Piper - 6 months

Today is Piper's half birthday. We celebrated with a checkup and shots.

I thought Piper had been feeling particularly heavy lately, especially when she falls asleep in the car and I have to lug in her carseat. Turns out she weighs 17 pounds, which happens to be what Libby weighed at ONE YEAR. [Truth be told, Libby actually reached 17 pounds at 9 months, gained a pound by 10 months, and then lost it when she started walking.]

Piper is rolling over in both directions, scooting infinitesimally small distances, grabbing absolutely everything, eating paper, sitting with just a little help, interacting and imitating, blowing spit bubbles, and other cute baby things.

Sleep is still all over the place, but it's not troublesome to me at the moment, so I'm not stressing about it. She generally goes to bed for the night about 9 and wakes up at 6:30, with several wakings each night to nurse. She starts in her crib most nights, but always ends up in our bed, which I rather like, actually. She takes 2 naps a day (that third nap flew out the window at about 4 months if I remember right), for varying durations (1-3 hours).

She had her first taste of rice cereal last week and seemed to like it, though most of it spilled back out. She's also had a couple bites of avocado and she spent some time sucking on a carrot the other day. But for the most part, we are not feeding her solids yet. She is obviously bulking up just fine without them.

Stats
Birth: 7 lbs 12 oz, 20 inches long
2 Weeks: 8 lbs 5 oz, 21 inches long
2  Months: 11 lbs 5 oz, 24 inches long

4 Months: 14 lbs 6.5 oz, 26 inches long
6 Months: 17 lbs, 27 inches long

Easter

 

The week before Easter, we kept meaning to find a place to take Libby for an Easter egg hunt. Luckily, we happened to drive by a church near our neighborhood that was advertising one for the community the day before Easter. 

The only problem was that it was scheduled for 10 AM, the same time Jared had committed to helping with a move for a member of our church. The move was just down the street from the church that was hosting the hunt, so he figured he would go to the Easter egg hunt (which couldn't last more than a few minutes) and then head over to help with the move. But when we got to the church, everyone was having muffins and drinks and we saw that the minister was going to be speaking for 20 minutes before the easter egg hunt. So Jared decided to go down the road and help with the move. By this time, it was already 10:15, and when he got to the move, they were miraculously finished. (Apparently 12 men showed up to help and it was just a single guy in an apartment.) So he rushed back to the church. But unbeknownst to Jared, the computer the minister was going to use for the presentation wasn't working, so he skipped it and started the easter egg hunt early. We were already finished when Jared got back. So poor Jared missed both things (though he probably wasn't too sad about not being able to move boxes).

 The picture of Piper was taken right after the church easter egg hunt. I had been carrying her on my back (in a baby carrier) and when I took her off and set her down on the seat (preparing to put her in the carseat), she fell asleep instantly. I had to snap a picture.

Baby Hair and Dreadlocks

When I was pregnant with Libby, I was sure I was going to give birth to a bald baby. Jared and I were both bright blondes as kids and I hardly had hair until I was 2. I had always imagined my babies as hairless. Eventually, all this imagining of baldness turned into a preference for baldness and then a repulsion of anything other than baldness. At one point during my pregnancy, I even told Jared "I don't care what our baby looks like; I just hope it doesn't have hair."

Well imagine my surprise when I was pushing Libby out and the doctor said, "I see a head full of dark hair." Instead of thinking "awesome! the head is almost out!" I remember thinking, "oh no. hair."

When the shock wore off, I realized that I actually loved Libby's head full of dark hair. (Even if the hospital lactation consultant did accuse Libby of being the milkman's baby.) As a bonus, Libby's long hair helped disguise her misshapen head.

My little Piper looked quite different than Libby at birth, but she also had a head full of long, dark hair. This time, I expected it and loved it from the beginning.

Piper's hair is long (I can put it in a ponytail on top) and tends to stand straight up. It's curly when it's wet or humid outside. She sometimes looks like a mom from the 90s with one set of bangs curled down and another curled up. Strangers comment often on the craziness of her hair. My favorite? "I have never seen a Caucasian baby with that much hair."

