where to get fed

within a short time of learning to crawl, all four kids have figured out to head to the highchair when they are ready to eat. manning saw me pulling his food from the fridge and hustled right over. he kept sliding the chair towards him and it seemed like he was trying to figure out how to get up there. no one likes to miss a meal around here! love.

 

boys playing

all three boys were playing nicely in their room after lunch and laughing at each other. it was so cute that i went for my camera. i came back to see maddux quietly reading books on his bed, mason playing trains and manning was no where to be seen. i could hear him though. and found him with the toilet paper! i thought i had another month or so before he would be up to this sort of thing. i will have to add bathroom doors to the list of things we need to now keep closed...

but he sure is cute. love.

 

on the move

today manning discovered that he can leave the living room. he has been content to just crawl a foot or two towards whichever toy (or more likely, book) he has his eye on. today the bigger boys went downstairs to play after lunch and i sat manning in the living room while i cleaned up the kitchen. then i heard a "thump" and assumed that he fell over, but there was no crying, instead there was another "thump". and another. and another. he was crawling! and he was making his way over to the stair rails to see where the big boys had gone (he could hear them). he was pretty delighted to be there. i guess i need to take another look around for baby proofing...

here is a little video but he was done by that point.

love.

 

manning's first crawl

and i missed it!  i have started going to the grocery store by myself on saturday mornings (the selection is great and it is quiet). while i was gone, manning crawled. i am happy that matt was home to see such a big "first" but i am pretty bummed that i missed it. thankfully, matt thought to take a little video for me. although he said that manning was crawling much more earlier. love. 

crawling?

yesterday, manning was able to move on arm forward when up rocking on all fours for the first time. and now today he hopped his knees forward twice while up on all fours. he is really starting to try so it might not be much longer before he is on the go. or it could be months. you just never know. love.

maddux on the move

sitting in circles

maddux is starting to crawl.  he doesn't have it all figured out, but he is starting to have forward momentum instead of always working his way backwards.  his latest thing is to get on all fours and then sit up, over and over and over.  essentially, he works himself around in a circle.  another funny thing about maddux is that he sits with his legs ramrod straight!  no wonder he had so much trouble figuring out how to sit up on his own.  enjoy.  love.

there is that smile!

while his big sister and brother were napping after our afternoon at the zoo, maddx was mister smiles again.  i was glad to see that he was back to his normal self, but i wished that he had been like this when we were taking pictures!  oh well.

not only was he all smiles, but he was chatty too.  i took a little video to share  i think this was the first he discovered that if he can see it, he can get to it.  he even took his first proper crawling 'step'!

maddux didn't stop at crawling either.  he sat himself all the way up for the first time too!  we were planning on lowering his crib last weekend and didn't get to it but it has to happen this weekend for sure!

he is really starting to get all over the place and i am going to have to keep a closer watch on what scraps of paper and stickers his sister and brother leave laying around.  he has already gotten a few stickers into his mouth.

i love this 'dismount' at the end of the first video (and all of the smiles and giggles).  the second video just gives a taste of his moving around.  nothing too exciting.  i was actually trying to catch him sitting himself up but he gets distracted by our bed.  love.

mason moving

so i realized that i haven't been that great at posting videos of mason on the move. he is really getting around now so i tried to get a lot of him playing this weekend. here is an edited together collection of him playing.

one of madelyn's favorite games to play with him is "climb on me". they kind of roll around almost in a wrestle like manor but mason isn't always a fan. he does laugh like crazy if he is in the mood and he does do the climbing in the first place because madelyn isn't supposed to force him to do things.

but then she has come up with a way to make him come or stay where she wants him to play with her. she isn't allowed to pick him up, but she found a way around that. the good news is that even though it doesn't look like he should, he loves when she does it! enjoy! love.

it must be a gender thing...

i have always thought the idea that men always have to have the t.v. remote was just an urban legend. but it seems that it might be a need they are born with...

mason makes a bee-line for the remote control. and not any remote, but only the t.v. remote will do. he has chased it down off the coffee table a few times but when he saw it on the back of the couch tonight matt and i both wondered what he would do.

he bolted right over and tried to scale the side of the couch. matt was snapping the pictures and couldn't get a good one of him up on his knees and reaching, but i thought that this one was pretty good with him just looking up and evaluating the situation. he tried for a while to get it before daddy scooped him up for bath time.

