9 Months

I completely missed my 8-month post and now Spencer is already 9 months old!  We went to his checkup today and he's health and well.  17lbs 11oz, 29.3 inches tall, big head.  He's still our bobblehead baby.  He's in the 70 and 80% range for height and head circumference and the 8th for weight.  Someone I know coined a new name for him.  He's my lollipop baby.  So funny.  Really though, he is growing like a weed.

He's pulling himself up and cruising everywhere he can and has been for a month now.  I forecast walking by Thanksgiving or not that much after.  He is in love with moving.  He still only army crawls unless he doesn't like what he's on; then he will get up on all fours.

He's still just so expressive.  He finds everything funny and laughs all the time.  He thinks it's hilarious if I say 'boo' to him, so I do it on a regular basis.  His favorite game is for me to crawl away from him around a corner and he'll chase me and then when he comes around the corner I yell 'boo' and he jumps and laughs and laughs.  Then we do it all again.

He's chewing on everything.  He has six teeth--four upper teeth and two lower.  He seems to be teething again, as he's chewing on everything in sight.  He loves food.  He eats most anything I give him.  He wants anything I'm eating now.  I'm still trying to let go and just let him go at food and get crazy dirty, but it'll come.

For a while he thought it was hilarious to buzz his lips, though mostly he just ended up spitting all over everything.  He's now moved on to opening his mouth as wide as he can and sticking his tongue out as far as it goes.  What a goof!  He especially loves doing both things when we will do it to him and then he mimics us back.

He babbles all the time. He loves to say mamamamama... though he will also come out with dadadada sometimes too.  I don't think he is calling me specifically that, but when he's sad, that's what he says until I come pick him up.  I imagine he really is calling me mama and smile every time. :)  He talks all the time.  He is not a quiet child, that is for sure.

He is super curious.  His favorite thing is to go to a new place so he can go exploring.  He of course tastes everything new he finds, even if it means getting flat on the floor so he can suck on a doorstop.  Gross, but amusing.  Hopefully that curiosity will become more constructive as he gets older, but I imagine I will find him in lots of places I don't want him along the way.

That's all I can think of for the moment.  Yay for 9 months!

Hello world!

Hi everyone.  I disappeared for a month.  But not really.  I'm still here.  It's just that Spencer chewed on my computer power cord and it stopped working and I ordered a new cord and it took two weeks to arrive.  What the heck?!  Nothing takes that long to ship these days.  Then when it got here it was cut in a couple places.  So it's going back and I will have to wait another while for a new one to arrive.  But for now I can upload pictures and blog and feel happy using my mac instead of my husband's PC, and life is good. :) 

So what has been happening lately? Lots of stuff!  We went camping for the first time.  How has it taken us this long to get out camping with Spencer?  Oh well.  Water under the bridge. It was so fun.  We just went to a state park campground outside of Midway, but we went with Bill's dad and cooked cobbler in our dutch oven, consumed some of those huge campfire marshmallows, cooked outside and therefore the food tasted amazing, slept in a tent, and generally had a great time.

Oh, and I cut my hair.  Bad picture but good haircut.  I like it.  Spencer can't pull it as often.  It's super easy to style.  Good times.  I'll probably grow it out again now. :)  Speaking of Spencer, he has been learning lots of stuff.

How to stand up

 How to do pullups

 How to climb stairs

 How to stuff his face full of food

 How to pull off all the toilet paper on the roll

You know. Important stuff.

Oh, and I got a job.  The MPA department at BYU called me and asked if I would come back and be a teaching assistant for one of the professors for his statistics class in the Executive MPA program.  I was flattered.  I said yes.  Now I'm one step closer to my dream of teaching college.  It's fun. 

So yeah, that's mostly it for the moment.  Life is good.  We're good.  Bill just discovered he has two instead of three semesters left.  Joy!  Things are going well.

