No Airplane Necessary

Tonight Nicholas experienced his first fruit - bananas. Of course he loved them as he has every other food (carrots, squash, and sweet potatoes). It's so funny to think of all the tricks people do to get babies to open their mouths and shove the spoon in - "Here comes the airplane" and the standard of mom or dad opening their mouth to have the baby do the same. We have never had to do this with Nicholas. If the spoon is in his line of sight, his mouth is open. The only issue we do have during dinner is keeping his hands out of his mouth. We learned early on to keep one hand restricting his movement, while the other one feeds him. All in all he is a really good eater. :-)

Prayers

It really amazes me how people can easily do the most unconscionable things. It physically hurts me to think of all the elderly people in this world that get taken advantage of by greedy, heartless, deceitful "human beings". It would take forever for me to explain the situation - let me just say I have recently witnessed an injustice of the worst kind.

My prayer is this: God, please give not only the elderly, but all of us the ability to discern friend from foe. For those who can't see the forest through the trees, I pray they listen to family and true friends who have their best interest at heart.

Kermit who?

Thanks Beth for this great pic!

Nicholas was the cutest frog ever! We went to Trunk or Treat at First Baptist in Leeds and showed off our little froggie! He was so tired since he didn't hardly nap today, but was such a trooper! Good thing his outfit was all fleece because it was cold outside.

Happy Halloween!

5 Months Old!

Nicholas is 5 months old today!

Each month that passes gets more and more fun. He is crazy about his feet and will grab both any chance he gets. This makes it hard to keep socks on his feet longer than a few minutes. We have discovered that putting shoes on solves this problem, especially since the weather is starting to get cooler.

He loves to razz for long stretches. In fact, just the other night, we let him lay in his crib for a few minutes as he was content. When we went to check on him, it looked like he was foaming at the mouth because of his constant razzing and blowing bubbles.

Nicholas still pretty much only giggles when he is naked and on his changing table. This is fine with us, just so long as we hear those precious laughs.

He is wearing size 3 diapers now and will probably continue for awhile. We are still using diapers from the shower, but we are close to running out. Again, I can't thank the Beth and Brad enough for the wonderful shower!

Thankfully Nicholas is still nursing well. When he does get a bottle, it is usually 6 oz. We also started giving him cereal in the mornings and baby food in the evenings (only carrots so far, but we will move to squash next).

His naps during the days are irregular. Recently he has had a 3 hour nap several days in a row, but he will mostly nap for 1-1.5 hours at a time. Bedtime hasn't been very consistent recently, but he is doing great about sleeping until at least 7am or later.

Saturday will be his first Halloween and he is going to look so precious in his frog costume! Stay tuned for pictures!

Happy Birthday Daddy!

Gabe - Nicholas and I wish you a happy birthday! Gabe had the day off and spent it with Nicholas and also cutting the lawn. We had a delicious dinner at Mimi and Pop's followed by a combo platter of desserts.

Yesterday was another day of firsts. Nicholas and I had our first pumpkin carving (I know Pawpaw claims we did one when we were little, but sorry I don't remember it) :) Daddy carved a great scary pumpkin!





Then later that evening, Nicholas tasted his first baby food (besides cereal) - carrots. He gave us his customary grimace at the first bite, but soon learned to love them.




Finally, Gabe and I just have to laugh at this patch of dark hair at the back of Nicholas' head. It's the only hair left from when he was born. Crazy how dark his hair used to be!



Happy Birthday Gabe! We love you!

What else can break on us?

It seems that things tend to occur in threes. Our three recently were things breaking down. First my car had belt issues (which luckily Pop was able to fix), our microwave of less than a year is no longer working and finally our heat/AC went out this week. Luckily the weather was pretty mild this week and we only went about a day and a half before our replacement was installed and running.

Several nights this week were bad due to Nicholas cutting two teeth. Thanks to my friend Dawn's advice on purchasing Hylands tablets, which helped a few nights. However, one night nothing seemed to do the trick. Finally Gabe decided to drive him around Leeds/Moody to see if that would help. Of course it worked and he was able to transition Nicholas from the car seat to the crib without him waking up. He was out... Again I think this is one of those rights to parenthood that everyone must go through because I can't tell you how many stories I've heard where a ride in the car helped calm a baby down. We can definitely attest to this.

Another first!

This past weekend I've tried putting Nicholas down at night before he was actually asleep so he doesn't get used to us rocking him to sleep every night and so he learns how to self soothe. Well it didn't exactly work as he cried for about 20 minutes before I gave up and picked him up. I did however discover that both Saturday and Sunday night he flipped over on to his back not long after I put him down. I believe he had some help in flipping over as he loves staring at the lights on our video monitor camera set up at the corner of his crib. He will crane his neck to see the camera lights and I guess the weight of his head helps him flip over.

Gabe and I also recently discovered what others have been telling us for awhile... Nicholas loves flying over daddy's head. Sunday evening after getting his bath and jammies on, Nicholas was "flying" and proceeded to spit up his cereal dinner all over daddy. We have been told that "Yeah you will do that until the first time he spits all over you." I guess we have to experience all those great parent firsts to get the full effect of parenthood.