Catching Up

I feel like I've been incredibly busy in the last few weeks, which is why I haven't posted.  But when I think back to what I've done, I can't think of too much!  Since the last post when I finished my student teaching, I have been hanging out at home, playing with my favorite little man, and finishing up school work... but I guess that's enough to keep you plenty busy!

What's been taking up the most time is completing my Teacher Work Sample (which was due on Monday).  I still have a few little things to type up as formalities to being finished with everything, but I have no more big projects left.  The TWS is considered the "capstone project" and was the last step towards graduation!  It took every single part of me to not run, jump, sing, yell, and cry as I walked back to the car after turning it in.  Turns out, that's why I wasn't as excited on the last day of school...because I wasn't done.  Now... Now I am done!! :)  Despite having food poisoning Saturday-Sunday, we got it in on time and it was awesome.  I will officially graduate in December, but the work is over.

This whopper of a paper was 47 pages pre-editing.  Of course, I'm a crazy editor and love to tear my paper apart and make it as concise as possible.  I think I ended up getting it down to 35 pages. 

I could hardly contain my excitement.  Woot woot!

Onto what you really want to read about... ;)

Every other second has been Sir Jimmie.  For the last week and a half, he's been in a "Wonder Week" or a "leap" and needed a lot of Mommy.  And I totally don't mind that! I'm just glad that I have the luxury of being able to take care of my little man.  The "signs" of this leap are "Cries more, more often or longer; Asks for more attention; Sleeps less or worse and eats less; Has mood swings; Is not pleased with many things".  HAHA!  Let me just tell you, this describes his behavior right now to a T.  And we have 19 more days before it's over.  Woohoo!

The reason for this fussiness is because he is growing up SO fast!! He is surprising me every day by how much he learns, grows, and improves in everything he does.  These moments are bittersweet, but I am loving them.  Despite the fussiness, we manage to get quite a bit of smiles out of this guy!!  I think for the remainder of the post, I'll just post pictures with little explanations because it's been a while since I just did a photo blast post.  We get A LOT of pictures, not just because I like to take pictures... but because when he's fussy, one of his favorite things is seeing himself in the camera.  So we take a lot of pictures to avoid the big meltdowns :)

(This necklace you see in these pictures is an amber teething necklace.  It's supposed to help with teething and is to be left on all the time to be effective.  I don't feel like explaining how they work.  No they don't chew on them.  That's the glory of Google folks! I'm just gonna say...it's working for us!  He's wearing it in all of these pictures, you just can't always see it because of his chubbiness!)

And somedays, he doesn't want to be put down at all, like many babies.  Then we resort to the k'tan.  Thank heavens for baby wearing! (Don't worry, I fixed the straps!)

Jimmie likes to be like Daddy

We've been burning a lot of Christmas candles around here :) Jimmie's fascinated by them and they seem to help him sleep better in the evenings when I'm still up and he's asleep.  Nice!

Oh, hi guys!

He became pro at doing this... so we had to take the poles off of the play mat so that it didn't fold over on his face.  It was good while it lasted.

Sometimes the days are long, but the nap times are awesome!

and so are the play times!

We got to babysit my friend Rachel's daughter, who is 1, the other day.  They were fascinated by one another...

And we made some Christmas cookies!

Okay, this was about the sweetest moment, I HAD to capture it!  These kinds of snuggles are becoming more and more rare.  But the really cool thing about this is that I had my iTunes on shuffle, just listening to music.  A slow song came on that I listened to a lot during my pregnancy.  He had been sitting on my lap just playing and dancing, but when this song came on, he stopped and snuggled up against me.  Oh my gosh, I nearly died.  It was SO cute, and I couldn't believe it!

We're transitioning to sleeping in the crib.  Do I need to tell you how he feels about this?

He's also in his Johnny Jumper now! He doesn't jump a ton yet, but likes to spin and swing.  He kinda jumps but mostly likes the freedom of movement while standing :)

Trying to do a lot more tummy time... trying anything to get him to stay on the tummy.  Using the front facing camera worked for about 30 seconds.

This girl has been sooo funny with Jimmie recently.  She loves to go sit about a foot away from him and hope he plays with her.  She is always within about 2 feet of him, I can't even keep them apart!

