teeth, teeth everywhere and not a bite to eat

tooth #5 came in last night. at least i think it was last night. i have been so focused on the teeth coming in on top i hadn't been watching the bottom gums and a new tooth showed up today! her mouth has just been an explosion of teeth this week! and there are more that i can see but can't feel yet and that is our criteria for counting them as "in". matt and i have to both agree that we can feel a tooth before i can record the date in her baby book. the poor thing just make chewing motions with her mouth - like she is chewing imaginary gum or something - or chews her fingers (as pictured), or my fingers, or any toy, or really anything she can reach and get to her mouth. you can just tell that it hurts, but she doesn't let it slow her down or make her too fussy.

since i have been making maddie baby food, i don't have many jars of food in the house (we keep a few for trying new foods before i make a big batch). but with traveling and being sick i haven't had a chance to make any and we have run out of 'cubes' in the freezer (well except for the avocado and she hasn't been too crazy about that yet) so today we tried peaches. she seemed to be indifferent to them. she ate them up. she didn't say "mmm" with every bite like she does with her other foods, but she didn't make an unhappy face like she does when we try avocado. there must be something to the sweet/sour flavor because she kept sucking longer than normal and would make this cute 'kiss-y' face while eating it.

we had even more snow today! we probably have close to two feet on the ground and it just keeps coming down. so we decided to try taking madelyn out in the snow again because she hasn't really been outside while the snow is falling (it has either been way to heavy or while she was sleeping) and we wanted to see what she thought of it. she tolerated us dragging her around on the sled and posing her for pictures, but she did not like it when matt dug a hole in the snow for her to stand in. i think she was just starting to get too cold.

and like i said, we were out of baby foods, so maddie and i braved the snow to go to the organic market for her foods and then to the regular grocery for matt and i. i buy foods for her that i wouldn't eat and have certainly never prepared - millet and acorn squash for example. she didn't really like the snow hitting her in the face while we were walking. she doesn't really seem to mind the cold, but she does not like the wind plowing in her face at all! she does this gasping thing until i find a way to block the wind. anyway, since i have determined that she can sit up in the grocery cart, i broke out this great fabric cover that i have for shopping carts today and she really liked it (and i did too). i will take a picture the next time i use it, but it basically covered everything that she could put her mouth on and has fabric loops for clipping toys on for her.

one last point of interest (maybe just mine). she started doing this thing that is pretty odd/funny to me. she closes her mouth and breathes really hard and intentionally in and out of her nose - kind of like when a cartoon character gets mad or a bull is going to charge. she is not mad at all when she does it, in fact i think she enjoys it. i don't know if it is amusing to her because she has a few boogies that rattle around when she does it or if it is just a matter of 'hey, look what i can do', but it is new and it makes me laugh. the funniest part is that her cheeks hang down farther than her chin when she clenches her lips to do it!

the video is of her opening her first official Christmas present from grandma z. and big pop tonight. and i thought that today was uneventful! love.

capturing Christmas

i haven't been feeling all that Christmas-y this year. i think its because we won't be home so there are no decorations, or cookies, or anything resembling Christmas that i can see on a daily basis. i also do almost all my shopping on-line so there hasn't been much shopping either. but what we did do was go out for family portraits today with maddie in her Christmas dress. she looked so grown-up! and i think we actually got a decent family shot this time. i can't wait to get the prints. they also had some 'santa sleeves' and white gloves for matt to wear while maddie held his hands and stood-up - very sweet... we got this very pretty dress and hair bows (with jingle bells) for only $0.86 thanks to a gift certificate we had been hanging on to for the purpose of buying her a Christmas dress. i was really excited for such a bargain! and maddie liked the dress so much when we tried it on at home that i couldn't get her to look up at the camera! luckily, she did better at the portrait studio.

maddie and i did some other shopping today before heading to the mall for pictures including home depot and target. since she is getting to be such a big girl i decided that we would try sitting in the cart by herself and it couldn't have gone better! she did great the whole time we were shopping (and since it was target you know that we were there a while). i was afraid to get kicked out for using my real camera so the picture is from my cell phone.

she is also getting her arms straight out while she does her rocking. before she was just getting up to her elbows, but now she can get all the way up to her hands. she isn't quite crawling, but she has figured out that if she gets all the way up to her hands and rocks back a forth a few times, she can lunge herself forward enough to reach a toy (or her daddy) that is too far away.

she is also ready for some new toys. but i am trying to control myself until the grandparents do their gift giving. it just seems like she is ready to move beyond her rattles and stuffed animals. especially now that she can sit and move more. she has also taken a great interest in standing on her own (she doesn't want to be in her exersaucer, she wants to be outside holding herself up while playing with the toys) so we might look for something that will help her pull herself up to a standing position. every time i go to get her from a nap now she has both hands on the top of her bumper or on the crib bars themselves trying to pull herself up so she is definitely getting ready.

since i didn't take any video today, here is one from yesterday. i was trying to get her doing this soft "singing" with the keys in her mouth, but when the camera went on she realized that she wasn't alone and started to get fussy because it was nap time. oh well. love.

late night laughing

we were getting ready to put madelyn to bed tonight and i started bouncing her little bunny rattle on the ground which she found to be hysterical! i lightened the video as much as possible, but pretty much any video taken after 2pm is just going to be too dark. so enjoy the sound-track of her giggles. (she was just extra giggle-y today.) what is really amazing is how hard she can laugh without falling over (well until the end of the video anyway...)

