9 months

I'm a little late with this, but Arthur turned 9 months old on the 4th!  His checkup isn't until later in the month so I don't know how big he is officially yet, but he is definitely a growing boy!  He mostly wears 12 month or 12-18 month clothes, though some of his 12 month clothes are starting to be too tight if he's wearing his cloth diapers.  He now has his 4 front teeth, tons of hair, and a huge personality!  Here are just a few of the times he has made me laugh in the past few days.

• Yesterday I ran some errands by myself and came home to find Arthur looking at a book on the floor.  He saw me and his face broke out into a huge smile and he started army crawling towards me as fast as he can go.  He got part way to me and then turned around, grabbed the book he had been reading, and brought it to me.  He wanted me to read him the book!  He sat in my lap and we read it 3 times in a row.  And he didn't even want to stop then - the boy LOVES books!  Here are some of his favorites if you want recommendations.
• His new favorite game is to be chased!  If he thinks that I'm going to pick him up, he giggles and starts crawling away as fast as possible.  He even does this in his crib, which is pretty funny because it's not like he can go far!
• The other day I was giving him a bath and he peed.  He looked down and watched the little fountain he was making and was extremely interested in this new discovery.  He thought it was hilarious, and spent the rest of the bath looking down and waiting for it to happen again.
• Last night I was giving him a bath and he was playing with a cup.  I put out my hand and said, "Can you hand me the cup?"  After saying this several times he smiled and handed me the cup.  This went back and forth for a while and I called Hunter in to see it.  Arthur handed me the cup again, and then Hunter put out his hand and said, "Can you hand the cup to Dada?"  Arthur grabbed the cup, giggled a lot, and crawled away from Hunter as fast as he could.  Of course he could only go like 2 feet because he was in the bath, but he made his point!  He has quite the sense of humor!
• He is all over the place now, and of course sometimes we have things lying around that he shouldn't get into.  The other day I was fixing dinner and Arthur started crawling right up to a tool that had been left out that he shouldn't touch.  He was clearly going for it.  I used my stern voice and said, "Arthur, no touch."  He stopped about a foot away from it, looked up at me, and smiled his biggest smile.  I didn't smile back and I kept saying, "No touch."  He kept smiling at me, like he was trying to get me to smile back, and when it didn't work he finally moved on and didn't touch it!  I just *know* that if I had smiled back at him, he would seen that as permission to touch it.
• His list of potential words ("Is he really saying that?  Or am I just imagining it?  Was that just a coincidence?") is growing.  There's now "nana" for banana (that one is pretty consistent), "dada" (he seems to just say this when Hunter is around), "mama" (though this seems to mean food, not me), and "bah" for ball.  "Eh-nor" (Eleanor) and "eh-che" (leche) have disappeared.  I remember Eleanor doing that too - she would use a word for a month and we would be all excited about it and then not hear it again for 3 or 4 months.
• Arthur is LOUD.  I love him and his hilarious personality, but I really, really wish that he had a volume knob sometimes.  Usually when he starts getting loud it's because he's tired or hungry, but sometimes he just starts screaming when he's frustrated with a toy or book.

How my baby sleeps

We contained him!  Temporarily...

Arthur and his cousin chasing the dog

Playing with Micah

9-month-old cousins!

You can see the bottom teeth

 

Getting into his books

And just to balance out the Arthur pictures, here are some of my sweet girl!

Licking the spoon after making rice krispie treats for the 4th

Budding scientist

P.S.  This is my 500th post.  Whoa!

Books we love for babies

We have a very large selection of board books, and when Eleanor was about 9-12 months old there were some that were clearly her favorites and some that she got bored with after 2 pages.  (Sandra Boynton books, for example.  She never liked any of those books until she was probably 18+ months old.)  Now that Arthur is getting into books, it's pretty interesting to me that the same books are *his* favorites and he gets bored with the same ones she did.  So, I just thought I'd share a few of their favorites if you're ever book shopping for a baby.  You can click on any of the covers to see them on Amazon.

And these are some that Arthur loves but we didn't have when Eleanor was a baby:

Rainy days

We had to come up with some new ways to keep busy these last few days!

