Fall Fun

We’ve been having so much fun around here with the fall activities! I’d write a bit more but frankly I’m feeling lazy and am saving all my brain space for a post about Bean’s first birthday (aka holy shit) so in the meantime let photos suffice.

Pumpkin patches!

Corn mazes!

Leaves!

Pumpkin decorating!

Cold weather! For like, a day!

Halloween costumes! We didn’t actually go trick or treating because we got home too late from work last night, plus she wouldn’t have really gotten much out of it anyway. Next year though. We took her to a trick or treat street at the nearest shopping center and let her pick out a few pieces of candy and get called a boy over and over because she was the only girl there not dressed up as Elsa. When will we be done with Frozen?

It is time to put away the Halloween stuff (and leave the Christmas stuff in the boxes for another month SHAME ON YOU for putting up your trees now) and that means figuring out exactly who has been living in the tote downstairs and chewing up all the lights that were in the box. Murr. Today is shopping for a few presents for Bean’s birthday and tomorrow she gets her 1 year photos done! Woohoo!

11 Months

Man it has been difficult to find time to get to my computer lately! Whoops.

Bean is now 11 months old! (As of a little over a week ago.) See above.

Last weekend, we went to San Diego for Cameron’s brother’s wedding. We had a fun time and Bean was a traveling trooper. We had short flights luckily and she was pretty good both times. The flight home she slept pretty much the entire flight. We were only there for a short weekend, but we got to stop at the beach, so Bean has now put her feet in two oceans before her first birthday!

While we were in San Diego Bean got to meet lots of family on Cameron’s side and everyone was so excited to see her. Although I have to admit that as much as I love her, I probably would have opted to leave her at home for this trip if I thought the family wouldn’t have killed me for not bringing her. It would have been nice to have a baby-free trip and enjoy more of the wedding festivities, but c’est la vie. As it was, Cameron’s aunt and cousins graciously took the Bean for a few hours on our last morning there and we were able to have breakfast and visit the beach by ourselves.

So, what is Bean into these days? EVERYTHING! She figured out how to pull up on things a couple weeks ago and now she is cruising around the house like nobody’s business. She makes laps of the living room and she is working on learning how to let go of things and sit down so I have a feeling she will be taking unassisted steps in no time. She is interested in everything and she is very brave.

She was doing really well sleeping through the night, but then she had two teeth come in about the same time and has been a little disrupted of late, but luckily is usually still only getting up once a night for a few minutes. After another dose of Advil and some cuddles she goes right back to sleep. She still naps twice a day, usually about 2 hours per nap, and gets into bed between 9 and 9:30 each night. I am working on transitioning her off formula soon, but I am thinking I will leave her on the toddler formula for a little while until she is more used to cow’s milk. I started giving her a couple ounces with food but it seems to make her really gassy, so we’re going to see how it goes. She gets 3 bottles a day, so I think soon I will work on cutting out the two daytime bottles and only give her one before bed because it helps her settle down.

Bean has a very independent personality and she definitely does not like to be crowded. She has never been much of a cuddler, and she becomes extremely overwhelmed if she is surrounded by lots of noise and people. In loud restaurants or gatherings she gets fussy easily but if she is removed from the situation she cheers up right away. Most of the time she prefers to play on her own and only comes to us to play occasionally. She still loves her kitties most of all and I have a feeling she’ll be using Sherlock as her dress-up doll/doctor patient/plaything in the future. She plays fine with other kids when we take her out to play with the neighbors, though she is more interested in observing the older kids than she is actually engaging in play–so she might be a little shy or socially nervous around strangers like I am. Now that she can cruise and do things a little bit more independently the playground is becoming more accessible, so I think the more I introduce her to other kids the more she will hopefully open up. I don’t think she’ll be much of a social butterfly, though.

Bean is a chatterbox and has started to say “mama” and “dada” with more regularity now. She also says “ooh-day” when she is excited or interested in something. She loves birds and airplanes and points at everything. She LOVES to dance and she likes to watch nature shows and recently has become interested in Curious George. She has been spending a lot of time with her Papi when I am at work, and they go for walks and hang out at the playground a lot.

We are trying to take her out for lots of fall activities, and yesterday she went to her first pumpkin patch. Just a small one; we planned to go to a place called Anderson Farms that has lots of activities, but she was a grumpy gills and wouldn’t take a late nap, so we opted for the one nearer to our house and we are planning to take her up to the big farm next weekend. Oh–and she is dressing up as an owl for Halloween! I also have to start figuring out what to do for her birthday…I can’t believe I will have a toddler in a couple weeks. When did that happen?