and this picture just makes me laugh because of her hand on her hip. it looks like she wants to tell you a juicy secret.

good night. love.

snow day

i am still fighting this cold, so this will be quick again tonight. we had about 6 inches of snow fall today. and this is on top of close to a foot of snow already on the ground! it snowed in the biggest clumps that i have ever seen here so i took some video of it. you can see how big the clumps are hitting the walkway to our front door. i took this video pretty early in the storm, so the snow got a lot deeper before it stopped.

and then i bundled maddie up in her snow suit to go outside a take a look at it all while daddy shoveled the driveway. we thought that he was going to have to shovel his way up the driveway, but matt drives that little corolla like it is a mack truck! luckily he didn't get stuck, but it did take him two tries to get into the garage.

oh and i can see/feel a fourth tooth (left center), but matt doesn't buy it so we will have to see what things look like tomorrow before he will let me count it as an "official" new tooth.

off to bed for some sleep. love.

video fix

okay, so my 24 cold has turned into more of a 96 hour and counting cold. i could not be sick at a worse time! i have so much to do right now between work and christmas preparation. oh well, i just have to concentrate on getting better and what doesn't get done, doesn't get done. enough about me...

the pictures are of maddie in my favorite pjs this morning. they are a size 12-18months! she is just getting so big! her sleeping feat last night was to get both of her legs out of the 'legs' of her pjs and into the torso part! they fit so snugly i don't know how she managed to do that...

here are a few videos of madelyn doing her 'rocking' that i think could turn to crawling any day now. (actually, as i was waiting for the videos to upload, she took a few crawling 'steps'! she covered about two feet of the floor!)







she also has another tooth! there is one that broke through the gum on the upper left, one over from center. so that was pretty exciting. it looks like all four of her front teeth may come in at the same time - only time will tell.

well i should get back to my recovery. love.

i'm back already

i am back from my trip to chicago and ready to blog again - so get off my back already! i would have gotten on last night, but i came down with a 24 hour cold. i felt fine in the morning but ended up sleeping most of the afternoon and had a 100.7 degree fever last night. but feel much better today.

maddie changed SO MUCH while i was gone! i knew that she changed everyday, but it was unbelievable when i went to pick her up how different she was! she felt heavier and her face looked really different too. plus, she was sitting up better and her dexterity had changed dramatically. she can pick up the smallest objects (like my fleece zipper) with very fluid movements. its difficult to explain, but the difference was very striking to me.

as you can see her daddy is proud of his work with the sweet potatoes! (this was one of the few pictures he took while i was gone.) matt would have posted more, but he was in the final week of writing and giving reviews and just didn't have even one spare minute.

and she finally showed some interest in holding the sippy cup herself. she always tries with a normal cup, but the handles of the sippy cup were of no interest to her. matt said that he just set it on the high chair tray and she picked it up and started drinking!

she did pull herself up while holding on to the laundry basket on sunday night before i left for the week. (the picture is a posed reenactment.) she is so anxious to get moving! we just keep saying that we are going to be in trouble when she really gets mobile...

okay, i just spent three hours on a christmas project and i am going to make matt a turkey dinner tomorrow and work on a million other things that i need to get done in the two weeks before we leave for kansas, so i am going to have to call it a night. i just wanted to make a quick post before bed since i have been m.i.a. and some of you are going through withdrawal. love.

look what i can do

maddie's latest skill is to hold the bottle while drinking. we haven't used a bottle in a few weeks and i thought that we should reintroduce it before we left her with a babysitter last night (more on that in a minute). plus, i am heading to chicago tomorrow morning and will be at a conference until thrusday so she will being seeing lots of bottle time over the next week. she didn't even flinch and got right to business by taking charge of holding the bottle.

so yesterday we had about 4 inches of snow that then got piled on by a few hours of sleet and followed up by rain. needless to say the roads were rough and there was a high risk of ice. but matt and i went out into the night for his office Christmas party downtown. so we left maddie with one of the neighborhood girls for the night (actually two of the neighborhood girls because on of the other neighbors came to keep the babysitter company since maddie would be sleeping most of the time). as we were getting ready to go, i kept worrying that something might happen to us on the roads. since we don't have our will written up yet (one of the million things i need to get done by the end of the year) i wrote up a little something and had matt sign it so that if anything did happen our families would know what we wanted even if a court wouldn't uphold such an informal, unwitnessed document. am i crazy or what? everything was fine. matt and i had a nice evening out at the public museum (where the dinner/party was) and madelyn did great for the sitter.

i also learned that the going rate for babysitting has not increases since i last babysat and in fact, we were called by the sitter's parents after i dropped her off saying that she would be returning half of the money because we should not pay her that much! oh well. i guess that it is better to over pay than underpay. right?

madelyn is way over this laying on the ground thing and just itching to sit and stand. here she is 'helping' me with the laundry and a video of her sitting and playing with a toy (not sure what you would actually call it - an entertainment table?). she also likes to stand at that toy and play - she holds herself up and can push the buttons so that they make noise and light put, but the camera is way too distracting to her when she is standing and she falls down before i get any real footage. maybe soon though... plus, you may notice that i have figured out how to lighten the videos before i post them! i think it makes them a little grainy, but at least you can see what is going on a little better. oh, and i should mention that she is not choking. that is just her latest extreme in making one of her favorite noises. even though it freaks matt and i out a little because it can sound like she is having an asthma attack or something! the joys of parenthood... love.