January 31 2010

A lot has occurred in the last month:


Elliott is now crawling like a crazy baby. He crawls everywhere and is getting fast. We'll try to sit with him and play with his toys, but he's at the point where he becomes bored with that quickly and instead will crawl around to the furniture and pull up. He's pulling himself up now, and doing it quite well. He hasn't had too many uh-oh's where he's fallen, and I think he's maybe bumped his head twice since pulling up. He's really good at it.

He has made a couple of attempts at holding on to one piece of furniture and moving to hold on to another piece of furniture or the railing. I think these are his first attempts at cruising. I’m sure we'll see a lot more of this over the next month.

It's really sweet when I walk into the room, he'll crawl really fast over to me then pull up on my legs and reach up to me. He's reaching out to his grandparents now too. He recognizes them and gets excited when they come to visit him.

Elliott is now drinking from his Sippy cup. He knows the word 'drink' because we've been offering him water out of our cups for some time. He is able to take a drink out of a cup, but we wanted him to use a Sippy cup so he could get used to holding the cup, not spilling the contents, etc. He loves his Sippy cup.

He's also eating really well. We give him pieces of table food, which he chews and eats up. We'll say 'mmmmmmmm' and he'll take a bite and say 'mmmmmmm.' Aaron taught him how to stick his tongue out too...Aaron will stick his tongue out at him, and then Elliott will stick his tongue out. It's so cute! I'm sure it will get him in trouble some day but it's really cool to see that he is mimicking us.


We bought a new toy at Target tonight - it's a push along walker that he can learn to walk with. It converts to a little car that he can straddle and push him self on. It only took Aaron one time showing Elliott how the walker worked and he was all over it. We couldn't get him to stay away from it! His steps are tentative and slow, but I could already see improvement as he walked with it this evening.

One thing we started doing with our nightly routine is reading to Elliott before his bath time. I figured that with 5 other babies at day care, Elliott probably doesn’t get the one on one time that he used to get when it was just him and two others. So every evening for about 20 - 30 minutes, we take him into our room with his basket full of books and we read. Elliott is getting to the point where he will rest against us and pick out book after book, holding it up to us to read it. Of course after reading a couple of pages he holds up another book, so he is either already bored with what we are reading or he just likes to hold up books. Either way, he's holding up the same few books time after time - his Dr. Seuss ABC book, Goodnight Moon, and his Baby Jayhawks First Words (okay maybe we like reading that one to him). By far the ABC book is his favorite, but the other evening he was crawling around on the other side of the bedroom and when Aaron started reading Goodnight Moon Elliott looked up, and crawled over to him really fast. That was pretty neat.

Elliott had a cold this last month, another cough he couldn’t seem to get rid of. I finally took him to the doctor since everything I read said take him in after 10 days, etc. He didn't have anything serious, his ears looked good, no RSV. But he weighed in at 23 pounds 10 oz. He's slowly getting a little bigger, but I think his growth has tapered off a bit. Which may be a good thing because his car seat is backward facing and his poor little legs are all smashed against the back seat. We can't turn the car seat around until his first birthday, which is 3 months away.


On the new baby news, I had the genetic testing done to test for any birth defects. Part of this was a sonogram, which we got to take home a couple of pictures of the 13 week old fetus. It was pretty cool to see that little guy at 13 weeks. We'll know results of the tests in a week or so, but from the sonogram photo the nurse said it looked normal.

I've spilled the news to my employer about having another baby. They were excited and surprised, as we all were! I will plan on taking another 12 weeks off. If all goes according to plan, that means I'll return to work the first week of November. I'm starting to think about what I will do with Elliott while on maternity leave. Part of me wants him at home, but part of me isn't sure if that's the best plan with the newborn needing attention and mommy needing sleep, but lots of women do it so why couldn't I? We have to reserve spots at the day care, so that will be the biggest factor in our decision.

On a finally note, we had a long weekend this weekend with another snow storm on Friday - practically the entire city shut down, including Elliott’s day care. So I got to stay home with him on Friday. It was a wonderful weekend of playing, laughing, reading, snuggling and catching up on naps. Elliott takes great naps while home now - almost 3-4 hours worth of naps per day. This really helps him sleep well at night too. Aaron and I constantly remind ourselves how lucky we are to have a baby with such a fantastic disposition. Elliott is so happy, constantly smiling, laughing, exploring. We couldn't imagine our life without him!!