 

10 Months

My bitty Bean is 10 months old!

What a month for the Bean. I feel like she has developed so much in the last few weeks, especially in becoming mobile. She still isn’t crawling, but that doesn’t stop her at all. She gets around! I have to be careful where I leave her because she could get into trouble. She is standing, not quite on her own unsupported, but very close. She knows how to take steps with help and she is starting to pull up on things. (Just while I was writing this, she stood up on her own on the side of a foot stool) Climbing out of the tub seems to be her favorite project right now.

Aside from getting going, she is chattering up a storm. No actual words yet, though we get “dada,” “mama,” and “baba” parroted back at us over and over and over when she feels like it. We sometimes get what we think are “hey/hi” and “wow/woah/oh”. She also hums, shouts, screams, and shrills like a bird at all times. She even whispers “dadoo” whenever you pick her up. As pleasant a baby as she is, she is definitely not shy about telling you when she is unhappy, be it vocally or physically. If she is done drinking her bottle, she will shove it out of her face. If she is done with the attention, she will shove you out of her face. We went through a screaming phase not too long ago, but it seems to have ended now thank goodness…or maybe I should say, it has ended for the time being.

Eating and sleeping have been about the same. We are still trying to get her to hold her own bottle, especially since she’ll be with Papi during the day soon and it would definitely be easier on him if she could drink her own bottle. We’re getting there. Mostly if I hand the bottle to her she wants to investigate it, turn it upside down, shake it, play with the nipple…she definitely knows how it works but for whatever reason just won’t take the final step of lifting it up. We had some success with a bottle that had handles on the bottom, but nothing concrete yet. She still gobbles up just about everything I give her for meals. Her favorites right now are ravioli, mandarin oranges, blueberries, and graham crackers. Oh, and she has four teeth now!

So, in lieu of another detailed monthly update, I thought I’d do a Day in the Life of A Bean…with approximated times, of course. A girl hates to be predictable.

6:30-7:30ish – wake up. Diaper change, breakfast, playtime, bottle
8:30-9:30ish – nap (mom’s time for an uninterrupted cup of coffee, breakfast, laundry, straighten up, etc)
11ish – wake up. diaper change, get dressed. If we have errands to run this is when I do them. If not, we watch a nature show or go for a walk, go to the park, etc
12:00-1:00ish – Lunch. More playtime/tv
2:00-3:00ish – another bottle, then nap.
4:00-5:00ish – wake up. Dinner.
6:00-6:30ish – evening walk
7:00-8:00 playtime, or sitting outside if the weather is nice, generally just family time
8:00 – bath time
8:30 – get out of the bath, quiet time in her room, bedtime routine. Lotion, pajamas, quiet music, last bottle
9:00 (hopefully) bed time

It’s hard to believe I am within two months of celebrating my little girl’s first birthday! I am thinking owl theme, she seems to love owls. Think that also might be her Halloween costume too. In the meantime, every day I am watching this bright girl learn more , test her boundaries (and mine) and become a little person. It’s so exciting!

9 Months

The Bean is 9 months old! Well…9 and a half at this point, but you get the idea.

At her checkup last week, she weighed 16lbs15oz and measured 28 1/4 inches long. Growing growing growing! The doctor was very pleased with her weight gain even though I was a little freaked out at first (I thought closer to 18lbs surely), but though she be but little, she is progressing through the percentiles normally. So she’s in the 24th percentile for weight and the 66th for height, so it may just be that she will be petite and tall. 

As of last night, she had taken one “step” as a crawler. She can get herself into the position and turn herself in circles, but she hasn’t quite been brave enough to take a leg forward. So is really close though, and gets very frustrated when she can’t do it, which makes me feel bad, but I don’t think it will be too much longer. However, she loves to stand behind her walker which we converted to a walk-behind. She isn’t taking any steps on her own just yet but she has exceptional balance and can stand there holding onto the bar for some time. I think she will be walking by her birthday. I really need to baby-proof stat.

Sleep is going okay, we had a slight setback with her nighttime sleep due to her top teeth coming in plus all the traveling we’ve been doing in the last few weeks. Things have been a little topsy turvy for a bit so hopefully she will settle in soon and the teeth will stop bothering her. She still naps like a champ though, usually twice a day for about 2-2 1/2 hours. 

