Baff-time!

Bath time is quickly becoming one of Sarah's favorite times of the day. It often has a calming effect before her bedtime, even as she smiles and plays through the whole thing.

Emily and Sarah are down with the Howells in Mississippi, leaving Dad to miss them and cope by posting cute pictures of Sarah. This is probably good news for you, since it means either you are with Emily and Sarah right now or at least you get to see these pictures.

Baby foods

As noted in Sarah's most recent update, we have been busy discovering new, nutritional and flavor packed foods for her to try. I use a few guidelines in choosing a new recipe:

• does it have any strange/health nut ingredients? (I'm not against these, they just tend to be expensive, not useful in other recipes, and not something we have in our normal table food)
• does it resemble a dish we normally eat? (the ultimate goal being to eat as a family one day)
• can it be frozen?
• will Sarah be able to pick it up?
• is it a choking hazard for her current ability level?
• is there any ingredient that may be an allergen?

I rely heavily on the website www.wholesomebabyfood.com and a friend's blog http://www.littletummyyummies.blogspot.com/.

This weekend I tried two new recipes: turkey loaf and broccoli cheddar nuggets. Both have been very well received! Sarah eats both eagerly, but I think she prefers the turkey loaf. This is her first real meat dish, though it also has carrot puree and applesauce as main ingredients. Talk about a well balanced dish! Dave and I preferred the taste of the broccoli nugget, or broccoli cake, as we like to call it.

Below is a (sideways) picture of the broccoli cheddar nuggets just before they went in the oven.

Bon appetite!

Happy 10 months!

This is the first month that has really flown by. When people ask how old Sarah is, I still say 9 months, or maybe 9.5, but certainly not 10 yet! Alas, it is here, and every month seems to be more and more fun. I think Dave and I are growing as parents (read: relaxing) as much as Sarah is growing in wisdom and stature. The updates are as follows:

Weight: still big, but slimming, people tell us
Height: ?
Head: we have one shirt I can't get over her head!
Diaper: size 4
Clothes: 9 month still fit, 6 month are packed away, and 12 month are the new standard
Likes: crawling, playing with her fridge magnets, books (turning pages and chewing), feeding herself, being tickled, purses, Daddy's shoes

Dislikes: being corrected, going down the steps

Schedule: May is the Christmas of the spring, right?! We have had lots of special activities going on and have learned to be very flexible with our routine. It has been great though, and we are thankful that this structure has worked well.

7:30 Nurse and solid

9:00 Nap

11:30 Nurse and solid

1:00 Nap

3:30 Nurse and solid (with florid drops)

7:00 Nurse and off to bed

Solids: Earlier this month, Sarah declared that she was over purees and mom feeding her. After several days/weeks of Sarah perfecting her locked lips move, I discovered she really liked to feed herself. It took me a while to trust that she could really chew and swallow more than the Gerber puffs that melt in the mouth, but she is doing great. Much of the month was spent coming up with good finger foods and trying new recipes. Right now, her favorite foods are sweet potato chunks, sweet potato pancakes, banana, turkey loaf, and broccoli cheddar nuggets. We also feed her pears and squash and are trying to still include some cereals mixed with a variety of purees. She really struggles with green beans and asparagus. I just can't get them soft enough to really chew. We recently discovered that she will eat almost anything sandwiched between pieces of sweet potato pancake!

Movement: Sarah has really exploded this month! She crawls (still army, but it gets her everywhere she needs to go), sits, pulls up to standing, and takes little steps when you hold her fingers. We have a happy mobile baby!

Teething: A couple of nights ago she woke up a couple of times with what seemed to clearly be teething pain. We gave her Tylenol for the first time, she settled down, and woke up about 5 hours later. The next day she was sleepy, but fine. No tooth has popped through, but we know it is on the move!

Speech: The babbles continue. Her most recent and favorite sound is "gaagen." She is getting more conversational and really likes it if you talk with her.

Sickness: Sarah had the same "Cape Cod crud" at the end of April that I described in her 9 month post. This time we didn't take her in to see the doctor, and after a few long, sleepy, stuffy nosed days, she cleared right up. We were so glad to get out and about again. It was also nice to avoid the amoxicillin routine.

Discipline: I was told when I picked Sarah up from nursery yesterday that they told her "no no" and she frowned and backed away. Success!!!

just standing around

wearing our snow suit in May

bath time with her duckies!

standing at the fireplace

sleeping in her friend's arms during a concert at church last night. you know it has been a long day when she falls asleep in someones arms! her only nap was the drive from church to home. yikes!!!

Mother's Day

Eventually, Emily walked in to see Sarah sitting alone on the floor, looking up at her, holding a card in her hand. I think that distracted her from the candlelight dinner right in front of her.

Days earlier, I was on the phone planning a girly-date with one of her friends for her. She would meet this friend for coffee and fried ice cream, and then spend a few hours talking or doing whatever they wanted without a husband or a baby to worry about. This would be fun for her, I knew, but it also got her out of the house long enough for me to cook her dinner.

Plans made, I sat tight and told Emily that something awesome was going to happen on Mother's Day. Saturday night, I wished her well as she went off to mentor some younger girls across town, and then snuck out behind her to the grocery store. Sarah was supposed to be in bed, so she enjoyed a few extra minutes of fun!

The real challenge came when I realized that she would see these groceries in the refrigerator if I took them home! Never fear- the church kitchen came in quite handy. Yet another reason it's nice to live near your church!

I often make breakfast for Emily on Sunday mornings, but this time I got creative with the shaping of the pancakes and had a nice surprise message waiting for her when she finished her shower:

We chowed down on that, and I left for church. Everything was working out perfectly, and Emily was all set to enjoy her time out with a friend. Once we had lunch and she left, Sarah and I snuck out again to pick up the groceries. Then we worked hard together to get some dinner cooked for her.

