'One month' Appointment

Frankie had his one month appointment today at six weeks because they didn't want us coming in with H1N1, go figure! He is good on all his milestones and got his shots today, which has him mostly tired but he was not happy about it!

He weighed 11.5 lbs and was 21.5 inches long. Pretty good growth especially with all the weird sickness and extreme spitting up that he does all the time. He is 90% weight and 50% height but he doesn't look too chubs, so not sure how that works. His doctor was very happy with his growth, and he showed off his skills at holding his head up during tummy time for her too.

Evie weighed in at 37.5 lbs and 41.25 inches, so she is about average for weight for her age and a bit on the tall side, but we kind of had that figured out. She is still loving being a big sister and has been a good helper:). She did not like getting her regular flu shot--but good news Evie, since we had H1N1 no need for another vaccine this year. What a favor, right?

Other news since last post:

• we are all healthy--hard to believe but true!
• Frankie is very aware of his surroundings and has started to smile
• 
• I am allowed to try eating milk/milk products again per Mr Man's doctor. It has been kind of nice eating dairy free because I can always share with Evie...but I miss cheese. And cream pie...and ice cream...and all that other good stuff. Hopefully his stomach can take this better than it takes everything else. He is such a spitter!

We're just excited to be back on track health-wise so we can all enjoy this time--before it is gone since it goes so fast! Here are more fun pictures:

visiting with Great Grandma Tin cutie bear ear coat that Evie picked out for him
listening to Evie read him a story

Halloween to now

Evie was Tinkerbell for Haunt the Halls when we trick-or-treated in the residence halls at OSU. Here she is with cousin Melissa in Siebert:
The following day (on actual Halloween) she was a spider. She loves her spider costume (with pink bow here to try and help people figure out gender). She has asked us to put it on her many times since Halloween--I had to hide it yesterday!Her hair is now long enough to do pigtails in the back. Here she is yesterday in her cheerleading outfit and lucky socks. Needless to say we no longer feel the socks are lucky, but the hair is cute!
Evie has really been into my dancing hamsters lately. I will try and figure out how to get video on here so you can see her dancing to 'Tequila'. Slightly inappropriate, but she loves it!

She has had a bad stomach virus for the past few days including lots of early morning bed clean-up. Hopefully we won't catch it and she will get better soon. What a way to spend a 3 day weekend (or 4 since we split time off on Friday to stay home with her).

I also forgot her stats from last doctor appointment. At the time she was:

• 32 and 3/4 inches tall: 90%
• 24 lbs: 40%--but on Friday she was 24.5 lbs.
• Her head is still enormous: 97% at 19 and 1/4 inches

Evie also said her first 'real' sentence this week. When looking at her animal sheets on her bed she looked over at me and said: 'This is a lion' and pointed to one of the lions on the sheets. Pretty nifty.

15 month appointment

Evie had her 15 month Dr appointment yesterday. She did such a great job and the doctor commented on her good naturedness and ease with strangers since she let Dr Gray poke all over her:)

She is growing like a weed. She is now:

• 22 pounds (40%, up from 25% at last visit)!
• 31 inches (75%)
• 19 in head circumference (96%, up from 85%)

So she still has the super ginormous noggin'. She also knows plenty of words and can identify lots more stuff than the minimum they look for at her age. Even funnier, daycare did their monthly newsletter yesterday and it talked all about how so many kids are walking now but for Evie it talked about her talking! She is super chatty and really starting to get stuff (mimics most things we say, so we have to be careful). They said she talks in sentences to them and when they can't figure out what she wants she gets pretty upset. The newsletter predicts she may be the next President!

She had a little trouble last night/this morning being tired and crabby from her shots but it was weird. She would be playing and having fun one minute and then seconds later screaming and having a fit out of nowhere. We put her to bed a little early and I hear she took a nap this morning for grandma because she was still so zonked. Poor thing!

One fun thing we did yesterday was make the coffee table into a 'fort' by throwing a blanket over it. She thought that was a riot.

So here are some of her new, fun words!