Bean eats everything in sight. She has 3 8-oz bottles a day and then breakfast, lunch and dinner. For breakfast she usually has fruit (blueberries and oranges are her favorite), Cheerios, and a waffle or an egg depending on how lazy I am. For lunch she typically eats some cheese cubes, crunchy puffs (the veggie dip flavor is her favorite), some more fruit and maybe a veggie. For dinner, if she doesn’t eat what we are eating, she loves to have things like ravioli which she snarfs like there’s no tomorrow. I also try to give her those fruit and veggie pouches, which are convenient but a lot of times she wants to eat things on her own and not let me feed her. Usually if I put her food in front of her and leave her alone, she will clear (most of) her plate. She’s not a picky eater as of yet and will pretty much eat everything I give her. She still won’t hold her own bottle, but we’re working on it. Mama needs her hands back.

She loves to swim at the pool! We put her in her little floatie and she kicks and splashes like crazy. She also loves remotes and wind-up toys. We take evening walks and she waves at everyone we pass. She loves to sit in the castle tent we got her at IKEA and play with her toys. I realized while we were in Maine that while she is sociable and likes spending time around people, she definitely gets to a point when she wants to go and do her own thing and be quiet. She doesn’t like to have a lot of people smothering her and still doesn’t want to cuddle much. Some of the best time during the day is her “quiet time” after her bath, when I let her sit on the floor in her room and just play. She has magnetic letters that she loves, and she is a pro at the roller-coaster bead toy. She is extremely interested in small details. She’ll spend twenty minutes in her bath investigating the hole in the bottom of a rubber ducky or turning the wheels on the bottom of her wind-up airplane. She’s still incredibly observant and loves to sit outside in the grass and just watch the other kids. She isn’t very interested in other babies it seems like; if we sit outside with our neighbor’s 13-month old, she is more interested in the older kids than him. It is plain fascinating to watch her investigate something new. Ripping up my junk mail or magazines seems to be one of the best ways to entertain her for ten minutes. 

Here are some other pictures of the 9th month!

“Give me the baba and nobody gets hurt”

8 Months

So, Bean turned 8 months back on the 3rd. I wrote half of her monthly update post and then closed the tab on accident, and lovely WordPress failed to save it as a draft, so it was all gone. And frankly I got too lazy to go back and write it again.

So here’s some pictures of the Bean’s 8th month of life. 

Still not crawling.

 

Happenings Around the Bean Pod

Happy Summer!

Well, what have we been up to lately? Seems like a lot! I feel like more often than not the last week or so we have been out of the house more than we’ve been in it!

Family Time

Last weekend my brother got married, so we had some out of town family in for that. We got to spend some time with my grandma Linda and grandpa John, who saw Bean when she was about a day old.

We took another trip to the aquarium with them, since it was too hot to spend time outside. Bean loved it.

Before the wedding rehearsal luncheon.

At the wedding (it was a renaissance theme)

Baby’s first baseball game

A New Beanmobile

The day we went to the aquarium I found myself crawling over the front passenger seat of my car to wrestle the stroller into the back seat because someone had parked too closely to me in the parking lot and the trunk had the baby’s wagon in it, and I decided then and there that it was time to get a bigger car. (I drive a Honda Accord.) I thought initially that we would trade in my car for something larger, since it still has a lot of value in it and that way we’d still only have one car payment, but when we mentioned this to Cameron’s dad and stepmom, they graciously offered to front us some cash to buy a car outright, then sell Cameron’s car so he would drive the Honda and I would drive the new car. We spent the weekend poking around on Craigslist and looking up car reviews. Finally, frustrated with the fact that nobody online seemed to be willing to respond in a timely manner to my inquiries about buying their cars, I popped onto a used dealership that has locations all over the place and immediately spotted a 2009 Dodge Caliber for an insanely good price considering it only had 63,000 miles on it. We jumped in the car and headed down to Park Meadows to look at it. It’s in practically perfect condition and we really liked it so we signed it that afternoon.

Here’s the catch though…it’s a standard. And can you guess who doesn’t know how to drive a standard? If you guessed ME, you’d be right. So, so far I’ve only driven my new car a couple of times under supervision while Cameron teaches me how to drive it. I think it’s going pretty well all things considered! I may even brave a trip to the store this afternoon. (In hindsight, that’s the reason it was so cheap. But I’m happy we got a good deal on it even if it is a manual.)