He is starting to develop relationships and figure stuff out and has become fascinated with Nala.  Seriously best friends.  She has been SO good with him.  He has pulled her tail, her fur, her whiskers, her tongue, and she doesn't care.  She just keeps lovin' him! She seems to understand that he's very small and fragile.  But she doesn't understand that she needs to "keep her paws off" of him.  We'll need to stay more on top of keeping her nails filed just in case.  

 We also celebrated our 2 year wedding anniversary.  We got a babysitter for Jimmie (which we haven't in a really long time) and went out on a date together.  I got to plan it this year, per my request, and wanted to do some things that we wouldn't be able to with Jimmie.  I wanted it to be more about having  good old fun than serious with like a romantic dinner. (Nothing wrong with that, I just think it's important to just go have good old fashion, little kid, fun sometimes!)  So we looked into a roller rink and turns out there's one in the town next to Provo that does $2 Tuesdays... WIN-WIN!  It was a lot of fun roller blading... neither of us had done it in so long.  But turns out that IS something we can do with Jimmie.  There was a lady who brought her family who was pushing her baby in the stroller on the rink while roller blading.  It was pretty funny, but a great idea! The good news is, we can go back whenever we want and I imagine Jimmie will actually quite like it.  We got some dinner and went out to "The Chocolate" for dessert (which doesn't JUST have chocolate in case you were wondering).  We decided to start a Christmas tradition of going out for dessert or hot chocolate where we create a plan of action for Christmas shopping and get some Christmas shopping for kids done together.  It was a lot of fun!  Not like Jimmie would know right now if we took him shopping for his Christmas shopping right now anyway, but it's always good to establish family traditions early :)

 I can never get him to take silly pictures with me.  I succeeded!!

Well, no wonder we'd never seen it before.  Only the finest quality for our anniversary, haha!

What a strapping young man!

We also took a few pictures for Christmas cards.  So you may see some of these a bit later, next month :) But here's a little preview of the cute little guy

It was so much fun! He loved that garland so much.

One of the Christmas presents that we got for Jimmie was a high chair!  Most babies start foods around 6 months, but lots start earlier than that.  We've been waiting because he didn't seem like he needed it and wasn't really showing any desire to eat.  But within the last few weeks he's starting going for my spoon while I'm eating, watching me intently with an open mouth haha.  His tongue thrust instinct is mainly gone, he's sitting, up and wants to eat.  So we decided to start with avocados!

 These pictures are from the first day... from getting to test out his new present...starting to eat...and finally just playing with it and having some fun. We made a big mess, but it was well worth it!  I don't really know how much he actually got down, but he was a trooper. 

Day 2:  Avocados

(We're following the 4 day rule to see how he adjusts to it/make sure he doesn't have any issues with it before moving on to more foods)

Mom was smarter, portioned out the avocado for 3 days instead of mashing the whole thing, eating a little, and throwing the rest away.  

Jimmie was way more accepting of the food.  In fact, after he remembered what we were doing, he was opening his mouth and lunging to get it all in there. 

We didn't let him play with the food today, so we just required a good wipe down when we were done.

 Get that food in there, Mom!

He was very insistent on helping get that food into his mouth.  It's not acceptable for me to feed him, he would like to do it himself.  However, when Mom doesn't help, the spoon magically transforms into a drumstick.  Imagine that! He liked it a lot and is doing great at this practice of solid foods!

I have a million videos from the last month because he has just been growing by leaps and bounds.  I can't believe the amount of stuff he's able to do now! I'm going to sort them in a day or so and get some of them up.  

He's been doing a lot of this recently.  He's so independent...being able to sit up and play by himself.  (I still leave the boppy a little bit behind him in case he topples...but that only happens every once and a while).  In fact, he has been sitting up and playing with his toys in front of me throughout this entire post that I've written.  He's SUCH a big boy!!  Getting to be so independent! 

We're loving him so much.  I'll get some more videos up soon.  

Just needed to get this post up before next week because we're going to California for Thanksgiving to see Steph, Marc, and meet baby Karsten!  Can't wait! 

Until then,

Em