It is hard to believe that we are just about halfway through the first month of the year.... and that it has been 2 weeks since the last blog entry. So, what has been going on around here? Well, near winter-like conditions returned for a few days... and it has been a little colder, but still not much in the way of snow... and none on the ground... in fact it has been raining a lot lately.
Sara is doing well, still healthy. She finished up her month of antibiotics this past Tuesday. The meds were to help prevent more ear infections while the fluid in her ears drained naturally... It seems to have done the trick as her ears looked good at two different doctors' appts this week. In fact, her runny nose had subsided too... but that was short-lived and the runny-nose is back already, but otherwise she is fine... and hopefully those ears will stay clear too. She has also grown to
21 lbs and
28 inches as of last Tuesday too, still topping out in the 90-95th percentiles. Sara is also expanding her food repertoire and has added peas today to her list of carrots, squash, sweet potatoes, green beans, and cereals. We have also been working on adding some texture to her diet as well. We tried real, plain, white rice on new year's even day... that went poorly... we tried mixing it in with some of her other foods, and it was only slightly better.... but adding some real oatmeal to her infant-instant outmeal has gone reasonably well.
Sara hasn't learned any drastic new "tricks" in the last two weeks, she is basically working on perfecting her form. She is getting better at lifting her belly up when on her tummy and trying to get on her knees. She seems to be scooting or creeping around the floor a little more too. She likes to sit and rotate around on her bottom a lot and she seems to be throwing in some forward and mainly backward movement at the same time spirally around the room, so-to-speak. Sara has also been a little more chatty lately, which has been fun, and it seems like she is a little more interested in back-and-forth conversations.
The biggest change for Sara is that we have retired the use of a pacifier while she is sleeping as of yesterday (Saturday). Sara has done much better with the change thus far than we expected, so clearly the timing is right. She fussed for about 20 minutes the first nap without it, and about 10 minutes or so for subsequent times being put down to sleep... and she did a reasonable job of sleeping last night (well, compared to the previous 2 months, at least). It is taking her a little longer to go to sleep, even when she isn't fussing, but she still falls asleep on her own, and that is fabulous.
Since about 3 months we have been trying to use a little sign language with her to see if she'll pickup on certain useful words like
milk, eat, drink, change, done. It seems that she has grasped at least a small part of the meaning of a few of the signs, especially
done. What we have been also waiting to see if she attempts to sign back to us.... not too sure on that one, but ever once in a while it seems like she is wagging one of her hands in an intentional way... whether she is saying milk, drink, or a one-handed done... I am not sure... maybe all of them, maybe she just likes waving her hand around, but we are having fun with it nonetheless.
In other news, even though I am not teaching this semester I have been pretty busy so far this year... the first 9 days of the year were spent preparing abstracts for the annual conference I go to in Houston every year, and then for the first time since Sara was born, once of us was gone overnight - me. I went to Washington for a day and half meeting. The meeting was good and stuff at home went reasonably well too. While I was gone we also learned some good news, a couple we knew from grad school is having their second child this next week, and our friends
Gretchen and Phil are having twins!!!! That is super wonderful... so, so far in 2007 we know of 4 new babies that are on the way. Pretty cool.
Labels: Sara
Sara and I had yesterday (MLK Day) off, so we spent the day hanging out. After a good morning nap and some breakfast we took advantage of the Cleveland Botanical Gardens being open on a Monday, and free to boot! That's where I took this picture while we were taking a break from wheeling around the glasshouse and looking at all the plants, birds, and butterflies. They have the coolest little bright blue birds and lots of butterflies, which they release once a day, everyday. We spent about an hour there poking around, enjoying the warm temperatures and cool sights while it rained and rained outdoors.
It pretty much rained all day and kept getting colder. By mid-evening it was starting to turn to sleet and snow and then we woke up to an inch or two of snow. In fact, the snow was coming down hard enough later in the morning that Danette had to turn around from a day-trip to one of her field sites... pretty calm now though.
