Little Stinker

Our little stinker has been a real handful this week! He was refusing to eat and was waking up three times a night. I'm pretty sure he was teething because he got a little better with Ibuprofen and Anbesol. Picture this: waking up to a inconsolable, screaming baby at 2:30am in the morning who is fighting you to put a q-tip in his mouth, doing the math to see if it's been 6 hours since the last dose of Ibuprofen, if so measure and fight baby to take medicine, rock baby to sleep, try to go back to sleep yourself, now repeat a couple of times a night for a few nights in a row! No surprise Chris ended up sick after a few days. He came home from work early and slept for three hours, had a little soup and Gatorade, and then we went to bed two hours early.

Of course you can't tell that anything was wrong from his pictures. He's turning into quite the little ham when the camera comes out. What I really don't understand is why it seems like Sam only has problems at night. We're going to the doctor tomorrow for his 12 month checkup, so we'll see what the doctor says.



Since Sam is over a year old and over 20 lbs, we were able to turn his car seat around last weekend. He got a big kick out of it. He kept laughing every time I'd look back at him. Of course he was asleep by the time we got to the gas station any way!



The car seat wasn't the only change we made this weekend. We dropped the bottle and the formula! That's right, big boy has a sippy cup and drinks milk. We went with the Nuby Silicone Spout after trying several other cups. All the other cups that we tried had these valve pieces to keep them from spilling which made it to hard to suck anything out of them. And if we removed the valve, we got a nice sprinkling, ok downpour, of milk every where. The Nuby is very similar to a bottle, so it seems like a good transition option. A nice bonus, is that we no longer have to mix bottles of formula to take to day care, since they provide milk for the kids at no additional cost. One other change (that I may be the only person intersted in) is that we also went from size 3 to size 4 diapers this weekend.



Here's a morning picture with Daddy in pajamas. They probably just got through making coffee, a favorite pastime of course. Sam loves the coffee making process so much that we got him a play coffee maker for his birthday. It's great! He fusses to play with the real one every morning and seems satisfied for now to pretend with his. I keep meaning to get video of it, but I'm usually trying to wake up then.



We went to Ian and Roya's for a yummy dinner Sunday night. They were dog sitting Lucky, so Sam got to play with a dog more his size. They really hit it off. Lucky made Sam giggle. Man, those cheeks are so pinchable! Sam got a big kick out of all the candles Roya had lit on the table. It was a good enough distraction to actually get him to eat a little. Sam also had fun climbing up their stairs. I tried to show him how to go back down backwards, but he couldn't quite get the hang of it.

Sam's appetite seems to have turned around in the last day or so. He actually ate Beefaroni without just chewing it up and spitting it out, so hopefully he's getting a break from whatever he was going through ... fingers crossed. We're trying to teach him some sign language to help communicate what he wants, especially at mealtime. Trying to teach him "more" is hard because he actually has to want "more" to teach "more." I think he learned "all done" the first day. There's a show on PBS called Signing Time to teach kids sign language. I had to email our local PBS to get the schedule for the show in Dallas, so check with your local station if the schedule for your area isn't listed on their web page. They don't teach the sign for "coffee" so we had to look that one up (ha!).

For our weekly motor skills report, Sam has learned how to stand up on his own. In other words, last week he would crawl over to something, pull up on it, and then take off walking. Now he can go directly to a standing position from any where. He's really walking every where and very rarely touches his walker. We can actually probably put that away now. He's also started "running errands." He'll go over to his wagon, get a block, and bring it to us. We say "thank you", he smiles or giggles, then goes over to get another block. He's started manipulating things with his hands with a lot more control. He got a set of nesting/stacking cups for his birthday. He loves to pour them out and put them back together in different combinations. He can't tell just by looking at one cup that its larger than and won't fit into another cup yet. He also got some soft blocks for his birthday, which he started stacking for the first time. He's had small hard blocks since Christmas which we would stack and he would knock over, so it's a big deal that he stacked them on his own. The blocks also have shapes that fit inside them. He loves to pull them out and try to put them back in. He can easily do the cylinder shape, but has a little trouble with the prism and box shapes.

We also want to say CONGRATULATIONS to our friends Brad, Jennifer, and Jackson on the newest addition to their family. Sofia was born on Tuesday. She was born about nine weeks early so she'll be in the NICU for a while, but she's doing great and is already breathing on her own. We can't wait to meet her!