Utah Trip: Dana's Baby Shower

The real reason we went out to Utah was for my friend Dana's baby shower and her brother's wedding. It was fun seeing friends from Midland. I don't have any photos from the wedding reception though. The picture below is Dana and me at her shower. I had fun looking at all the cute baby girl things she got.

Dana, me, Kim and Natalie

Utah Trip: Hang out with Kim and Ty

Beckett and I took a trip out to Utah with my family at the beginning of May. While we were there we got to spend some time with my friend Kim and her cute little boy Tyler. Here are a few pictures from our visit. Ty is so full of smiles and has beautiful blue eyes. He's about 3 1/2 months younger than Beckett. The boys enjoyed watching each other and poking each other's face. Ty thought the blossoms were tasty.

Beckett liked playing with Ty's toys. This photo of him reminds me of baby pictures of my brothers.

Here the two are together. I couldn't really tell any difference in size until the two were seated next to each other. It would be nice if we lived closer so we could hang out more often.

5 year Anniversary

9 Months old

9 Month Stats:

Weight: 16 pounds - less than 3% (They want to have us come in for weight checks again because he's below his growth curve- but I think it's just because he doesn't really eat solids.)

Height: 27 1/2 inches- 25-50% (The last appointment was obviously mismeasured because they said he was 28 inches and 90%. I thought that was off- I guess I should have asked for them to remeasure.)

Head: 18 3/4 inches- 95-97% (his big head is holding strong)

Dan went to Portland a few weeks ago for a library conference. This was the first time he's been away from us since Beckett was born and he was going to be gone for almost a week. I thought I might go crazy if I was only around a baby for a week- so I convinced my family to come and visit over the weekend. Dan was like "I expect Beckett to be sleeping through the night when I get back." So the first night Beckett woke up a few times and I just let him cry it out. When he woke up around 5:30 a.m. I decided to feed him. Then the next few nights he didn't wake up until about 5:30 a.m. And that has been pretty much how it's been since- except for a few nights. It's so nice cutting out about 4 awakenings. We just need to get him a little more consistent with taking good naps.
Beckett now can wave and clap his hands. He loves the song "If you're happy and you know it" and he will clap his hands when you sing it.He loves sucking on a spoon- however he still won't touch food that comes in a spoon- just finger foods for Beckett. My family was here a few weeks ago and they all tried to see if they could get him to eat pureed- no one succeeded. I still haven't tried too much finger foods (still the main foods are baby mum mum and the grain puffs) with him because I'm too nervous. This picture was from last night- we tried giving him kiwi- he made sour faces- but he still ate it.

Beckett loves taking baths now- since he can sit and play with toys the whole time.

Spring is finally here! We have pretty flowers blooming in our yard and it's warm enough to take walks now. Yea! But we'll probably still get another snowstorm sometime before summer- we usually do.This past month we've discovered two things Beckett's scared of. Dogs barking at him- and going through the car wash.
Here's Beckett with his friend Reese- she's about 6 months older than him.

Beckett is loving getting into things, pulling things off shelves, and opening and closing doors- he'll soon have to learn what I did about slamming doors on your fingers. Beckett hasn't progressed much with the crawling- he still does the army crawl- just a little quicker now. Here he had crawled under the night stand to get the telephone.He loves walking and is getting better and better. He pretty much can do it by himself. He's just super cautious and prefers get around by holding on to furniture or anything that might support him becuase he's still a little tipsy at times. The video shows him walking across his bedroom by himself.

I like to tease Dan that Beckett's going to take after me and do tumbling and cheerleading. Beckett has great balance, likes being upside down and high up, he loves doing flips, flying through the air and dancing/bouncing. Last week Beckett did a head dive over our couch and landed on our hard wood floors. But of course he still likes to hang over the couch.

However Beckett is a total boy- he already thinks farting is funny. He's super active-doesn't like to sit still. He loves running, kicking a soccer ball around, and is fascinated by mechanical toys.Since it has be warmer here Dan has been able to get out on some bike rides- which makes him happy. Beckett and I usually go along and hang out while he rides.