• no--and she shakes her head and sometimes does a whole body shake to signify NO
• uh-oh--still a favorite even when it is an 'on purpose' where she says uh-oh and THEN something falls to the ground and also 'Oh no' as a new one
  
• apple, eat, juice, water, waffle, more, yum-yum (sounds like num-num), cracker, 'Os' for cheerios, cheese, spoon (which she is pretty good at using)
• mommy, daddy, nana, baby, nita and geon (from daycare), bubba (all dogs and PQ), emma, ally (cat and dog and grnadparents' houses), woof-woof, quack, ooh-ooh (monkey), moo, vroom-vroom (like every car we pass! plus strollers too), fish (and I swear she is starting to get the hang of saying Allison from playing with her pictures from her shelf most mornings)
• she can identify (and say for some of 'em): eye, ear, nose, teeth, mouth, hair, toes, belly button, shirt, sock, shoe, glasses
• outside, light, seat (for chair), ball, bouncy, rock-rock, bumpy, down, up (although she MUCH prefers to use down for both up and down), done, bye-bye, see-ya, off, book, that? (almost always said as a question with finger pointing), please, thank you, eewww (when something is yucky)
• she also plays 'give me five' and 'peekaboo'
  

Daycare says she is doing colors, like red, blue, green, yellow but she has been a little resistant to say them for us. I am sure I missed tons of things but this is a pretty good start. She says a lot of babble stuff that could be something but is still a little too unintelligible. If I missed one and someone wants to chime in, go for it!

Mommy's 30!

Mommy's 30th birthday was Tuesday and we had lots of fun. On Monday I ate for the first time at the Cheesecake Factory and then we went to Texas Roadhouse on her birthday. Mommy also took me to the doctor on her birthday to make sure I had gotten rid of my ear infection. It's finally gone and now I weigh 21 pounds, 5 ounces (with clothes on) and am about 31 inches long!
I enjoy helping mommy clean up--when she gives me a paper towel I find yucky spots on the floor and take care of them! I don't think mom and dad realized I could be so helpful with chores this young. We are getting a deck at my house and it is almost done so I got to stomp and play on it today! Then we went for a walk; as you can see I pushed the stroller:)

12 month appointment

Evie had her one year appointment today--
25% for weight at 19 lb 12 oz
50% for height at 29 inches
85% for noggin' at 43.5 cm

When she was born her head was about 13 cm around (thank goodness)! Can you believe that bitty body supports such a huge head!

They also asked about how many words she says so we rattled off stuff like: mama, dada, bubba (dogs and cats and bunnies), bye-bye, uh-oh, num-num (food), ball and down (most recent and also uses for up). Apparently the doctor usually looks for a baby to have 3 words down by 15 months so I would say Evie is a little chatty:). She is such a show-off!

She also has her second ear infection, in her left ear again this time!

Evie is Sick:(

Evie has her first real yucky nasty illness (more than a bad cold and cough). She has her first ever ear infection which has also turned in to pink eye. I noticed her eye was all crusty and gross yesterday when she woke up but she wasn't running a fever and her eye was not red...so she went to school and I panicked and called the doctor and took her in. Good thing I did!

Her left ear is infected which caused her to get pink eye in her right eye (a little all over the place but oh well). She is on antibiotic and we caught everything really early so she should be good. She was so cute for the doctor and then I brought her to work for a few minutes to show her off and she charmed everyone here too. She was in her pout/quiet mode and looked adorable.

She weighed in at exactly 20 pounds (with clothes and shoes on) and is 29 inches long!

Evie is 8 Months Young Today!

It is Evie's 8 month birthday! What this means is:

• she is taller and weighs more--she is over 17 pounds and just a bit over 27 inches long
• she is cuter and more huggable than ever
• she eats all sorts of crazy foods--and has learned to feed herself puffs (which were formerly too small for her to grab--look at those fine motor skills maturing!)
• we have another 'deck of cards' photo for you
  
• we are 2/3 of the way there to her first birthday!

What she's still holding out on:

• she still has no toothers
• she prefers commando crawl and rolling to getting up on all fours and using the more regularly 'approved' method
• walking, well duh, right?

But for the first time ever this weekend for her parents she:
Pulled herself from sitting to standing all by herself AND was able to remain standing (before she has slowly toppled over the other direction after pulling herself up)!Here she is on her 'learn-around' playground which she loves. As her daddy says, she is the standin'-est girl!

