First real Burley ride

Last week Mark was home during the day and it was beautiful out.  (70’s with a nice breeze and sunny – pretty much perfect weather.)  So he wanted to take Abbie for a spin in the Burley and take her to the park.  We had gotten her a helmet, although it’s still big on her.  We can tighten it down so it’s snug on her head, but it sticks out so far in the back that it pushes her head forward when she’s in the Burley.  She didn’t like that too much.  So we took it off her and rode on the sidewalks and avoided cars.

Armed with her mixing spoon!

At the park.

There was another lady at the park with her 14 month old and her 2 Rhodesian Ridgebacks.  Abbie was fascinated by the dogs.  She was much more interested in them than anything else at the playground.

She really is growing up too fast.  She’ll consistently wave bye-bye or hi now, although her hand is still facing her, but that makes it all the more cute.  Mark will start beat-boxing and “singing” a rhythm and she’ll immediately start grinning and bouncing along to the music.  It’s the cutest thing ever and I have it on video, I just have to get Mark to put it on the blog.

Abbie’s impersonation

Abbie’s “Something About Mary” impersonation.

Introducing the new mei tai!

My friend Em K and her daughter spent a week with us here in January, while Em ran a half marathon.  While she was visiting, she noticed that the mei tai she’d made me before Abbie was born was one of her “older models”.  She said she wanted to make me a new one and asked what I would like.  I really didn’t give her much direction besides saying I liked green and purple.  So she took that and ran with it.  It’s a good thing I was sitting in the car when I opened it because I probably would have fallen over if I hadn’t been.  I don’t know what I was expecting, but it sure as heck wasn’t what I got.  The thing is beautiful!  It’s seriously a work of art!

This picture shows the purple the best.  It’s a beautiful, deep purple.  In the other pictures the flash made it darker, but this first picture is closer to the actual color.  I LOVE it! She used a really neat animal print on the main part of the mei tai.  I wasn’t sure I’d like the animal print on a mei tai (I’d seen other ones she made), but I love it and it’s perfect.

The back of the MT is lined with this vibrant green dupioni silk.   

This one also has a hood on it, which the old one didn’t.  And she appliquéd things she cut out from the main print she used.  This thing really is a work of art.  I wore it in  Barnes and Nobles (where we bought an Italian translation book) and I got my first compliment on it.  The lady said it was amazing and beautiful.  And I got lots of glances from people who didn’t want to stare but you could tell they wanted to look.  Haha!

Here’s a picture of the first one Em made me and the new one.  The old one didn’t have a hood and all the straps were shorter than they are on the new one (which made me feel sort of fat when I didn’t have much excess strap after I tied them).  This one also has more padding – she added it to the waistband and I think more on the shoulder straps too.  She also made the body of this MT bigger, which will be good as Abbie gets older.  And I just noticed today that she put a little pocket with a velcro closure on it at the end of one of the straps.  How perfect is that?!

I am just so excited about this new mei tai.  I wish I had half the skills that Em does with a sewing machine.  I think it would be fabulous to be able to make things like this for friends – something beautiful, but also highly useful.  But, I’m a VERY beginner sewer and half the time my stupid machine doesn’t work, which then frustrates me and I give up.  I would LOVE to learn to make quilts though.  How hard can it be to sew blocks of fabric together?  Maybe I could learn to do that in Italy (if we go to Italy).  Em has definitely inspired me to at least try to do something with my sewing machine.

Thank you Em.  I absolutely love it.  I know we’ll get lots of use out of it while in Europe.   I owe you big time!

Abbie’s 9 month appointment

Today Mark and I took Abbie to her 9 month appointment.  In all honesty, I was much more worried about Mark at this appointment than I was Abbie.  Mark has only been to one or two of her other well baby visits, and he was quite nervous about her getting a shot.  For the past few days he’s been asking me how she’ll react and what we have to do during the appointments, etc.  It’s pretty cute.  I’m happy to say, both Mark and Abbie survived the appointment.  =)

Abbie now weighs 19lbs7oz, which puts her just over the 50 percentile.  She’s 29.5 inches long ( 95%) and her head circumference is 17.5 inches (50%).  In other words, she’s right on track – the same track she’s been on since birth.  We still have a long, skinny baby on our hands.

She had to get one shot today – her polio vaccine – and Mark was VERY nervous about that.  But Mark held her arms, I distracted her with a toy and the nurse held her legs and gave her the shot.  She sort of jumped a little and got a startled look on her face, but by the time she started to pucker up, Mark was already picking her up.  She let out a little whimper, a big sigh (not as big as Mark’s though), and then she was fine, and Mark was breathing normally again.

I cannot believe how fast Abbie seems to be progressing lately.  It seemed like she was working on crawling forever.  Since the 14th of February, Abbie has started crawling, she can easily pull herself up to a standing position, she’s cruised along the couch by herself once, and any time she’s in the upright position, she’ll move her feet to walk now.  NONE of that was happening 11 days ago.  I cannot believe it.  Maybe all of this is normal, but since she’s my first, I have no clue how fast kids usually pick up on these things.  She’s growing up way too quickly.