Renaissance Festival

‘Tis the season for ren faire! We’ve taken Bean to the festival twice now and she has a ball. I dressed up her wagon to look like a carriage and she is without a doubt the cutest thing that has ever happened to the faire. Nobody even notices me and my parents in our (cough) thousands of dollars worth of garb because everyone is staring at the baby. I guess that’s okay though.

This was right at the end of the day before we left–she was TIRED.

Keeping Cool

The temps lately have been in the high 80s and low 90s which is a bit brutal, so I try to avoid taking the baby outside in the middle of the day if I can help it. We go for our walks either early in the morning or in the evening when it is cooler. In between, we steal free air conditioning at the mall or hang out in the basement and watch tv. I say “watch tv” loosely, because we don’t have cable so really we’re watching dvds or Netflix. And when I say watching dvds or Netflix I mean Disney movies or documentaries. I know screen time is supposed to be discouraged at this age, but I honestly have no problem whatsoever with Disney or documentaries. I’m not plopping her down in front of the tv alone so I can go do something else, we always watch together, and I’m comfortable with her watching these programs rather than cartoons.

Plus, this way I get to learn stuff too. This week we have been watching “Blue Planet” which is about the oceans. I may have a future marine biologist on my hands.

Sleep

Maybe it’s because we’ve been keeping busy and have been out and about so frequently, maybe it’s because she’s not teething right now, or maybe it’s because she’s just figuring it out finally, but sleep has been great lately. She’s had 3 nights in the last week where she slept straight through the night! If she doesn’t sleep all the way through, she only gets up once, has a small bottle, and falls right back to sleep. It’s been awesome.

 

 

Steals

I definitely don’t consider myself a bargain hunting queen or a master of the thrift shop finds…hell, I haven’t even clipped a coupon since I helped my mom do it every Sunday as a kid. Sure, I buy in bulk and check out sales when I need something expensive, but I’m definitely not one of those wonder people who manage to find a priceless one of a kind Picasso in a thrift store behind a matte print.

There are some things, though, that I typically hate to buy new and spend full price on, so I go out of my way to buy second hand. And by some things, I mean practically all baby items.

Sure, diapers and wipes and bottles and small toys, whatever. If I see a cute outfit on the rack at Kohls on sale, I’ll snag it. But I definitely prefer to buy most or her clothing and large toys used. The nice thing about baby items is that unless it’s been handed down for five children, chances are it was used only for a short time, so damage tends to be minimal. And unless we’re in a desperate pinch–like the time we bought a brand new swing at full price because we were desperate for the baby to sleep–I spend a little time shopping around for a good used one.

Did I mention the baby swing was used for two weeks and has been gathering dust in the basement since? Yeah.

Anyway, enter my two fantastic steals. I started poking around on Craigslist for a used wagon for the baby, since strollers are pretty difficult to navigate on the grounds of the renaissance festival. I was hoping for one with a canopy on it, but would settle for one without and rig up an umbrella if I had to. I finally jumped on one that was being sold not too far away for $40. (A new Radio Flyer without a canopy costs nearly $100.) On Friday I went to pick it up and when I got there, the lady selling it hands me a canvas bag with all the pieces to the canopy. Say whaaaaat. She didn’t even mention in the ad that it had the canopy with it, so I basically robbed this lady blind over this wagon. Best deal ever.

To join in the World Cup fun: scoooooooooore!

And steal number two. Yesterday we went for a walk around the complex and came upon a perfect Cozy Coupe left next to one of the dumpsters. Uh, hello. I was going to get one for the Bean for Christmas, but apparently Christmas came early. We looked around to make sure there were no kids nearby who might have just left it in an unfortunate place, but since there was no one around and the thing was sitting in the dumpster enclosure, we took it. It appears to have nothing wrong with it whatsoever except for the stickers which are peeling, but other than that it’s basically brand new. The Bean is still on the small side for it, so it may be a month or two until we can tool her around in it, but even so, hot diggity! The only thing better than getting a good deal is getting it for FREE.

Oh, and, speaking of the wagon and ren faire…

(Okay so the one of me has nothing to do with the wagon or its contents, but I felt like sharing anyway.)

Joining the Ranks of the Unswaddled

….why yes, that is an attempt at a lame Game of Thrones pun. You know, in case you were wondering.

