Charlotte is 6 months old!

Oh boy where has this summer gone? I am so behind in blogging it has become ridiculous. I am hoping to find some time to catch up soon, because I have so many pictures of our fun Summer adventures to share and since it is almost Fall I better get on it!


Even though this is now going to make my posts out of order I am going to skip ahead and post about little Miss Charlotte. She has turned 6 months old and is no longer a newborn, she is a very active baby. We went to the Dr and she weighed in at 16 lbs 2 oz which puts her in the 50%ile, her height is 24 1/2 inches which places our little shortie in the 10%ile, and her head is 42 1/2 cm which is the 50%ile. She is perfect! She has 2 bottom teeth and eats pureed bananas, peaches, apples, avocado, peas, sweet potatoes, and mashed potatoes. She also loves teething biscuits and had some pizza crust that she loved! The dr gave us the go ahead to start introducing dairy which I am hoping goes well since she has been on soy formula for the last 5 months.

Charlotte typically goes to bed around 7 or 7:30 and sleeps till around 1am, wakes up to have a bottle. She then goes back to sleep till either 5, 6 or 7 am. You never know. It is a mystery to me, if I could figure out what makes her sleep till 7- I would repeat it every day :)  She is getting better at napping, but it is very inconsistent in length. Sometimes she'll sleep 30 minutes and sometimes 2 1/2 hours, it's different every day.  I have to say that it is much harder to give her the nap environment she needs when you have another child who wants to go play and do things. If I stayed home and let her and Anabelle nap in their beds when they needed to, we would never leave the house. So Charlotte's sleep experience is different than Anabelle's was. I definitely think that her napping schedule impacts her night time sleeping schedule. That combined with her reflux issues in the beginning of her life and her tendency to get stuck in the bars of her crib have made sleep training more difficult with Charlotte. She has thankfully grown out of the getting stuck stage. The older she gets the better she is sleeping and I think that once she moves to one long nap a day, then her sleep schedule will really improve.

Charlotte is sitting up on her own, when I go in to get her out of her crib in the morning she is sitting up smiling at me. Given how strong she is we have decided to drop her mattress down so that I don't find her trying to climb out some morning :)   She has quickly shown in the last month that she is ready to start crawling.  She is easily frustrated but when she isn't tired and sees something she wants, she is very motivated to get it. She is able to drag her body around and scoot and roll and move to get to what she desires most of the time it's her big sisters toys. She doesn't quite have the crawling movement pattern down, but she can kinda army crawl. It's fun to watch her being able to make choices in what she wants to play with. She is a very happy, smiley, sweet baby. She loves to cuddle and give kisses. And by kisses I mean attempt to eat you  :)   I took her to JCPenny to get her 6 month photos and they came out so cute! I love them. She is such a beautiful little girl and I frequently have a hard time capturing it in my pictures. They did a great job of catching her adorable smiles!

Swimming Lessons

This year John and I talked about putting Anabelle in swim lessons. I asked around with the other moms for recommendations and got many answers- all of them expensive! At the age of 2 all we expected was for her to get a little exposure to swimming; things like learning to put her face in the water and just generally not be afraid of swimming. After looking at the cost we decided to wait till next summer. Then groupon came along, if you don't know what groupon is- you should. It is a "deal of the day" website that offers coupons for local companies. Groupon came out with a deal for swimming lessons at the Naperville Tennis Club, $45 for 3 weeks of swimming lessons, every day for 30 minutes and I didn't even have to get in the pool with her! Perfect for a mom with a new baby. It was a great deal, so we signed her up.

Anabelle had no prior experience swimming, in fact she had only been in a pool a handful of times. So she went into the "shrimp" group.  Overall, it was a positive experience, but probably because our expectations were low. I looked at it as a fun experience for her, and if she learned a little at the end of it- bonus. Anabelle is still young, and this was her first time taking any kind of class or lesson. I was blown away by how willingly she went with her teachers-people she didn't know. And by how willingly she jumped into the water every day. We never heard any protest, she loved every minute of her lessons and she was generally a good listener with her teachers. That being said, they didn't place very many demands on her :)  Over the 3 weeks she had many "teachers" and most of them were quite young. They were overseen by the same college age girls everyday. If we had paid more and it had not been her first year of lessons I would have been disappointed in the amount of teaching done- they could have pushed her a little more. This was also a good lesson for me in how challenging it is to get out the door and to a specified appointment every day. It was good training for when we decide to sign up for another class or preschool. 

Here are just a few (ha, ha) pics of our swimming lesson days :)  

Getting ready.

"I'm ready to swim!"

Anabelle had a lot of different teachers.

Jump!

Charlotte loved watching the swimmers in the water.

Paddle, paddle, paddle!

Putting her ears in the water.

Learning how to hang on to the wall.

Kick, kick, kick!

