Seven Months Old

Today, Violet is seven months old!

She has started eating more baby food (probably because I am making it a point to remember to give it to her). She loves bananas, pears, peaches, and sweet potatoes. She is not too keen on the cereal, though. I had to start buying the baby food that already has a grain mixed in. We even gave her formula for the first time the other day, just to see how she handled it. She drank it just fine, which makes me less anxious about leaving her for longer periods of time in the future.

Violet's personality gets funnier every day. She has started making the occasional fishy face. Sometimes she will bust up laughing about nothing at all. She loves most other kids and loves to watch Eddie and the neighbor kids play outside. She loves to be outside, so in the evenings when she is tired and fussy, but we're not ready for her to go to bed, we go out on the lawn for a while.

One of Violet's favorite things is my hair. She loves to hold it and pull it and run her fingers through it while she's falling asleep. She likes when I have pigtails because it gives her a big chunk of hair on one side to hold while I carry her around.

Violet still has no teeth and hasn't started crawling, but we imagine both those things could change any day. She still does not sleep through the night and I have big plans to start sleep training as soon as I know we'll be home for at least a solid week to establish a routine. I am setting myself up for the worst case scenario: that she will scream for 2+ hours each night before falling asleep and keep that up for at least 2 weeks. Then if it works faster, we'll be pleasantly surprised.


As far as I can tell, Violet's growth hasn't leveled off yet. I keep waiting for it to, but I'm afraid to buy any clothes for the future because she might be wearing toddler sizes before too long. Right now she fits in 12-18 month sizes and I've started buying 24 month stuff for fall and winter. Hopefully as soon as she starts moving, she'll stop growing so much for a little while.

Riding in Style

As you may recall, we gave Eddie a tricycle for his second birthday. We tried to teach him how to ride it, but no matter how much we tried, he didn't seem to get it before the winter came. I was starting to wonder if he was a little too uncoordinated. Then when I took him in for his three year well-check this year, the doctor told me that he should now be developmentally ready to learn to pedal. I wish I'd known that a year ago.

So Eddie spent this summer actually learning to ride his trike, despite looking like he could barely fit on it any more. Once he got the hang of the pedaling and could ride it without one of us behind him to push him every three feet, I got thinking about upgrading him to a real bike. Lucky for us, our friends Steve & Melissa just upgraded their son to the next size of bike, so they let us have his old 12-inch one (thanks guys). They brought it over last week, much to Eddie's delight.

After a couple of trips outside to practice, Eddie has gotten really good at riding. His biggest problems are his shoes having no traction on the bottom (so his feet slide off the pedals), the back tire having no traction (completely expected in a three year old's bike with pedal brakes), and learning to pedal without engaging the brakes. Dave patiently walked around and around the courtyard with Eddie as he learned to pedal and showed his "brand newer than yours" bike off to all the other kids. Every time he'd accidentally pedal backward and hit the brakes, Eddie would angrily say, "Hey! Who did do that?"

Now we've gotten him some new shoes and a new back tire, so he should be able to ride with ease. And we bought him a stylish new Batman helmet and bell that match his bike beautifully. He really is riding in style.

Lagoon

Last week, we went with some friends to Lagoon. It had been almost two years since the last time we went and we had high hopes that Eddie would be more adventurous this time around. He was and it was fun to see him go on rides by himself. He said they were fun, but it was difficult to judge based on his facial expressions, which looked like a mixture of fear and concentration.

He told us later that Bulgy the Whale was his favorite.

Luckily, he had some friends to ride with. Here he is with Lucy on Moonraker.

Violet spent the time lounging in the stroller looking hot and sleepy.

A First

Today Violet experienced a first: being stung by a wasp. She was stung twice on her hand and it took me a few minutes to realize that she was shrieking with good reason. At first, her whole hand turned red and swelled up, but after about an hour, the redness and swelling started to go away. I take this to mean that she is not allergic.

Motor Mouth

These days, Eddie asks a lot of questions. And I mean A LOT of questions. This makes watching a movie with him a little ridiculous -- even movies he has seen 800 times already. To let you experience this first-hand, I decided to make a list of everything Eddie said during the first ten minutes of his first viewing of Despicable Me.

"What happened?"
"Dere he is."
"There he is."
"What's wrong wif her?"
"What happened?"
"Where is he driving?"
"Where is he driving?"
"Where is he in?"
"What was he in?"
"His giant car!"
"What's in his house?"
"What's wrong with him?"
"What is he doin'?"
"Where is he going?"
"Where is he going?"
"What are those kids doin'?"
"What are they going to do in this movie?"
"Where they at?"
"What is he doin'?"
"They're at the movie theater."
"Where's he going?"
"He's gonna steal the moon!"

By my calculations, Eddie said something every 27.2 seconds. Now I understand why parents learn selective listening.