8 Months

At eight months Beckett is getting better at walking- still he needs a little assistance. We got him a walker that he can actually reach the floor in. Beckett is a happier boy now and so am I. I'm able to get a couple of things accomplished while he's awake now without him fussing. We are now discovering ways we need to baby proof our home. He likes the pull the leaves off our little tree and eat the dirt. Thankfully for now he has a little bit of a barrier in between things with the walker. He races all around the house in that thing- we have wood floors so he can fly. He loves playing hide and seek and chase. He's also learned if you run real fast, then you can pick up your feet and just glide for awhile. He still is pretty much exclusively breastfed, eating every 2 hours or less- because the stinker won't eat baby food. We've started trying giving him finger foods which makes me so nervous because he doesn't know how to swallow- he gags every time even if it's teeny bit of puree. He'll eat anything you give him as long as it's not baby food that needs to be eaten with a spoon. But right now he gets very little food other than milk so we can hardly count that. Last weekend we went out to lunch in Grand Junction and an older couple (strangers) was looking at Beckett "Oh he's so cute- except I might turn you in for child abuse- because it looks like you don't feed him". The main finger foods we've been giving him recently in tiny pieces are baby mum mums, freeze-dried apples, and cheerios. It's great because at restaurants we can now put him in a high chair and give him some little snacks to try to pick up and eat and he's entertained. He feels included like a big boy, so he doesn't get fussy.

We still let him walk around a lot without the walker. He's really good at walking around by grabbing onto furniture. He's starting to stand on his tip toes to grab something he can't quite reach. He likes grabbing onto things like our floor lamp. He likes to shake it back and forth and almost knock it over. He's starting to try to pull drawers open. It won't be long before he's going to be a major disaster. He loves exploring. Anytime I open the dishwasher, fridge or freezer he races over before I close the door so he can grab and see so many new things.

His hair is starting to get kind of long and a little bit of wave to it on the ends- it mostly starts to curl when he has crazy bed head. He grunts and hoots a lot but not really any consonant sounds- he did for like a week at 6 months and hasn't since. We still get comments all the time about how observant he is. He doesn't want to miss a thing. He's getting better about napping and sleeping.

He's finally starting to do some crawling motions. But when he's walking or crawling to try to get something, he gets just a close as he can to be able barely reach it with his fingertips by stretching. He also can go from sitting to his army crawl position if there's something he wants to reach. But it's usually really slow with occasionally splits and head dive. Just ignore in the video when I call the phone a camera. Just trying to confuse Beckett.

This video shows about the best we've got of him laughing. Ignore my head that blocks the view for a second- I was trying to hide the camera from him. He does a laugh sort of thing a lot especially when we're playing hide and seek or chase- but it sounds more like a quack. My dad says Beckett has the weirdest laugh.

Daddy's boy

Dan said I had to do a post about Beckett being a mama's boy- but I wouldn't have anything to post about. So here's some pictures of Beckett and Dan. Beckett is fascinated with Dan's bike. Sometimes Dan will ride his bike in our house and Beckett will chase after him in the walker. Now that it has been warming up here recently- Dan's done a couple bike rides in Grand Junction. Beckett gets so excited watching him and the other bikers.

About 3 weeks ago Beckett got sick for the first time. He was just starting to feel a little better when I took this photo of him helping Dan take off the empty water bottle. I'll admit when Beckett was sick he was a major mama's boy. I also learned that if Beckett is coughing/making choking-like noises you should turn his face away from you, not toward you like I did. I ended up being covered in mucus-barf.

Dan doesn't like this picture but I'm including it anyways becuase I like it.

Dan blowing on Beckett's tummy.

Chewing on toys.

Beckett in Dan's boot- I did some weird effects on the photo.

Weeend in Denver

A couple of weeks ago we went to Denver to visit family. We were able to visit with Dan's family (even though I don't have any pictures of them) and mine. My family had moved there a couple weeks prior. It was fun seeing them and checking out their new house. It was a quick trip, but we had to get back so Dan could go to work Monday. We left Sunday evening and about 6 hours later in Glenwood canyon there was a big rock slide. There were about 20 boulders on the interstate and some as big as semi-trucks. They had to close the interstate east and west bound-so if we had left after the rock slide we would have had to take a 200 mile detour to get home. I've posted a couple pictures of it from the Internet.