On Fridays all of the kids got fruit snacks for a treat, Anabelle thought this was the best thing ever!

Grandma was able to come to almost every lesson, which was a huge help!

We had to celebrate the end of lesson with a special lunch and ice cream of course!

Rock star in the making

We went to family night at the Arboretum tonight and had a great time! We packed a picnic dinner and went to watch The Little Miss Ann Band perform. Anabelle really had fun dancing around to their songs and was quite into the show. It is really entertaining to watch a bunch of kids jump and dance around to live music. At one point the singer asked for volunteers to come up and sing "Twinkle, Twinkle". She choose an 8 year old as her 1st singer. After that she asked for another, Anabelle immediately yelled out "me, please!" and the singer said, " I don't know you are a little young. Is your Mom here?"  So I held up my hand and gave the thumbs up. The singer said, " ok, come up here"  You can't tell from my video but she was up in front of quite a large crowd and she rocked it! I was shocked by how fearless she was. I love it, so proud of my little girl!

Slow down please

Charlotte is 5 months old today and this is about the time when I would like things to slow down just a bit. It seems like every day brings a new development or milestone and it just goes by too fast. So Charlotte, could you please slow down just a little bit? Thanks :)  

Here's the latest news on Miss Charlotte

* She has now mastered rolling both ways

* She can sit up pretty well, but with a pillow behind her, she still likes to dive bomb for added excitement

* She has become more tolerant of being on her stomach

* She isn't crawling, but she scoots around

* She has discovered her toes and can almost get them into her mouth

* She loves to attempt to eat anything she comes in contact with

*She is a drooling machine!!! (we do a lot of laundry around here)

*She has a tooth popping through on the bottom!

* She has starting eating purees, so far she likes sweet potatoes and bananas and doesn't like peas

* She goes to bed around 8 and wakes up somewhere around 1 for a bottle, then back to sleep till around 5 has another bottle and if we are lucky goes back to sleep.

* Naps are not consistent or predictable at all, I'm sure we'll get there someday... I hope. Most of the time she wakes up, plays about an hour, eats, then plays another hour and then naps for "awhile". This could mean 40 minutes or it could mean 3 hours- you never know :)

* She likes taking baths, and has graduated from the bath lounger to the mini tub insert where she can sit up.

* She loves to look at books, be sung to (itsy bitsy spider is a favorite), dance around, be tickled, and play with her big sister.

Here are some pictures form the past month:

A new doll, she loved it right away!

Thankfully she has gotten better about sleeping in her car seat, we are on the go a lot!

She has started to play with the toys attached to her car seat more often.

Time to start whipping up some baby food. Here are some sweet potatoes. I typically by fruits and veggies, fresh or frozen, and I try to do organic. Then steam them and throw them in food processor. Puree till smooth, pour them into these baby food trays, freeze,then pop them out and store them in ziploc bags. Just take out what you need each day. Each cube is about 1 ounce.

 

Loves watching Anabelle

She could hang out in this hovering position for quite awhile, just waiting to pounce!

Bath time!

Hanging out on the patio, enjoying the summer weather.

Anabelle picked out a book about teeth for Charlotte to read.

My brother Michael took these pictures of the girls this weekend. I thought they were amazing and had to share. He and Aunt Steph also gave the girls the dresses they are wearing. Thank you!!

Snippets

Lots of random pictures just laying around so I thought I'd stick all together in one big post. Here are some snippets from the last month...

Anabelle and I having fun with self portraits.

Watching the fireworks on the 3rd of July at Ribfest. John and I celebrated our 7th anniversary that day and didn't even get a photo together. Good thing they'll be a few more anniversaries down the road for photo ops  :)  Here's Anabelle  sitting with Daddy.

Even Charlotte liked the fireworks.

Our good family friend Bonnie came for a visit!

Charlotte is pretty smiley lately- love it!

John and I had a night out to attend the wedding reception of a good friend from college, Brett and his beautiful bride Maureeca.  We had a really fun time!

Brooke and Jason 

Apparently something was funny :)

Brooke, Erin, and me

The Guys: Justin, John, Eric and Jason.

Charlotte has been on the move. She sits up with support and then when she flops over on her stomach she is starting to move around. It's more of an angry scoot right now, she's not happy about it but she kinda "inchworms" her way around. Not far by any means, but she can definitely move around a bit. She'll be crawling soon.

She has also been hanging out in her exer-saucer. She basically outgrew every other sitting contraption that we had. She can't safely be in her bouncy seat or bumbo chair anymore since she can touch the ground and roll and her legs are super-human strong. So the exer-saucer and high chair are the only places I can safely put her if I need to get something done. Hopefully she'll get better at sitting unsupported soon, so I can just plop her down on the ground with some toys.  But for now she loves this thing. 

Trying to fit her whole hand in her mouth?