So, we decided that the time had finally come to get the Bean to sleep without her blanket. Since birth she has been one of those babies who really prefers to be wrapped up tight to sleep. Since she has also been a belly sleeper since about 10 weeks or so, I knew it wasn’t safe to put her in her velcro swaddle, so we’ve been wrapping her in an afghan, which I figured was a safe compromise. She could still be on her belly to sleep, was feeling tight and secure, but still had enough wiggle room to remove and arm and roll over, and if she did, there were enough holes in the blanket that it wouldn’t suffocate her. This worked for a long time…until it didn’t.

All things considered I should have started this process a while ago. For the last month or so she has been rolling over and getting out of the blanket numerous times a night, causing her to wake and cry until I came in and wrapped her back up. In the last few weeks she has been putting up more of a fight than normal in getting into her blankie at night, and that, coupled with an uncannily-timed newsletter from The Incredible Infant about the dangers of wrapping once baby can roll over, told me it was time.

She was more ready for it than I was, to tell the truth. I got comfortable in our routine and I knew that pretty much no matter what, that blanket would put her to sleep. So I kept putting it off, because I was worried about the transition. Usually about once a month we attempted to put her to sleep in a wearable blanket instead of a wrapped one, and she would just lie there propped up on her arms looking around and rolling over instead of sleeping. Or her arm movements would wake her. So maybe those early attempts were just too early. But the other night, she started thrashing and screaming when I tried to put her in her blanket before bed, so I thought, all right, tonight’s the night. I fed her her last bottle and laid her in her crib without a blanket. She fussed for a couple of minutes, but after one or two binkie replacements, she went to sleep. She woke once at 1:30, I put her binkie back in, and the next thing I knew it was 6:30. It was the most solid night she had slept in a really long time. Last night, she conked out and didn’t make a peep until 4:30. I had decided that I would start letting her wean herself off the night bottle, at the recommendation of her pediatrician. If she really wants one, she can have it, but if she goes back to sleep on her own, let her go without. So she needed one last night, but after that she went back to sleep until 7:30.

Naps have still been a little wobbly on our new plan, mostly I think because at night she is sufficiently exhausted and pretty much falls asleep right away, whereas during nap time she is tired but not really tired, and it takes a little longer to coax her into falling asleep. But, I’m happy to say she has been soothing herself to sleep for the most part and we haven’t even had to let her cry for much longer than a minute or two. So, not to jinx myself, but I feel like it’s going pretty well.

Speaking of naps, I don’t know why this excited me but yesterday we went to Thorntonfest with my parents, which is a community festival in my hometown with people selling crafts and artisans and local businesses selling stuff, it’s a fun time. (That’s not really the part that excited me, by the way.) I had never taken the Bean to anything like that before and I wasn’t sure how she would take to being out and about for several hours outside with lots of noise, but when she started to fuss a bit we reclined her stroller seat and she passed out for a good 45 minutes while we walked around. (That’s the part that excited me. You can tell my life is really thrilling because I get excited about naps.)

After that she was content to kick back and let us stroll her around like she owned the place. What a kid I have.

6 Months

A half a year old!

But…since I forgot to do her 5 month update, here’s that picture too.

What a happy, spirited girl I have. She has really blossomed in the last month or so and she smiles at everything and everyone. You still have to work at her to get a real laugh out of her (I am the same way though) but she is very jovial.

I haven’t taken her to her 6 month appointment yet (we have to find a new pediatrician) so I don’t have exact stats on her, but when I took her to the doctor for a cold about a month ago she was 13 pounds exactly. She’s been putting on about a pound a month consistently up till now but she seems to finally be getting some solid chunk on so she might be more than 14 pounds now. She is actually fitting into 6 month clothes; she was wearing 3 month sizes up to really recently. I can’t really dress her in footie pajamas for very long anymore because her feet grow out of them faster than the rest of it! Her hair is coming in really long and got really dark! Looks like it will be brown after all. Her eyes are still beautiful gray.

She loooooves food! We are still mostly on purees, but she gobbles them up at light speed. Carrots, peaches, pears, sweet potatoes, she loves them! The only thing she hasn’t really been crazy about was prunes, but really, who is. This last week I started giving her puffs and she is still getting used to those. She eats them and I think she likes the flavor, but the texture obviously freaks her out. We’ll work on it. I tried strawberries in the mesh feeder a couple days ago, and she got the hang of it really quickly but the strawberries were obviously way too tart because she freaked out! She even got a bite of my frozen yogurt and she loved it so much she tried to grab the whole cup.

