For Andrea’s first Christmas, I wanted to do a photo shoot in front of our Christmas tree. I thought it would make a nice Christmas card picture and I wanted to do print and frame some pictures to give to family for Christmas. She did so great! Here are my favorites…
This is the one on our Christmas cards:
I love the look on her face in this one, like “What are they doing?!?”
This might be my favorite. ? ? ?
A big belly laugh to end things…
We flew out to Portland to see Paul’s family for Thanksgiving. It was Andrea’s first flight, and she did soooo well! She was a real trooper cruising through the airport with Mommy carrying her in the sling. The flight was at 8:30am, so we had to leave the house around 6, and she stayed up the whole time, fascinated by the airport and all the new sights. Then once we got settled in on the plane and were ready to take off, she was really tired. She nursed from the time we got on the runway and was asleep before we hit cruising altitude, then she slept for over an hour an a half. When she woke up, she just played on Mom’s lap with the toys we brought for her and we read a few books. She loved just staring out the window and at the little TV screen in the headrest in front of us too. She shared a banana with Mom too, which she really enjoyed. It’s a 5 1/2 hour flight, so after a couple hours of playing, it was time for a nap and we had almost 2 hours left to go. She nursed and fell asleep, and woke up just before we landed. She nursed right through the landing and never fussed a bit. There were screaming babies all over the plane and a toddler behind us crying “My ears hurt, Mommy!” But Andrea didn’t seem bothered at all. Yay!
She didn’t adjust too well to the time zone difference, and being in a strange crib in a strange house, with lots of new people around, but that’s a lot for a little girl to deal with (especially one with a routine as regular as Andrea’s). She had restless sleep the whole trip, and woke up earlier than normal, but she got a little better every day. Poor girl. 🙁
Hopefully the flight back goes as well as the trip out here!
Even though Andrea was pretty fussy Monday and Tuesday, I’ve been fooled by what I thought was teething before, so it never crossed my mind this time. Then overnight, everything changed. Andrea woke up and has been a perfect angel all day. I still didn’t clue in though until I checked her gums this afternoon (which I do almost every day), and I noticed her first tooth had poked through on the bottom! AHA! Her fussiness the past two days has a name – TEETHING!
I’ll post a picture as soon as it starts showing when she smiles. For now, you can only see it if you pull down her bottom lip, which she isn’t a big fan of. LOL
I’m trying to get better at posting regularly on here again, so I thought I’d make a quick post to say that Andrea figured out an awesome new skill this weekend. She can now drink out of a straw!
For the most part, Andrea has never really taken to bottles (even after I bought every type under the sun). And we’ve had mixed success with sippy cups (she mostly likes to chew on the ends, which is messy). So I started working on getting her drink from a straw, and after drizzling a little water from straws on occassion, she all of a sudden figured out how to drink from them on her own over the past couple of days. She loves it! We marked the occassion by buying her a Baby Einstein sippy cup with a straw today, which she seems to like. I will try take a picture or some video and post it here soon. It’s very funny to see, since she’s so little, but she does a great job!
I know I haven’t updated in a while, and I need to add some older stuff, but I had a quick video to share…
Andrea has been sort of hot-and-cold about solids, but I started to notice that she is more excited about eating when she gets prunes. We’ve been doing baby food prune puree, but we’ve also been trying to let her try finger food sometimes, so today I bought some regular prunes at the store to see what Andrea would think of them. Her reaction was so funny that I had to share a bit of the video…
She took the prune from me after this and gummed on it for a little while before she decided she was done.
The other finger foods we’ve tried are avocado, sweet potatoes, and pears. She has trouble holding the avocado and sweet potatoes, because they are too slippery/mushy, but she seems to enjoy chewing on pear slices and now prunes. LOL
On Monday (Sept. 22nd), we went to our first playgroup with MOM’S Club. We sat down on the floor to play with the toys and the other babies, and I propped Andrea up in front of me, and I noticed she wasn’t leaning back on me. She was sitting on her own for the first time!!! It’s like she saw the other kids doing it and figured she could too. I only had my camera phone, but I had to take a picture…
And here’s a short video we took of her sitting up. Forgive the poor quality and the background noise. My little digital camera is all we had handy when we realized we should be recording. Oh, and my husband doesn’t always have that high-pitched of a voice. LOL! He only sounds like that when he talks to the baby. 🙂