Happy Halloween Little Lion Man

Halloween doesn't mean much to a 7 month old other than being dressed up in a ridiculously annoying costume and being paraded around so that mom and dad have an excuse to go door to door grabbing candy for themselves. None the less, here's our little lion man who graciously complied with our ploy:

A little overwhelmed by the whole experience

Playing with his friend Lila (a very adorable pink bunny) at Mom's First

Little Intruder

The March fam has a pesky little intruder. He has stolen Caleb's sweet demeanor, wakes him up waaaaay too early in the morning, disrupts nap time and has made eating a painful process for all... can you guess who it is (more of a 'what' than a 'who', really). You got it... Caleb's first tooth has arrived! The bottom left tooth broke skin yesterday and the right one will surely follow soon. This is another exciting milestone, but Tim and I are sad to say good bye to Caleb's toothless grin. Speaking of which, this post is mainly just a photo dump from the past couple weeks:

Loving the swing as usual. I just downloaded some photo apps on my new phone and was trying them out (hence the weird effects). 

Another new trick? Caleb can now pull himself up and stand on his own! 

He's been busy showing off to his buddies...

Caleb with Lila and Cam from our Moms First group at church. 

My friend Lisa's son Gavin is just two months older and is
showing Caleb the ropes at the park

Both boys were drumming away on the slide, taking cues from each other. 

I love that Caleb can now pull himself up in his crib. This was definitely worth a photo shoot...

What a surprise to walk in to Caleb's room, turn the light on and see this shining face!

He's so proud of himself

Peek-a-boo!

 "Are we almost done with the pics? For real, I'm so over this."

We host a small group from our church each week and this past week we skipped the study and carved pumpkins instead. I'm very impressed with the Old Men Muppets pumpkin, brought to us by Tom & Tori, well done!

Tim insists we light our pumpkins in the window each night. Who am I to say no?

Taking a break from our busy day of playing and napping to visit daddy for lunch. Caleb had a cold and spent the whole day in his PJs.

Ahhhh, we made it another day. Even though we love nearly every minute with Caleb, I must say it's nice once he's down for the night and Tim and I have some time alone.

Momfessions

After rereading a few of my posts over the past 6 months, I realized that 99% of the content I've posted has described the glorious moments and milestones we've reached. Not only does this misrepresent both me and Caleb, it also neglects the many times we are not put together. So here is the first of what I am sure will be many posts providing details of our less-than-glamorous moments (aka "Momfessions"):

• I confess that for the first 7 months of life, Caleb has spent most of his days in spit-up-soaked clothing. Whereas other moms may have changed their child after they doused the front in regurgitated milk, my son wore it like spit-up was the new black. 

• I may be the only one to admit it, but I bet I'm not the only one to do it... Caleb and I sometimes share his baby food packet of pureed mangos. It's a little piece of heaven in a 4 oz. package.

• This is a story I am keeping in the memory bank for Caleb's wedding: There was this one exceptional blow-out diaper a couple months ago... I'm talking all up the back and front and even in his hair since I had to pull the onesie over his head (in hindsight, I should have just cut it off of him). To get him clean, I grabbed him by the ankle and carried him upside down to the bathtub. It seemed like a brilliant idea at the time but oh how wrong I was. To my horror, as I looked down at him laying in his tub, I realized he had gotten his poop all over his hands. And what do babies do with their hands... they put them in their mouths. That's right... CALEB WAS EATING HIS POOP! And surprisingly, he wasn't fazed one bit. He laid there with a mouthful of crap and the usual toothless grin plastered to his face. It took everything in me not to leave him that way long enough to snap a pic.

• We let Caleb cry. There. I said it. For the first 4 1/2 months we jumped at every whimper, and while I definitely believe that was the right the thing to do at the time, we knew it couldn't continue forever. The crying started at nap times and eventually took place at night too. We never had to do the full extinction cry-it-out (thank you Lord!), but we did let him cry a couple times for about an hour in the middle of the night. Even though listening to him cry was one of the hardest things to do as a mom, I am so glad we did now that we have a sweet boy that can put himself to sleep, sooth himself back to sleep and sleep through the night. Win-win for all!

• Warning - the following content may be TMI for you men reading this. I confess I loath pumping! You may know that I couldn't nurse Caleb due to his reflux and aspirating, which meant hundreds of hours of pumping over 6 months (hours spent in the middle of the night, in the car, in public restrooms, etc.). Thankfully, we made it to our 6 month goal when I finally weaned off the pump and switched Caleb to formula, woo hoo! 

That's enough for now. I'm sure there will be more to come. In the meantime, I'd love to hear your confessions in the comments below. Come on now, don't be shy...

YAY Seven Months!