while he was napping this afternoon madelyn played out back. it is nice that i can sit in my office working and madelyn can play out in the sandbox and on the porch swing with the dogs where i can hear everything. she looked so lovely laying down swinging in the shade - the picture really doesn't do her justice. we had spent all morning at the car dealership getting something installed on the car that they didn't have ready when we bought it. thankfully, there was a kids area with toys in the waiting 'lounge'. madelyn was really happy to finally play outside since it was a gorgeous day! too bad that i had to spend it inside. oh well. daddy had to spend it inside too.

i had forgotten to mention this story when i posted about mason crawling yesterday. mason crawled for the first time while madelyn was at school. when i picked her up i told her about his latest accomplishment. madelyn was really, really excited! she started saying that mason was big now and could eat her snacks, and dinner like us, and go in her tent. i told her that he still needed to wait a while before he could eat the same food as the rest of us. i had totally forgotten about the tent!

when mason first came home madelyn started asking for him to come into her tent and pretend sleep. i have been telling her that he is still too little to go into the tent with her but when he starts to crawl he could go into the tent with her. i also explained that she would have to wait until he was in a big bed before he might have any interest in playing 'pretend sleep'.

so of course the first thing madelyn wanted to do when we got home was to have mason come play in her tent. i took him into her room and left him sitting by the tent's entrance. i was in the kitchen and madelyn calls out, "he crawled! i saw him! mason crawled! he's in the tent! he's in my tent!" she was SO excited. she kept trying to tell him to try laying down on this pillow that was for him, but she is waiting patiently for that day to come. it was just so cute how excited he was for him to finally be able to crawl into her tent. love.

he's crawling!

almost three months to the day from the age madelyn was when she started crawling, mason crawled! and he is pretty fast too! he is starting to get the hang of all his new found freedom too. i am sure i won't be this happy about his crawling by the end of the week. (i am only kidding, because i know that i will still be super excited but i am sure that he is going to keep me on my toes. this video is from his second success today. love.

yoga and sitting

mason appears to be a yogi. he seems to be keeping himself from crawling by his dedication to his yoga poses. here is some footage of him working on his downward dog and sitting. this is pretty much how mason spends a lot of his time - at least today and yesterday. i keep thinking that he is going to crawl, but i am still waiting...

mason did get his upper right middle tooth today though. the funny thing is that he isn't a super "straight to mouth" sort of kid. madelyn put everything in her mouth, but mason seems to be much more selective. and he is finally to a point where he naps at 10am and 1 pm before going to bed at 7:30/8:00pm. the best part is that he doesn't cry, rock, or anything. we read two books and he goes down without a peep. it is so nice! love.

maddie attacks

just a quick video of maddie coming to get me.

hi, doggie!

madelyn is extremely interested in our dogs now. she crawls over to the glass sliding doors to look for them out on the deck. and when they come up she laughs at and talks to them. i think "dog" or "doggie" might be her next word. she has come pretty close to saying it while looking at her books with dogs in them. she is just missing this vowels by saying "dg". you can see her trying to give maggie a 'kiss' in the picture while lady waits her turn.

matt went out last night to brave the cold because we were worried that maddie wouldn't be able to breathe with her congestion. so matt came home with a bag of supplies from walgreens and we woke her up. after plugging in a vapor fan in her room, putting saline drops in her nose and sucking them out again, and rubbing baby vicks on her chest we were all breathing easier.

and we all had a great night's sleep! due to concerns about frostbite (it was colder than -30) and maddie's sniffles we stayed home from church this morning. i hate missing church but it really was in madelyn's best interest. she slept until 8:30am!

here is a video of a well rested girl showing how fast she is getting at crawling.



did i mention before that she gives "kisses" now? she mainly gives them to matt (not that i am jealous or anything). they are the big, wet, open mouthed, "i'm going to eat your face" variety, but she gives them on request. very sweet. well, that's all for now. love.

mommy's home

sorry to have not posted sooner (especially since matt didn't post while i was gone) but i had a lot to take care of when i got home and maddie had some cold (or teething) symptoms. she threw-up for the first time on wednesday and had a slight fever on thrusday. not to mention that her cough has gotten 'juicier'. i think that all of this is from her molars coming in and not from a bug.

as with every trip i take, she changed so much while i was gone! she waves 'hi' and brings her hands together when someone claps. she has also figured out the "daddy" sign. i am not sure that she knows what it means, but she will do it when we do it so that's something. right? she has become a regular chatter-box! she babbles pretty much all day from the moment she wakes up to the moment she goes to sleep. at least while we are at home. when we ran errands today she didn't say very much. i think that there is just so much to take in that she forgets everything else.