This is what you do when you need to clean the kitchen but have two kids who want to be right next to you

This is a bird sensory bin I made for her recently.  Filling it with bird seed sounded like a good idea until I kept stepping on it everywhere no matter how much I swept it up...  This time I was actually smart enough to put a blanket down first.

Forget the birds.  Dinosaurs have invaded!

Dinosaurs took over the water table, too.

Working out with Daddy!

Update

Well, it's been a while.  Here are some of our latest little happenings:

Arthur is growing!  He has officially grown out of some of his 12 month clothes, though it depends on the brand.  I'm really glad there's a consignment sale next month because he'll probably outgrow everything he owns by then.  He is also quite mobile now.  He's not fast and he doesn't just go, go, go, but if he sees something he wants he goes and gets it...including Mama working in the kitchen.  Yesterday I spent about 2 hours cleaning the floors, under furniture, etc. to make sure everything is clean for him.  A crawling baby is big motivation to keep your floor clean!  Oh, and he is also definitely a little people person.  We had VBS this week and Arthur was in the nursery while I volunteered.  One of the nursery workers told me that he is the happiest baby she's ever seen.  She knew Eleanor as a baby too and said that Eleanor didn't cry and liked to observe everybody, but Arthur just smiles at everybody all the time.  What is this extroverted little boy going to do in this family?

Eleanor is growing up and really turning into a little preschooler...or maybe I should say teenager because she already thinks she knows more than me.  The other day around 2:00 she said, "It is not evening."  I said, "You're right, it's afternoon."  I went on to explain that afternoon means after lunchtime and that we just ate lunch a while ago.  She started laughing and said, "That is NOT how it goes, Mama!"  I've gotten this response several times lately!

Yesterday morning we heard her wake up on the monitor telling a story that went something like this:  "Eleanor was making cookies for Brock [a little boy she knows] with Mama, but Daddy STOLE the cookie!  Daddy came in and took the very last cookie and ate up the cookie!"  Of course, nothing about this story was true.  Hunter went up to take her to the bathroom and asked her about it and said, "Did that really happen, Eleanor?"  "No..." "It sounds like maybe it was a dream."  "Yes!  It was a dream."  So if you wonder what little kids dream about, there you go!

Like I said, we had VBS this week but we ended up leaving early on Wednesday when I realized Eleanor was sick.  Over the past few days Arthur, Eleanor, and I have been sick off and on, but I'm hoping we're almost done with it.  Yuck.

Now for pictures...

Playing together!  Finally!

Sweet sleepy boy

At a park by the river

(And this is the last picture I have of her because she does not like the camera!)

Arthur enjoyed the river, too

He likes Eleanor's train set!

Uh oh, now where will the train go?

Cousin love!

He's starting to get into things!

"I'm stuck!"

Riding on the tricycle for the first time!

He's not super fast, but he can get what he wants
(And those are 24 month pajamas!  The legs are too long, but otherwise they fit.  The poor kid doesn't have any in size 18 months so we just make bigger hand me downs work.  Why buy new ones when he'll be out of them in a month?)

This video makes me laugh.  It's a little old - thankfully Eleanor has gotten better about sharing with her brother.  She has also learned that if she plays with her toys up on the couch then Arthur can't get to her...for now.  ;)  Sometimes she's really sweet about sharing with him, but not always!

New Eleanor-isms

These are all just from this morning!