The quirkiest feature of Piper's hair is its ability to form dreadlocks in record time. If I don't comb her hair every day or so, she'll wind up with a gnarly dreadlock in the back. The first time it happened, Jared said, "I think you're gonna have to cut it out." I've gotten pretty good at getting them out with detangling spray and a fine-tooth comb. Recently, we seem to have lost our detangling spray and I put off combing her hair for a little too long. Before I knew it, she had 4 separate dreadlocks. This time, I did have to break off a few chunks that wouldn't comb out.

Pinterest Challenge: Completed

I'm 6 for 6 in the Pinterest Challenge!

Here are the project I completed:

1. Attach the growth chart (that I made back in December) to the wall. It's ridiculous that it took me 4 months to hang this on the wall. It was an easy 10 minute project to hang it up.

2. Popsicle stick picture puzzle. We've already lost some of the sticks, but it was fun while it lasted. And easy to make. I've made 2 more already.

3. Homemade air fresheners. I didn't bother taking a picture of these, because I was not happy with how they turned out. They smelled good if you held them right up to your nose and sniffed, but they didn't permeate the room at all - even in a small bathroom. So they were pretty much worthless. I'll stick to my spray air freshener (water and essential oils mixed up on a spray bottle).

4. Potty training underwear. I bought the Gerber training pants that this tutorial uses, but that's as far as I got. However, I completed another sewing project, so I'm totally counting that one. I made a ring sling to carry Piper (or Libby - it's totally adjustable, so it works for both!). I'm enormously proud of myself for sewing pleats. You can't see them very well because my fabric is striped, but they are there and they look darn good.

5. Grapefruit donuts. It was fun to make donuts for the first time, but I wasn't crazy about these. I think I'll keep my grapefruit and donuts separate from now on.

6. Bleach art on a shirt. I love the design I ended up using (anyone recognize the state flag this comes from?), but my technique was sloppy so it didn't turn out perfectly. But it's bleach on a shirt - it's not supposed to be perfect, right? It's a super instant-gratification project though because once you have your stencil made, it takes about 10 seconds.

Libby @ 2.5

Libby's half birthday was March 1, but since we're not very good at celebrating whole birthdays in this house (much less half), it sort of passed by without much recognition. But I'd still like to do an update on Libby at 2 and a half years old.

Libby loves nursery at church. Sometimes we go spy on her through the peep hole to see what she's doing. She mostly plays independently, though she does seem to enjoy being around the other kids. Lately, she's started to play with the other kids more. When we picked her up this week, she was running around the room chasing one of the other girls.

We had some friends over recently and Libby was crazy about playing with their little boy. They were so cute following each other around. I told her to stand next to Brady so I could take their picture, and this is what I got. It reminds me of couples from my high school who liked to walk down the hallway like this (though usually, the boy was the one with his arms around the girl). Haha.
 

One of the best pieces of advice I've read from parenting books is to give your child choices. So instead of letting Libby have free reign over her clothing, I lay out a couple outfits for her and let her choose. Or I let her choose a shirt and then I choose pants that match. She is certainly developing particular opinions and tastes. She calls her jean jacket her cowboy jacket, which I love.

[Which reminds me of a funny story: At Home Depot recently, we saw a man wearing a cowboy hat. Libby pointed at him and said, "A cowboy!" He was nice and said, "howdy" back to her, but then she got shy and buried her head in Jared's neck. Jared said, "you didn't think he could hear you, did you?"]

Libby hasn't wanted to wear her doll wrap as much as I thought she would, but I think it's so darn cute when she does. She can be very sweet and motherly to her dolls and animals. I've only seen her try to nurse her baby once, but we've seen her nursing her animals on other animals a couple times. She has a small baby that she calls "Piper-baby" (she originally started calling it that because she was going to give the baby doll to Piper, but then she had a sudden and fierce resurgence of ownership) and a bigger baby that she calls "Mommy-baby." Sometimes Mommy-baby feeds Piper-baby milk.

Libby loves to help me cook. Whenever she sees me getting mixing bowls out, she says, "what we making, Mommy?" She likes to prepare her own food whenever possible, like buttering her toast, peeling her boiled eggs, etc.

I couldn't find Libby's art smock (which is really just an old t-shirt of mine) one day, so I just took her shirt off to let her paint. Apparently she took that as a sign to paint all over herself, including her nose.

For being as shy in public as she is sometimes, I can't believe how much she loves the Chick-fil-A cow. We've seen him a few times (at the mall), and the last time, I was lucky to have my camera with me.