Toy Box

I was so excited to move into our new house at the beginning of August because it's so much bigger so that meant I'd be able to build more stuff, since our apartment was totally maxed out.  Well, sort of.  I did build a pantry.  But it turns out that even with an extra bedroom, a real dining room, and a bigger living room, we didn't have need for much of anything new, except for one thing: a toy box.  Since our living room has become Spencer's playroom, I felt the need for a place to corral the toys, at least at the end of the day.  Plus, I really wanted to build something!

I used the extra plywood from the pantry and a plan from ana-white.com and went to town.  It's taken quite a bit longer than I expected because I've been busy with other things and could only really work on it while Spencer napped, but I finally finished it today and I love how it turned out.

I might add some letters on the side that say TOYS, but we'll see

I got to use my new jigsaw to cut the curves for the bottom.  I love getting new tools

Standing

Spencer wasn't going to sleep as fast as he normally does when I put him down for his nap today, and eventually he started screaming more than normal, so I walked in to see what was the matter.  He was standing up in his crib.  Oh boy!  This is going to be exciting.  I tried to put him back down and watched him through the crack in the door.  He pulled himself right up his little mirror attached to the side of his crib and then cried piteously for me.  When I didn't come in he tried to grab for the end of the crib without moving his feet and wound up falling face first into the slats on the end of the crib.  So bring on the standing.  Hopefully he learns to move his feet a little before he gets too many head injuries.  The child is fearless.

Why do babies hate sleeping so much?

Spencer is currently laying in his crib crying piteously "ma ma ma ma ma" while he kicks his feet against the mattress or the sides of the crib or the wall, whichever way he happens to be turned at the moment.  Albeit endearing, I wish he would just go to sleep.  He's much happier when he sleeps, yet somehow he acts like I'm torturing him when I put him down for a nap.  I don't get what's so bad about it.  I would love to sleep for hours during the day.  :)

So I realized I have taken significantly less pictures of Spencer recently, and he was wearing the cutest new outfit today, so on a whim I pulled out the camera.  Did I get any good pictures?  Uh, no.  At least none smiling.  He is generally such a happy little guy.  He laughs and smiles all the time.  But when I pull the camera out, total stone face.  See the proof?

 

 

 

 

 Rest assured though, he is generally smiley and happy.  I think he's teething.  Actually, I know he is since he just pushed through one of his top teeth.  Not his front two.  One of the side ones.  He's going to look like such a jack 'o lantern when it comes in enough to see it.  He's already got his bottom two middle ones.  We didn't even know he was teething until it came through, but now I think he must be working on more because he's been super fussy for the last couple days. 

In other news, he's started pulling himself up!  It's so fun to watch.  It opens a whole new world of interesting things to play with.  Bill and I are definitely his favorite objects to pull up on.  See?

 Oops, fell down!

 And if you're still reading this, I had to take a couple pictures of him sitting to prove that he can indeed do it, even though he generally refuses to.  Who does that?  He won't bend his legs, or he'll push back against my hand until he's laying down.  He just likes to crawl.  Sitting is boring.  What a goof.  But he's my goof. :)

 

 

 

 

 

7 Months

I nearly missed it!  Spence is halfway to 8 months now.  He's still growing like a weed.  He's so tall compared to other kids his age, and he's finally starting to fill out a bit.  He's been eating solid food for several months now and just loves it.  When he particularly likes something he says "mmmm" every few bites.  It's cute.  He's got pretty strong opinions about some foods.  Green beans are not his friend.  Neither are carrots or peas.  He'll eat any fruit though as fast as I can get it in his mouth.  The other day I fed him some avocado and black beans from what we were having for dinner and he was in heaven.  He's also learned to feed himself cereal.  At first he could get it in his hand but couldn't figure out how to get it to his mouth, but lately he's learned how to pick things up with his thumb and pointer finger.