• Gesturing around at the inside of our house, "This is MYYY house.  It's not Mama's house, but my house!"  (She knew she was being funny.)  Me: "Oh really?  How much money did you pay for it?"  "I paid lots of dollars!"  "How many dollars?"  "I paid FIVE dollars!"  Oh, if only...  :)
• In the car, passing a restaurant with a large American flag outside:  "There's a flag!  It's a gigantic flag!'  "Yes Eleanor, that's our country's flag.  You know, our country has a birthday in July and you have a birthday in July!"  She thought for a minute, started to laugh, and said, "But it doesn't have a mouth so it can't eat cake!"
• We went to Target and I had a list but I knew there was one thing I forgot to write down.  I explained this to Eleanor and told her that I was trying to remember what else I needed.  She gave me helpful suggestions that we really did need (avocado, for example), but I told her that I was planning to get those things at our next stop at Publix.  Then she got a big smile on her face and said, "I know what it was!  A great, BIG dinosaur!"  She was holding 2 of her dinosaurs in the shopping cart with her and I know what she meant was that she wanted me to buy her more dinosaurs.  :)  So funny!
• Somehow we ended up talking about Halloween yesterday and I told her what she's been for the past 3 years.  (pea pod, strawberry, black cat)  Today she told me that she wants to be a Dilophosaurus for Halloween this year, and that I should be a Tyrannosaurus Rex, Hunter should be a "flying dinosaur" (Pterodactyl), and Arthur should be a "spine-o-saurus" (aka Stegosaurus).  I'm halfway tempted to try to make it happen just because it would be so funny!

Of course, there aren't any Arthur-isms yet, but he's working on it!  I'm almost convinced that he's been trying to say Eleanor's name whenever he sees her.  Also, whenever I nurse him I call it "leche" and there have been several times lately that he has made a sound like "eh-che" when he is about to nurse.  A few times he's even pulled off and said it and then gone back to nursing.  It's not consistent though, and sometimes I think I'm just imagining it.

"Real food"

I was recently inspired by this website to try to only eat real food - meaning no processed foods, no foods with ingredients I can't pronounce, and no food with sugar or white flour in it.  Now, I'm not doing it 100% - even my Stonyfield organic yogurt and my 100% whole wheat bread have sugar in them.  And if I go out to eat (which we do about once/week), I'm going to enjoy my meal and not ask a thousand questions like whether or not there is sugar in the soy sauce.  However, I did make my own plain yogurt the other day and so far, so good.  Hunter's still afraid to eat it, but he said he'll try it if I eat it for a week and don't die or anything.  :)  I also have plans to eventually make my own sugar-free whole wheat bread, but I'm not there yet.

The best part?  I have more energy than I've had in a while.  I was really surprised that after just a few days it made that much of a difference, but it did.  Nap/quiet time came around yesterday and instead of wanting to just go lie down, I organized my drawers and closet and cleaned out the pantry.  This isn't really a drastic change for us because we really don't eat many processed foods in the first place - we make pretty much everything from scratch - but even just cutting out little things here and there makes a difference.

Anyway, I just wanted to share a few of my favorite recipes/tips that I've found so far.

• In the mornings I've been drinking iced coffee (love this way of making it) and I add a little bit of almond milk and maple syrup.  Yes, maple syrup.  You really can't tell the difference and it's a natural sweetener.
• Love this whole wheat banana bread
• Here's my recipe for yogurt in a crock pot, and the berry sauce that I eventually plan to make to go with it.  So far I've just been adding a little bit of honey to it but the berry sauce sounds better.
• These cookies are SO good!  Yes there's some sugar in the chocolate chips, but that's it.
• And I love this granola recipe.  I make it with dried cranberries and for the nuts I do half sliced almonds, half pecan pieces.  Sometimes I reduce the amount of maple syrup, but I can tell the difference.
• I love eating this sandwich for lunch, though I leave off the green goddess sauce.
• Another way of satisfying my sweet tooth - mix a frozen banana, some almond milk (maybe 1/2 cup?), and 2 T of cocoa powder in a blender.  It seriously tastes like chocolate ice cream.

Last day of school! (and more)

Today was Eleanor's last day of school!  Here's the obligatory picture.  Lots of silly poses today!

She did NOT want to put the stick down!

Today they celebrated the 3 summer birthdays at the end of the day.

Here she is listening to everybody sing to her

Chocolate hands!

Posing with the lead teacher

Her favorite activity at school (no surprise!)

The other night we had enchiladas that definitely had a kick to them.

I think Arthur enjoyed them.

Here's a video of my funny, funny boy:


Hunter took the kids to the zoo to see the temporary dinosaur exhibit.  (What, there are no dinosaurs at your zoo?)