Speaking of eating, she popped her first two teeth a couple of days ago! I was sure that her top two would come in first but she proved me wrong and the bottoms came in. I never even noticed because she wasn’t especially cranky or anything like that, but the other day she was nomming on her Sophie and I happened to look in her mouth and saw two gray things in there, and there they were! She has been wearing an amber teething necklace, so I have no idea if that’s why she hasn’t been showing any additional crankiness over it all, but if so, yay. They haven’t quite come up all the way yet but they are on the way for sure.

Sleep has been okay, but a little bumpier than normal. She was sick about a month ago, and then we moved and she went through a huge growth spurt at the same time, so we went through a hitch where she felt the need to wake every 3 hours at night and put up a fight going back down and then wake for the day at 4:30am. We’re slowly getting out of that now, but man oh man was it nice when she would sleep 6 hours at a time and only wake for a bottle once! (Which she did at my parent’s house last week, I should note. Grumble.) Naps are still pretty normal, once we got out of the moving transition period she went right back to sleeping about 2-2 1/2 hours for each nap.

She still isn’t sitting up on her own and she hasn’t rolled over from her back to her belly yet, and she isn’t very interested in attempting to crawl, but she can stand up! Not independently and she can’t pull herself up, but if I stand her and lean her against something she can support herself. Doing things in the “correct” order would be boring I guess.

My parents bought her a walker a couple weeks ago and it’s like the best thing ever for her. She loves that thing! Especially since it has a tray that I can put her favorite guitar on and make music. She can go pretty much everywhere that we go around the house and be present with us instead of in her play pen which I think she likes much better.

Even though she can’t sit up or roll yet, she still gets around. Those legs of her are strong. She kicks the bars of her crib and the edge of her changing table so hard she gets bruises on her feet! When she lays on her back on the floor she can wiggle herself all over the place and usually when I come into her room after a nap she is completely perpendicular and upside down from the position I originally put her in. Once she figures out how to crawl and walk she is going to be friggen unstoppable.

Her favorites right now are bath time, playing guitar, sitting on the back patio in her new chair, swinging at the playground, and going for walks. She has to bring Sophie with her everywhere we go. She is an observer for sure; she loves watching the other kids at the park and she is happy to sit and watch the geese in the pond in the courtyard. Being in the city opens up so many possibilities for us and she has been out and about with me a lot. We’ve been to IKEA and the aquarium and the book store and I think this weekend we’ll go to the Botanic Gardens. She usually enjoys being in the Ergo, but I think I might have to figure out the back carry soon because it’s pretty obvious she much prefers to be facing outward and looking at things than having to stare at mommy’s neck. She loves her kitties! They seem to have welcomed her into the pack too, especially Sherlock. She smiles and laughs at them and they love to cuddle up next to her on the couch. Whiskey even sleeps on her changing table. Weirdly, when she was at my parent’s house last week, she cried every time their cat Simon meowed at her. For a while she was really interested in Brody and would laugh at him all the time, but since he is living with my parents right now I think she has forgotten about him, because last time she saw him she cried at him too. Oh, and she totally has a crush on Jimmy Fallon. Usually in the mornings I turn on last night’s Tonight Show and she will stop whatever she is playing with and stare.

Oh Yeah, I Have a Blog

…which I have been intending to update for some time now, but at the end of the day it just never happens. Sigh.

As of tomorrow, we’ve been in our new house for 2 weeks! I love love love it. The place feels so homey and right and we are very comfortable here. Still arranging some things (I have a box of “leftover junk” that still hasn’t managed to find a place sitting in the corner of my dining room) and every time I think I should take pictures to put up here, I find a reason not to–like the fact that only this room is clean and I don’t have time to clean the others and who wants a picture of only one room? Anyway. Next week, it’ll happen. I hope. In any case, I love being in the city again. So many things for us to do! If I need to run out and do something, it’s available within 10 minutes. Amazing. Restaurants, shops, parks, I have so many places I can take the Bean. She is loving our new place. She loves to sit outside in her walker and watch the kids and the birds and the squirrels, it’s just awesome. Tomorrow my parents and I are taking her to the zoo for the first time. Quite excited.

And, as it happens, today is my birthday! I am 26 today…downhill to 30 from here right?

Happy birthday, Mommy. My gift to you is a 5am wake up call and a big poopy diaper. I’m so thoughtful.