Happy seven months (and 6 days) little dude! What an active month we've had:

• Let the baby proofing begin! Caleb starting crawling just before turning 7 months. Here's the video evidence (for those of you that have not already seen this on the black hole known as facebook):

• His vocabulary has expanded and now includes ba ba, ma ma, da da, na na, and ya ya. After close examination it appears that ma ma is his whiny syllable, da da is his happy one and ba ba is how he expresses anger. Who the heck knows if this is true, but we'll give it to him for now.
• Caleb has started shaking his head from side to side as if saying "No". There seems to be no correlation to the actual word, but it's funny asking him questions and pretending he's responding... this is as close as I get to actual conversation at home :)
• I've returned to making homemade baby food and must say that pureed.chicken.is.disgusting! I can't believe I'm feeding my child what very closely resembles cat food, especially since I am NOT a cat person. 
• We started attending a 30 minute class with nursery rhymes and songs at the Wheaton Public Library and he loves it! It's perfect for a baby who loves music, people and dancing. 

Ready.Set.Go!

Always sticking his tongue out. In the wise words of Full House's Stephanie Tanner, "How rude!"

Birthday Bash in Michigan

We spent last weekend celebrating birthdays in Michigan (Tim's is Oct. 14th and mine is the 15th). We arrived late Friday and immediately scarfed down a Dark Horse pizza (yum!). We headed East Saturday morning and stopped for a couple hours in Chelsea, where my grandparents live in a retirement community. What a sweet time we had watching them interact with Caleb and just spending time together... we miss them both immensely. Tim and I said our goodbyes to Caleb (my parents took him for the day) and we continued our trek into Ann Arbor for a very fun (and cold/rainy) afternoon watching U of M kick butt - go Wolverines! Thank you Hannah and Michael for hosting us at the Big House! Back in Marshall we enjoyed a dinner for which words do not do justice. 8 hours spent slaving in the kitchen (by my dad) made for a very special and absolutely delicious dinner kicked off with a spinach and fennel salad, followed by a grilled beef tenderloin, broccoli and scrumptious mushroom risotto. The night was capped off with my very favorite triple chocolate tort... bravo dad!

Meeting his first dog... Caleb had Louie
cowering in the corner in no time

Caleb with his Great Grandma Luciani

Studying Great Gramps

Apparently Great Gramps passed the test

We assumed Caleb would be looking at us above the camera making the silly faces,
but we didn't expect my mom to be so enthralled too :)

Thank you Grandma and Grandpa for the legacy that you've created, which has brought us to this point
in time where we can bring 4 generations together! We're so blessed

So it doesn't appear that Caleb is too sad about saying good bye to mom and dad
to spend the afternoon with Grammy and Grandpa

We may be soaking wet and cold, but we had a great time at the game with Hannah & Michael

Tuckered out after our long weekend. These moments are the best

Gettin' Crafty (Part 1)

With most of my time spent at home over the past several months, I've had the motivation and a bit of time (in between naps and after Caleb's bedtime) to get my craft-groove on. After working long hours for 4 years, I forgot just how much I enjoy making things. Most things have revolved around getting the nursery put together or documenting Caleb's first year (a.k.a scrapbooking), but I'm now venturing into the remodeling of our bedroom and the basement (more on those things to come later). For now, here are the before and after photos of Caleb's room:

Before
(even before we moved in)

After!

These are the blackout curtains I made last week - who knew curtains were so tedious and took SOOOOO long??? I was excited at first about learning to sew... until I realized that making curtains is 5% actual sewing and 95% measuring, ironing, measuring again, cutting, ironing again, pinning, unpinning and ironing one last time for good measure. Given custom-made, lined curtains would have cost hundreds (many hundreds), I'd say it's all worth it. I'm working on curtains for the basement now... if I have time, I'll take pics along the way and do a step-by-step DIY curtain post on the blog later.   

Here's my pinterest-inspired frame in Caleb's room. The great thing about this is that all of the photos are pinned on, meaning they can easily be changed out as Caleb grows. Let me know if you'd like to know how it was made and I can try to explain.

Another pinterest inspiration - I painted the tree on the wall and made the letters before Caleb came along. We didn't stick the letters on the wall until the night before I was induced since we were keeping the name a secret.  I still remember how fun it was to finally put them up knowing we'd meet the little man the next day.

Here's another look at the room with the curtains opened. You can't tell now, but we originally screwed the curtain rod in way too high... it looked so awkward! After filling in the holes and repainting those parts of the wall, we finally had the  curtains up. 

Our Lil' Punkin

We took advantage of the b-e-a-utiful weather this afternoon with a trip to Sonny Acres Farm to introduce Caleb to one of his mom's very favorite foods...PUMPKINS! After buying every ingredient on Trader Joe's pumpkin shelf on Saturday, I realized 7 months was far too long to meet one's first pumpkin in person. Caleb should be very familiar with this glorious food item though given that most of his time spent in utero was in the cold winter months when pumpkin spice lattes, pumpkin muffins/bagels and pumpkin pie were frequently on the menu at the "mama motel" (yup, I just named my womb. I'm guessing I'm going to reread this post months down the road and make a promise to myself that I'll stop creating new posts when I'm in this mood).

Caleb refused to actually look at the camera but we did catch a few good shots among the many we took:

Our lil' punkin loving the pumpkins... I'm so proud! 

He wasn't too thrilled that the warts wouldn't come off

 You bet we were those parents repeatedly squealing "poopies!" (currently Caleb's favorite word) to our child, desperately hoping he would crack a smile... works every time.

Like me, he was drooling over the pumpkins by the end