here is a video of us playing peek-a-boo around her cup after lunch yesterday. she is just so giggly. she is also starting to laugh when tickled. her neck, right armpit, and feet are her ticklish spots.



the picture at the top is one matt took of her climbing under the coffee table when i was gone. and this picture is one he caught of her 'carrying' her toys while she is crawling.

tomorrow her uncle brad, aunt abby, and cousin annabell are coming to visit for the week. we are really excited to see them! i will do my best to keep you up on all the action! love.

improvised movements

madelyn wants to walk so bad. she has now started to crawl with her back legs straight like she is walking on all fours. she starts by standing with the help of whatever she can get her hands on and then can't figure out how to move around once she goes as far as the coffee table/couch/wall/toy can get her. then she works her way down to sitting and tries to crawl/walk to where she is going.

she has also developed a means for taking her toys with her when she gets on the move - she puts them in her mouth! its really funny when she does it with a stuffed animal. she looks like a mother animal carrying her young. she also did it with the balloon ribbon at the birthday party over the weekend so that she could take the balloon with her.

today we tried hard boiled egg yolks. i didn't have them ready in time for mixing in with her porridge (because of her nurse appointment this morning for the other half of her flu shot), so she had it for a mid-morning snack crumbled up for finger food. she actually did a lot better than i thought she would. i would guess that she ate at least half of it and the rest got smashed up or dropped on the floor in the process.

love.

follow the leader

i am happy to report that there was no blood shed today!

the new trick of the day is following us out of the room when we walk away. she has crawled out of rooms after us before, but it is usually because we are calling her and trying to get her to, but today i put her in the living room to play and went into the kitchen for a drink. i looked in at her from the kitchen and she had rounded the couch trying to follow me. she did the same thing to matt when he got home tonight. he left the living room and she took off after him.

we were lucky to have matt home earlier than normal tonight - maddie got some extra daddy time! as you can see, some of that quality time was spent taking a pre-dinner nap on the couch together. the video shows one of the ways they wore each other out - as with all videos, maddie stopped laughing once the camera and lights were on but you can get the idea.



where yesterday was shrieking, today was raspberries! at snack and lunchtime today she was blowing raspberries as hard as she could - there was spit flying everywhere. plus, she would take a huge breath and blow, her face would get all red and then she would take another breath and start all over again. it made lunch take a lot longer than normal, but i enjoyed a really great laugh. she just kept looking at me like, "what's so funny?".

matt may not agree, but i am going to call "da-da" her first word. she says it all the time now. everything is "da-da". i was joking with matt because she was calling the remote control "da-da" tonight. she was standing at the couch trying to reach it and just kept excitedly saying "da-da-da-da-da". i told him not to feel bad because she calls everything "da-da". she will also say "hi" back to me when i say it while she is looking at me, so hopefully talking videos will be in the near future.

she just has more and more of a personality everyday. its so cute how friendly and loving she is with everyone. we keep saying that she is going to be a little social butterfly when she gets older - oh boy!

love.

bumps and bruises

one of the challenges of having a child who had a lot of teeth before they can even crawl is keeping those teeth from getting knocked out. madelyn had another tooth slamming adventure this morning. she was crawling around the living room while i ate breakfast and watched the morning news. she then got up on the laundry basket, walked/cruised over to the coffee table, and then to her toy basket under the table. she continued going between the coffee table and her toy basket in a 'walking' fashion getting toys out and putting them on the coffee table where she could better see, taste, and shriek at them. she was having so much fun that she started waving her hands around and let go - resulting in her top teeth hitting the edge of the coffee table on her way down.

this time i was more upset than she was. she cried initially, but as soon as i picked her up she was fine and started chewing on my fingers with no signs of pain. her gums were bleeding again around the same tooth where there was bleeding the last time she slammed her mouth like that (right before we went to Kansas when she was trying to crawl on the hardwood floors). there is still a little dark blood spot on her gums right above her right, front tooth from today's falls (yes, "falls" - plural - keep reading).

then when i went to pick her up from her nap i noticed the long scratch on her face that you can sort of see in the picture near her eye on the side of her face. after feeding her, i clipped her finger nails for the second time this week to try and limit the number of marks on her face.

and madelyn was not done injuring herself yet. her new thing is to crawl her hands up the walls so that she can stand leaning up against them, but the catch is that she can't figure out how to get down. i guess she was trying to get back down when i heard a thump and then crying. she had a nice red mark on center of her forehead the size of a quarter from where the wall texture scratched her a little on her way down (she caught herself during her fall and was just kneeling with her hands on the wall when i went to get her).