She’s babbling quite a bit lately.  Any time she sees us drinking, she wants some of it, and she does fairly well drinking out of a cup.  I still nurse her 3-5 times a day, and she’s wearing size 3 diapers.  She’s in only 9 month clothes now, although there are a set of Gerber onesies that are 18 months that fit her!  That brand’s sizes are so far off from the rest of them.  She’s still taking 2 naps a day (except for today…), and she sleeps 10-12 hours at night.   She’ll wave bye bye sometimes and you can ask her where Abbie’s tongue is, and she’ll stick it out.

It is increasingly harder to get pictures of her with her little signs.  These ones are the best we could do, although all the zoo pictures where taken on her birthday.  I need to get a bigger SD card for my camera because I took 1.6 GB of pictures at the zoo alone and our SD card for the camera is only 2GB.  I think I need at 8 or 16 GB one.

My cousin sent me an article from the New York Times online that was about traveling in Venice with an infant.  Apparently Italians LOVE babies, and you get preferential treatment over there, if you have a baby.  This article was talking about how these elderly Italian ladies thought their 10 month old was great and the writer said something like “We knew that she was spectacular, we just weren’t sure everyone else knew too”.  It made me laugh because I’m fairly certain that every parent feels that way about their child.  (And if they don’t, something’s a little off…)  But reading that article made me excited to go to Venice with Abbie, and since we’ll only live about an hour from Venice, hopefully we’ll get to go there often.  (And the article even mentioned how perfect it was to have the Ergo in Venice since a stroller would have been a pain with all those bridges.)  

Anyway, that’s the news for now!

Uneventful update

So I thought I’d update everyone on our move process, and sadly, there is nothing to update you on.  We still don’t have orders (or any of the move set up) and we still haven’t even gotten our passports back yet, let alone our visas.  So… yeah.  I really don’t know how this is all going to turn out.  It’s going to be a major act of God to have this all fall into place at the last minute, but I’m really not holding my breath at all.  We’re supposed to be leaving AZ in 11 days, and I just don’t see how that’s going to happen.  We have an appointment with our landlord for the final inspection of the house set up in 10 days.  Ha!  I’m terrified that for some reason we’re not going to get to go to Italy.  Mark’s PRP approval is taking forever.  We thought we’d have it sometime last week, and we still don’t have it, which is why we still don’t have our orders either.  Even if he does get orders though, Abbie and I can’t leave without our visas.  We expedited our passports, but it’s been over a month since we sent off for them, and we can’t apply for the visas, until we get our passports back.  It’s a huge mess and a hurry up and wait situation, as is typical with anything involving the military. 

So that’s the “update” even though there’s nothing to update you on.  Bummer.

2nd trip to the zoo

To celebrate Abbie’s 9 month birthday today, we went to the zoo with grandma and grandpa Maresh.  Abbie LOVED it.   She does this funny thing when she’s so excited she doesn’t know what to do – she does this ear piercing, earth shattering scream at the top of her lungs.  It’s pretty darn funny.  She just tenses up and full out screams.  She did that a lot today since she was so excited and she didn’t know how else to express it. 

Heading into the park.  Ready to go!

Quick family shot on the bridge before we went in.

First carousel ride!!  She wasn’t quite sure what to think of it and was diving for me most of the time, but she did stay on the rhino the entire time without crying at all.

Checking out the giraffe’s with daddy and grandpa.

We couldn’t resist the giraffe feeding encounter…  Abbie was just fascinated with the giraffe’s.  She wouldn’t take her eyes off of them, but if they got too close to her, she didn’t really want to touch them.  However, she’d reach for them if they weren’t paying attention to her.  It was really cute.

Mark’s mouth is open like this in 90% of the pictures I took.  Pretty funny!

Looking at the tigers.  If you look closely, you can see one laying there.  This is when she started to do her excited screams.  =)

I couldn’t pass up this cute photo op.  (These photos are completely unedited.  I wish I knew how to edit them, but I don’t…. yet.

Hitching a ride from daddy.

Looking at the baboon exhibit.  She watched the baboon walk all the way over to her and he got really close and checked her out.  Again, she was screaming.

Watching the otters, while screaming of course.

Another photo op by the lake.  Did I mention how much I LOVE this camera? 

The bird caught her attention.  She watched it walk all the way by and then was trying to look around Mark.

We were looking at some big birds, but I don’t remember what they were called.

Checking out the fountain.

Petting the goats at the petting zoo.  She has an ear fetish.  She loves all ears, Mark’s, Sadie’s, the goats.  At least she wasn’t screaming.  Much.

Grandpa Dan works for John Deere.  Couldn’t pass up this photo op!

Look at the elephants with Daddy.

She LOVES being tossed in the air.  (Side note – my grandma made me that sweater and now it fits Abbie.)

Being at the zoo sure is tiring!!

We had such a fun time with her at the zoo.  It’s so much fun experiencing things with her for the first time.  It’s a whole new level of enjoyment.  It’s funny, I remember when I went to zoo’s and actually took pictures of the animals….  But now I have a MUCH cuter subject to photograph!  Her first trip to the zoo was in July, when she was 8 weeks old.  I cannot believe how much she’s changed in 7 short months.   Here are a few pics from the San Diego trip.

This hat doesn’t even fit her anymore!!!!