He's still army crawling like crazy.  He gets up on his hands and knees and rocks a bit, but then is off like a rocket army crawling.  He doesn't care to take the time to learn to crawl normally since he can move everywhere he wants on his stomach.  His clothes are showing a bit worse for wear, but it's all good.  He just learned on Wednesday how to pull himself up on things, and he thinks that's the bees knees.  He loves being in the middle of things.  If we leave him on the floor playing too long, he comes and head butts our legs until we pick him up.  He really is fantastic about playing on his own though.  It's great for me because I can get lots of things done.  As long as he can come find me every now and then, he is good to go.  Well, unless he's tired.  But that's understandable.

Sleeping has been quite the interesting issue the last few months.  He has struggled a bit, but he's doing better now.  He take two or three good naps a day and if I get him totally full before he goes to bed he'll sleep until about 5 or 6AM.  He still wakes up a lot in the middle of the night though.  We're working on that. 

He's talking up a storm.  He keeps trying out new syllables.  So far he says 'g', 'b', 'w', 'm', and lots of 'ahs'.  So cute.  He'll talk to us or his toys or just to himself.  I just love my little guy! 

Painting

Painting.  Yup.  That pretty much sums up my last month.  See, my parents hired Bill and I to redo their deck.  This is not just any deck.  It's one of those decks with a slatted roof over the top. Read lots of details, so lots of sitting on the hot roof painting 2x2s.  We have been working on it since the first of August and just about finished the first coat on Wednesday.  Now we've got to do it all again for the second coat.  Thank goodness that should go way faster.  The wood was so dry that i just soaked up the first coat like crazy and took a long time to paint.  Oh, and 6 cans of paint.  Wow.  I'll have to post a picture when we finish, because it looks fantastic now. 

So since we're doing all this painting at my parent's house, what did I decide to do in the rest of my time?  Build a pantry and paint it too!  Genius. 

Actually, I really love how it turned out.  We have lots of cabinets in our kitchen but no pantry, and I've never been a fan of putting my food in cupboards.  The kitchen cabinets are that old '70s pale oak wood color that matches nothing, so Bill and I decided to go a little crazy on the color we painted the pantry.  Nothing was going to match, so we picked a fun color: yellow!  It's definitely a conversation piece. So fun. I got green covers for the shelves, so this is definitely an eye catcher.

Some vids of army crawling

Spencington is getting so good at army crawling.  He's starting to get up on his knees too, and even toes sometimes, though he doesn't move at all yet when he does that except to push off.  He's also starting to get more independent.  He and Bill do this cute thing where they go on an adventure together.  Here's a couple videos of them doing it.  Sometimes Bill leads, and now Spencer is starting to lead, or just head off on his own completely.  It's cute.  Of course I think everything he does is cute, except for throwing temper tantrums when it's time to go to bed, but nobody is cute when they do that. :)

Finally a minute to breathe

The last few weeks have flown by.  We have been so busy I haven't been able to stop and document any of it.  See, first we went to Island Park, ID for a family reunion.  That was fantastic.

We spent two days in Yellowstone while we were there and it was incredible.

 Then we came back home late Saturday night of that week and moved into our new house the following Monday morning.  Since then we have been unpacking, I've been teaching a class, Bill has been going to his summer class, and Spencer has been growing a couple teeth.  Oh, and then yesterday we took a quick trip down to southern Utah for a family baptism.  It's been insane, but I finally have a moment to breathe and relax.  It feels nice.

To sum it all up, the family reunion was tons of fun and Yellowstone was amazing.  I would love to go back there again but this time camp and hike. 

I love our new house except for the mosquitoes that got in while we were moving.  At least that's what I am hoping. We killed about 15 of them before we went to bed last night.  We're still renting, but having a yard and a washer/dryer, and a bigger place than our old apartment is wonderful.  I love the class I'm teaching.  I would love to keep teaching college classes.  Here's hoping I can make it happen.  Spencer is as cute as can be with his new teeth, though I refuse to get my fingers anywhere near his mouth now because that child bites hard!

 He has started pulling all sorts of funny faces and cheesy smiles.  They are adorable.

 He's moving now too, everyone beware!  So that's the last three weeks in fast forward. :)