click on the links and enjoy!

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2574173892130424640&hl=en This video is Hannah playing with her Papaw Like.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7663669173936585793&hl=enThis one is of Hannah playing with Kyle's Uncle Jimmy.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2597797762694029574&hl=en This one is of Hannah playing with her friend Evelyn.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8293798188009359032&hl=en This last one is just of Hannah looking generally cute!