But sometimes Sarah played and explored in the dress Grandma Vicky made her:

Eventually, Emily came back to the scene I described earlier: Sarah sitting alone on the floor with a card in her hand. Once she got a chance to read it, I popped out and said hello to her. The table looked about like this:

The three of us had a nice dinner of pan-seared chicken, grilled asparagus, and mashed red and yellow potatoes. IBC root beer was the drink of choice, and strawberries awaited us for dessert. But of course we had to get a family picture before we dug into it!

After we were full beyond belief, Emily and Sarah went outside to play in the lawn while I did the dishes. Then we enjoyed the rest of the evening together.

I had a great time sneaking around and putting it all together. I call it a success, not because it went perfectly (it didn't) but because Emily got some sense of the treasure she is to our home. I hope she never loses sight of that.

Tulip. Daisy. Tulip. Daisy.

"Don't go digging around until you see what sprouts up. Bev planted all sorts of things in those beds." That's what our neighbor told us last week when we were thinking about pulling some of the shrubs up around the front yard.

This title may be somewhat of a misnomer, but it's always fun to reference what was once every child's favorite show. (And if you can tell me how to get there, I would appreciate it.) While we haven't found any daisies just yet, the aforementioned neighbor was proven right when tulips started blooming all around our front yard.

Take a look.

Building a Garden

The first man and woman did it for a living. Why shouldn't Emily and I, right?

Gardening is becoming a great team exercise for us, as she possess quite a lot of garden knowledge and I find myself wanting to wear my muscles out after a week in the office. So she does the thinking and the light work, and I enjoy the heavy lifting.

Lately that's meant I've gotten to build two raised beds for us and fill them. Home Depot had some great 4x4 beams for us, and I was able to screw them together quite easily. After a little tilling, it was off to the dump to pick up some free compost.

Our dump has a special place for yard clippings, which they let sit for four years and then freely give back to us as compost. Shoveling it into trash cans in the back of my Volvo made me miss the old days back at the peat mine a bit. By the fourth load, the inside of the Volvo looked about like the inside of Uncle Randy's truck, and my fingernails looked about like Dad's do after a good day of surveying. It was almost like being home again.

The bed looked good filled with compost, but that won't grow vegetables all that well. The experts around here say to amend it with the one thing you can always find on The Cape: sand. I was able to find some spare sand in a few natural locations, and now it's in a good situation to both nourish and drain.

Here's the final product:

Emily has some young tomato plants growing, waiting for a little more warmth before she puts them in their new home. Beyond that, we have peas, beans, lettuce, carrots, and squash planned. We hope we'll one day be eating of our bounty!

Green thumb?

Maybe. Time will tell. A few months ago we posted a picture of the lettuce we planted. It stayed inside for a while, then moved to the sun room. We watered it a couple of times and voila- some small leafy greens! (As well as a few weeds...)


We plan on mixing some fresh greens with our regular salad soon. Yesterday, I potted a few tomato plants for our garden. Since we have to wait until the chance of frost has passed, and around here that is the end of May, we wanted to give our tomatoes a chance to go ahead and get to growing. There are 12 plants here: 4 in individual pots that we plan to truly nurture and the other 8 in the big pot, just in case. The ones on the left are beefsteak and on the right, big boy.


At the bottom of the picture we have a pack of impatiens. The plan is to put them around the front of a somewhat forlorn bed in the front yard. We also have a beautiful pink azalea from the homeowners association that is going to need a home soon. It is such a joy to see things grow!

Standing up

Late Saturday afternoon I went to get Sarah up from her afternoon nap. To my amazement, she was STANDING in her crib. The poor child had one hand on the side of the crib, one hand on the mobile, started crying, and I ran downstairs to grab Dave and my camera. This is what we came back to...


...big tears, but still standing! Yay, Sarah! We are so excited for this next milestone. Now we just have to get past the "new trick" phase so that she doesn't pull herself up every time she wakes up. We are also working on getting down, as she doesn't have much confidence in her ability to sit back. It is interesting how clearly she shows her fear and trust at this age. We pray that as her parents we will guard and use her trust and fear rightly.

Pulling up and conquering stairs

Sarah has started pulling up on things! I didn't think there we many places for her to pull up in our living room, but she seems to find plenty. So far, she only goes to her knees, but we are on our way to standing!

She also discovered how to go up the steps in our living room on Friday. This means she is no longer content unless she is roaming the house, or at least near our feet. It is so fun to see what she finds interesting and worth checking out. We are still working on how to go down the steps. This is difficult to teach since, thus far, she has never wanted to go any direction but up!

The first time she made it up!

Checking out her good work

Tutu

Sarah was given this pink, fluffy tutu as a hand-me-down from an older toddler at church. We found it in the closet recently and have had lots of fun. Not only does it make everything Sarah does extra cute, but Sarah loves it! She will forget it is on, then rediscover the fun of fluffy layers. I have no doubt we will occasionally be pulling this out for more fun!

Dad days

What's wrong with this picture?

I am so thankful for all that Dave does to help with Sarah. He is always willing to take a diaper change, initiate a bath, and strap Sarah in her car seat. He works hard so that I can stay at home and affirms my role as a happy homemaker. Dave is a great father and husband- even if Sarah's pants sometimes end up backwards!


* We wrote several posts a few days ago to narrate some of our more recent pictures. Most of our pics are about Sarah, but there is more going on in our lives than photographing our daughter (though lets be honest, ever moment with her seems worth capturing!). Hopefully we will soon fill in the gaps, pictures or no pictures!