And here are her card photos. I can't decide on a favorite because they are all fun--although the one on the right almost doesn't even look like her to me (she looks like a doll or something I guess). Unfortunately her mobile status precludes us from getting a great shot of the cards on her chest for growth comparison, but I think these are a still fun--and of course the left-hand photo says--I'm gonna get you sucka!

Nearly 17 Pounds

Mommy took Evie to the doctor yesterday because she seemed a little crabby and snuffly and we were worried about her. She checked out perfectly--no infections, just a yucky cold. She weighed in at 16 lbs, 15 oz which is pretty crazy--an entire pound in about 3 weeks. Guess she is just trying to show mommy up since I didn't weigh much more than that at 12 months! Daddy loves the hat--mommy and grandma agree it is too cute!
On Saturday, we took Evie to our first Circleville Pumpkin Festival. It was the 100th Anniversary and was a good time. It was so crowded that it never even felt cold there! We let Evie eat a teeny-tiny piece of pumpkin donut and she LOVED it. It was her first 'big people's' food since up until now she's been on the kiddie diet. The Festival itself was much bigger than we were expecting--very chaotic. I was also a little dissapointed by the lack of 'pumpkin things'. We went the last day so some stuff had closed up but the most adventurous stuff we got included: pumpkin pizza (crust, pumpkin sauce and cheese--I liked but no one else did) , pumpkin waffles and apparently there was pumpkin chili but we missed it. Everything else I've seen before--pie, fudge, ice cream, etc.Well, with that being said there is actually one thing she just discovered she does not like. PEAS. Daddy hates 'em and apparently so does Evie. When we fed them to her last night she:

• cried
• gagged & choked
• spit them back out
• generally looked ticked off

We'll probably try them again but seems like these are a no-go. We made a little video of the pea-hating extravaganza which was pretty cute, and of course daddy was so proud that she hates the peas just like he does!

In other good news (knock on wood) Evie has been doing much better at sleeping through the night so hopefully we have passed the phantom wake-up at 3:30 a.m. thing for a few weeks...months...years would be awesome!

And next week is her very first ever Halloween--can hardly wait!!!!!!

Evie's 6 Month Appointment

Evie had her 6 mo appointment today and she is not happy at all about the 3 shots she had to get. The doctor said she looked perfect, and she weighed in at 15 lbs 14 oz and measured at 26 and 1/8 inches (so mommy's guesses at 5 months were a little off).

Right now she is extremely ticked off so back to baby!

Evie is an active girl

Evie has had a big week. She went to the fair two times--once with Irene, Jer and Alaina and another time with Grandma and Shari. Now that she can be in her baby bjorn facing out she really enjoys being in there (mostly she enjoys eating it!):She also has a very cute sun hat:
We also all went out to OSU-Newark to look at the classroom moomy's class will be in--I start teaching 8/28 out there for the 3 week course.

On Thursday she did a vision study at mommy's work and made more money again--she is quite the little working girl. Afterwards we went to Tropical Bistro for lunch (which she slept through) and took her on her first trip to Tuttle Mall before her 4 month doctor appointment. Apparently mommy measures bad because she is only 25 inches long (not 25.5). She weighed in at 13 lbs 13 oz, so her weight is closer to 60% while she is still 'tall' for her age and her noggin' is huge! It just has to be big so she can have super eyes and the extra chubby cheeks! The doctor said she is doing great. The weird round dry spot on her arm turned out to be eczema and not ring worm or anything weirder. We have been using cortizone on it since Thursday and it is already almost gone! We also can start trying her on real food (rice cereal first) if we want to so we may do that soon.

On Friday we visited the Sabs and Evie got to meet baby Katie--Evie was in a bit of a snit so no pictures of the two of them together, but here she is at Sabs and here's Katie with her daddy:

Yesterday we went to Babies R Us, the library and Nana and grandpa's house. We also put together and set up her high chair and she is so small in it--total riot:
And today she's already visited grandma while we went to church and who knows what else we will do today--like I said, she is a busy little lady!

Babies Is Cool

So I got an email from one of my favorite students today and she wrote the coolest baby analogy that I thought I would share:

'I remember being a kid and seeing Polaroid pictures develop for the first time--the blank page, and then a shadowy image, and then a picture I could recognize but with odd colors, and then the real image. Is it like that with a baby--that you see her getting more and more aware of her world and becoming more and more of a personality as each day goes by? I bet it is exciting!'