but, wait, there's more! at playgroup today she slipped while crawling on their hardwoods and knocked her tooth again!! there was a lot more blood this time, but she quickly recovered and was biting my finger as hard as she could while i was trying to figure out where the blood was coming from. its not like she isn't a stable kid. i think she was just so excited by everyone running around (there were about 11 kids between the ages of 3 and 5 months) and got ahead of herself.

her mouth started bleeding again tonight while she was chewing on her pack-and-play but best as i saw, she didn't hit her mouth again because there was no bang and no crying. what can i say, the girl is fearless and wants to try everything. i am just going to try and keep her scaring injuries to a minimum...

maddie's preferred method of communication today - shrieking. from the time she woke up until the time she went to sleep shrieking was the way in which madelyn expressed herself (she did throw in a few raspberries, grunts, "hi", "da", "ga", and nose snorts, but the day was mainly shrieking). i never know what she will sound like from one day to the next. here is a video of her shrieking today with her toys and the crawling to the newly discovered printer stand in my office and the 'fun' reams of paper underneath it.

yesterday she pulled an open ream of paper off the shelf, shook the paper out and proceeded to play with the plastic wrapper. of course i had to be the party pooper who threw it away.

hopefully, tomorrow will be much less bloody! love.

play yard standing

tonight madelyn stood herself up in her play yard. i was probably a little too excited about it (i scared matt). i was getting dinner ready and looked up and she was standing. while we were eating at the table (right next to the play yard) she fell down - well she tripped on her lilly doll - and we got to watch her get herself back up again. she just worked her hands up the side and over the top. and she was pretty quick about it too! she was pretty proud of herself and could even walk end to end - back and forth. what was a little concerning is that she is already trying to get her legs up and over too. i can just hear her little brain thinking - "i am so out of here"!

i like this picture of her smiling because you can see most of her teeth. (you will need to click on it to really see them well.) it is crazy to see all those teeth in her mouth! i almost don't recognize her - she just looks so different.

maddie got her first paper cut today. the only reason i noticed was because she bled on the product catalog she was turning pages in under my desk. i couldn't figure out how she could have started bleeding because she didn't cry at all. and then i found the paper cut on her finger. boy is she tough. i have seen grown men make a fuss over a paper cut and here my six month old doesn't even make a peep.

she is also starting to get more daring when standing by letting go with at least one hand and trying to move between objects by reaching. luckily she doesn't cry every time she falls. i'm telling you, she is one tough kid. i think that she has to be tough in order to keep up with her active lifestyle!

oh, one more random maddie story from today. she crawled out of her nursery and into the guest bedroom out of pure curiosity - not to follow me. we had better get the baby gate on the stairs this weekend (or sooner).

i have to go get my mom at the airport tonight. she is going to be here until monday. love.

now we're moving

madelyn can get herself up to the top of the coffee table and walked down to where she could reach some magazines and matt's wii controller. i started filming after she got down to her basket of toys and started reaching for everything on the coffee table.



so then i pulled her down to make her try again so that i could film her getting herself up and down the coffee table. but then she fell this time - oops. (she stopped crying quickly and went down for a nap.)



yesterday, i let her have some cottage cheese as part of her finger food afternoon snack. she really got into picking up the little curds and getting them into her mouth. it was, however, very messy and she had to be stripped down. i didn't get her dressed again before dinner (avocado) which was just as well because - as you will see - dinner was very messy too. she had been biting the spoon as hard as she could (with all four top teeth and three bottom teeth) and wouldn't even let go when she would pull the spoon herself and that is what i was trying to film. instead you get to see how excited she gets for every spoonful and how she 'helps' get the spoon into her mouth.



today we introduced millet porridge for breakfast and it might be a new favorite! i was really doubtful that she would eat it since she doesn't like the texture of the rice porridge, but she really liked it. now that she will eat two grains, i can mix the oatmeal and millet with some veggies to create true "super porridge" for a complete meal. yea!

i also let her try a straw cup today and she was able to suck her water up. i was actually surprised that she was able to drink from it.

now that she can get around better - and quicker - she crawls over to my desk chair when she is ready to eat or nap. no, really. i know it sounds crazy, but all day she would play by herself in my office and then crawl over to my chair at the exact times when she has been eating and napping since we got home from Christmas in kansas.

sleeping update: saturday night maddie slept from around 7:30pm until 6:30am! and then last night she slept from around 7pm until 4am. the good news is that she went right back to sleep after i went and cuddled her for a minute at 4am. she was just sitting up in her crib and crying. i think that she couldn't figure out how to lay back down again. progress!

love.