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Oh summer time! The days may be longer, but they still go flying by. Our summer days have been a blur of playing in the backyard, picnic dinners, dirt under our fingernails, exploring new parks, and getting sticky with good summer things like watermelon and ice cream and sweat.
I am taking a breather from it all to update the blog. My kids are changing so fast! I know I need to chronicle these days before I forget them.
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Joey: 9 months
This is a very happy baby. He loves to be tickled, to play with toys, look at books, take baths, go in the stroller, etc. He’s starting to get over his stranger danger and has willingly let non-mom people hold him. Joey has three teeth, and I really thought it would have been four by now. The right tooth of his two front teeth has been on the verge of cutting through for about two weeks. Joey shows no inclination to crawl or pull himself up. I should be happy that he is still immobile, but I know how much fun the big kids will have with him once he starts crawling. He just had his 9 month check up so I know that this chunker is almost 21 lbs. 40% of that is in his cheeks.
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Joey, 7 months.
A lot has happened for Joey this month, he got two teeth, can sit up all by himself, and he has started eating solids. He also got kicked out of our room because we were all waking each other up at night too much for anybody’s taste. He now sleeps in what was Trixie room and Trixie’s crib. It’s the earliest we’ve kicked a baby out of our room and it is so nice not needing to tiptoe around at night or worry about blowing my nose too loudly. Oh, getting more than two hours of sleep at a time is pretty nice too.
Read moreIn an attempt to press pause on the passage of time, and document the way my children change over the course of a year I’m going to take intentional (or mostly intentional) portraits of them every month and jot down of few of the things they are doing or saying at that time. This is my less-intensive version of The 52 Project, which I tired a few years ago and, predictably, did not complete.
But I need to do something, because I’m forgetting things! Stupid things, like whether or not we’re out of milk, but also important things, like when Trixie started crawling, or how long it was that Johnny slept in our bed with us. The other day Alex showed me a video of Trixie shortly after she started talking and I had no memory of her little voice sounding the way it did in that video. Maybe it’s just mom brain, and someday it will pass and the fog will lift and I’ll remember stuff again. But in the mean time, precious things are happening! And with so many tools for documentation readily available I thought I’d better start doing a better job of documenting.
So here I go.
Joey: almost 6 months.
If this baby looks happy, it’s because he is happy. He loves to laugh and smile, and he loves when his older bother and sister play with him. This play always looks too rough to me, and I’m often scolding the big kids to be more gentle, but then I realize that Joey is laughing, so it must not be too rough.
If you had told me 5 years ago that someday I would have a baby that I could set down in his crib WHILE FULLY AWAKE and he would just go sleep on his own I would have laughed in your face. But that is the kind of baby Joey is. Easy, happy, super cute, very chubby.
Trixie: 3 years and 3 months.
She is the middle child, my only girl, and in many ways, the scrappy one. But gosh, she sure is pretty too. When I look at those dark eyebrows and lashes I get excited for Trixie that she won’t share in her mother’s fate of being a near albino.
Trixie is a talker. But you probably already knew that. Lately she has been latching onto certain phrases and using them in a variety of scenarios. Example:
“Joey’s not just any baby, he’s my baby brother!”
“That’s not just any stadium., it’s a soccer stadium!”
“These aren’t just any slippers, they’re my ballet slippers!”
Johnny: 5 years and 8 months
Best big brother ever! Every morning he greats Joey with hugs and kisses and words like, “Hey buddy bum! Did you have a good sleep?” And every night he gives Joey a kiss and says, “Good night, Joey. I will see you in the morning. I will miss you. I love you buddy bum.”
Counting is very big deal right now. Johnny likes to count to 99 (he can’t remember that 100 is what comes next). He also likes to count just odd or even numbers, and he likes to count by 11. “11, 22, 33, 44, 55, 66, 77 ,88 99,” and then “Ten-ty-ten.”