I thought this was absolutely perfect--and such a great visual. It's also a good analogy for how her vision is going from total blur of next to nothing to being able to see everything in the world around her as time goes on (which is cool for an optometry student too)!

And now for an Evie story and fun fact. Here's the story:
Evie is wearing a cute new outfit from Nana today that came with little soft shoes that are a smidge big on her for now. Mommy is driving along and at a stop light looks back and sees that Evie has managed to kick off her shoe, pick it up with her left hand and has it stuffed in her mouth. That's three different tasks combined together to eat one shoe--and seems pretty crazy that she managed to coordinate this landmark event at 3 months!

And now for the fun fact: Evie weighs about 14 pounds (I weighed her on our scale at home with me holding her, then weighed me so this isn't 100% accurate). I need to measure her still too. Apparently mommy weighed 17 pounds....when she was one year old! I think Evie is going to be bigger than her mommy was, for a while at least.

Thumb

Did you know that Evie has two thumbs? She just found out herself, so it is big news! She of course has found her thumb a few times in the past, but recently she has been able to pretty reliably place it in her mouth when she wants something to soothe herself. Pretty awesome accomplishment and we don't mind if she is a 'sucker'.

We had a busy week and weekend. Evie went on her first outing without either of us when Nana took her to Magic Mountain with her cousins and family from North Carolina. Then she went to COSI with everyone which she thought was really exciting since they are running the Star Wars exhibit.

Here is Evie learning the force from Yoda. She was very interested.Evie appreciated that R2-D2 is her size...especially when compared to the Wampawho was a little scary--can't you tell?She was also afraid of Darth, but it wasn't too bad since Grandpa was there.

OK, so you probably noticed that Evie managed to sleep through the entire exhibit, several hours worth of cool stuff she didn't even know she was missing!

Sunday, Evie had a bad day. She was doing some raspy breathing so mommy gave her some nose drops to try and help her out, which seemed to work. Then later, she started scream crying like she was in really bad pain and it took us a very long time to get her calmed down. Today, I called the doctor and they said we should bring her in just in case so we went in this afternoon. She was in good health but may have had a bad bout with acid reflux. Since it was the first and only time she has been like this, we are going to wait before doing anything else. We did find out though that she weighs 12 lb 14 oz now--in about 2 weeks she has put on 12.5 ounces which is crazy. She is literally getting so big, so fast! This may be my newest favorite Evie pick:

Father's Day

Evie and mommy conspired to give daddy an awesome first father's day!
Look at how cute she is!

Daddy got the 'obligatory tie' he asked for, a dress shirt, stepping stone with Evie's foot in it and a photo scrapbook from shutterfly (as a note this links to the site not the book, which you can see if you visit us:) ). He also got funds for whatever he wants to use them for and some nice polo shirts from our parents.

We also got Grandpa his own scrapbook:Hopefully daddy will post and tell everyone about his first father's day soon!

At Evie's 2 mo. appointment she got 4 yucky shots which she was ok with (somewhat fussy but mostly sleepy), and has gotten soooo big. She weighed 12 lb 1.5 oz, 24 inches long. This puts her in the 80%tile for weight and 92% for height!

Four Week Doctor's Visit

Mommy and Daddy took Evie to her 4 week doctor's appointment today. She is doing really well and is almost 10 lbs already!

Her stats:
9 lb 14 oz (55%)
22 in (75%)
15 in head circumference (75%)

So she is a long and skinny kid with a big noggin' (thank goodness her head wasn't that big at birth!). Everything else was good. She goes back at 2 months and gets yucky shots then--2 vaccinations in each leg:(

Evie's First Play Date

Evie had many firsts already this week, including her one week birthday today.

Yesterday, the Fish's came over and we had a wonderful time being new families together. It was also Evie's first 'play date' and they were so cute together--it is funny how different they are in size (and notice how aware they are of each other-not):

Then this morning she had her one week Doctor appointment. She is now 20 1/8 inches long and weighs 7 lb 14 oz, surpassing her birth weight already (which usually takes 2 weeks and not one!) This means that we do not have to wake her to feed her which is very cool and also that the breastfeeding is going well and is actually working. Here she is with daddy in the doctor's office:

Daddy also got to use his diaper bag for the first time--he was so pumped: