Reilly's 1st Christmas!

Reilly's first Christmas was SO much fun and went so well! We had three Christmas' to get to, my mom's house, my grandpa's house, and jeff's mom's house! He did great and for the most part stayed happy all day. Unfortunately the only nap he took was a 2 hour nap at 9:30am, so last night was a catastrophe. (So bad I turned off the monitor.. don't worry.. he got me back by SOAKING his bed..ew!) I think he got a little overstimulated, but it was so fun watching him open gifts and play with his cousins. He got so many gifts (too many!).. I let him have 5, the rest are in the closet and he will get them over time.

We hope everyone else had a great Christmas, or whichever holiday you celebrate!! Have a great new year.. I will be watching the ball drop with the baby monitor by my side. Woo..hoo.. :)

ps-Reilly has made up some pretty sweet dance moves, and is starting to add songs to them.. it's pretty funny. Of course his songs are just sing songy babbling, but they're hilarious!! I'll have to post videos once I get my camera back from Jeriann.

Sleep Training..

Not Rei.. me! I'm not sure what happened, or why it happened, but I have developed some strange sleeping habits, the biggest being that I now sleep curled up on the edge of the bed, practically hanging over spooning the mattress. It's weird, but Jeff loves it, he likes to gloat about how he has the whole bed to himself and he feels like he sleeps alone again. Meanwhile I am getting crappy sleep and back pain from my new weird habits and am trying to train myself to sleep ON the bed again!

While I was pregnant I made what I called a pillow fort.. and I think that's where it all started. I would use 4 king size, big, whatever they're called, pillows and put on behind me to keep me from rolling onto my back (NOT a side sleeper), one in front of me to keep me from rolling onto my stomach, one between my knees because my hips got so dang wide and would hurt after 15 minutes of side sleeping.. sometimes one under neath my ribs to support them, and usually with all of that I wouldn't even need a separate one for under my head. No.. this was not comfortable at all, but it was much worse without the fort. Naturally, with Jeff and my pillow fort taking up so much space, in addition to getting out of bed every 40 minutes to use the restroom I stayed pretty close to the side of the bed.

The came Reilly.. yeah, we co slept! Totally against it in the beginning, but it happened and it was awesome and I would do it again. We waited until he was old enough to move around in his sleep so I would feel comfortable sleeping with him and not suffocating him with him next to me.. until then he just slept on me. (Not all the time.. he did have a bassinet, but.. it was allowed.) Anyway.. being constantly alert of him, and my husbands creepy sleeping issue (don't touch him in his sleep he will wake up swinging! it's terrifying!) I would try to give Rei plenty of space.. pushing me to the end of the bed and giving my son enough space for 7 babies! Of course he was tiny and insisted on being cuddled up against me at all times, not to mention gravity, but the more he moved closer the more I moved away to give him space, thus half my body hanging over the side of the bed. Fabulous.

So.. that's my newest development. It's not exciting, I'm consciously trying to work on it by starting in the middle of the bed and moving back there anytime I wake up.. kind of weird. Thought I'd share.. has this happened to anyone else?

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas!

Christmas is so much more exciting this year having a little one to celebrate with! I had to stop myself from making "From Santa" labels for his gifts and making sure I wrapped things in different wrapping paper, can't wait for those years! Instead this year I figured.. eh, he doesn't know what Christmas is.. why not just give him his presents early? I have given him one, and if it weren't for Jeff not letting me, I probably would have given him them all! Mostly I am excited to start new holiday traditions!

We had our first family Christmas last week at my Dad and Rhonda's. They go to Kentucky every Christmas so we always celebrate a little bit early. It was funny watching him figure out that there were things underneath the paper as he opened his gifts, and in my family's true spirit- Reilly received toys that made noises and bounced around.
Here is a little video of him opening gifts:

Jeff came back from his San Diego trip a day early, so yesterday we got to have a family day. We took Rei to see Santa at the mall. He fell asleep on the way there, so I wasn't sure how it would go. We woke him up and let him look at some of the displays, just to get him excited, then handed him over to Santa. He did awesome, I fully expected, and not going to lie- kind of wanted him to cry so I could enter him into the contest for a shopping spree, mother of the year... he looked around a little unsure, but then, at no fault to my sisters and their constant paparazzi style pictures of him, he saw the camera and started smiling.

Reilly is continuing to grow and change a little bit each day. Today he was wearing his "Baby's First Christmas" outfit has little reindeer on the feet, he kept wiggling his feet and getting so excited about the reindeer moving around.. strange child that one. OH! AND! Every night before his bath we clean up his room, and I try to make it fun and pretend he is included when really, until today, he has just watched my take away his toys and say goodbye to each one. Today I was cleaning up his toys doing my usual "bye panda, bye ring stacker, bye..etc" and he dumped the toy bin back over and continued playing with them! So this should be an interesting little transition. Hmm.

Oh.. if anyone has any great advise on introducing water, I'd love to hear it! I tried with the bottle, but he expected milk and wasn't too stoked. We have some sippy type cups, but the require more sucking than he is capable of.. he takes it out of my cup, but.. that's not reasonable. So the more tips the merrier! :)

Quick 6 Month Update!

Ahh.. I am falling behind again! Lately has been so crazy with work, Reilly, going to Reno.. unpacking! Love taking quick trips, but I HATE unpacking! Reilly turned 6 months a week ago and I don't know who this kid is from one day to the next! He is doing so much so fast that I can't keep up, but I am loving every second of it!

As of late, Reilly has decided he is a construction worker. One of his Christmas gifts this year was the Fisher-Price laugh and learn (or whatever that line is called) tool bench, and it's hilarious! He can sit for so long and just push the buttons, try to pull the paint churner thing, and hit it with other toys. It does come with a little hammer, first thing he does is takes the hammer out of it's place, plays with it for a few seconds, then uses something else (Sophie for instance) to hit the tool bench. It is also fun seeing him switch from toy to toy and keep himself entertained. While I was getting ready this morning I sat him up in his room with his toys and then got ready in his bathroom and just watched him as he played, it's amazing to see him grow and see how much he has developed! Child development was one of my bigger focuses in college and I worked in the area for several years, but I'm still so amazed by it- I really think it's one of the most incredible and mysterious things in the world and can't get enough of it!

Last night was really interesting, in a not so great fashion. I'm wondering if my sweet little angel is becoming a bit manipulative. Haha! I'm sure not intentionally, he just does what he knows gets a response.. but last night was.. frustrating! He went to bed around 8 and then woke up around 11:30 for his first middle of the night feeding, so it was looking like it was going to be a 3 hour night (it's always a surprise, either 7 hours straight or every 3.. fun little game). He woke up again at 1:30 and I put him back to sleep, but THEN at 2:30ish he started making one little cry noise, and then waiting for 5-10 seconds, making another, and waiting.. and this went on for quite a while. He wasn't crying, just making sounds and waiting. After a while Jeff was done listening to it, he gets up early for work and doesn't like when I ignore Reilly's noises. I knew that Reilly was just trying to get me to go in there and he didn't need me. He had just been nursed an hour prior and wasn't even crying.. so I went into his room just so Jeff could sleep and he was in his bed LAUGHING!! I was not stoked about this.. now, I laugh, because thinking about it the whole thing was pretty funny, and that is pretty clever of him, but at the time I was not a fan! So he got what he wanted, I rocked him back to sleep. That child.

We are missing his gym class today because he is moving up to Level 2, which is during nap time.. yuck! But I'm really excited for that class now that he is sitting up a lot more, so I guess we'll see it on Saturday. He is moving so much! He sits up for.. as long as he wants to, rolls everywhere, I had to use his changing table strap for the first time yesterday because he will not stay in one place. You put him on his stomach-he switches to his back, put him on his back-and he switches to his stomach. He has also started moving himself around backwards-like.. backwards army crawling I guess, and he is trying SO hard to crawl, he gets up on his arms and then kicks his feet really fast with his knees in the ground, but doesn't get anywhere.. poor guy! As much as I'm not in a hurry for him to crawl, he can take his sweet time as far as I care, it would be fun to see him crawling around with my cousins twins on Christmas since they are around the same age.

I think that's it for now.. as usual I'm skipping out on SO much but am not great at keeping this bad boy updated, and need to fully utilize nap time for other things besides blogging. I put a few of his 6 month pictures in here, he was so funny while Christina was taking pictures.. he looooves when the camera flashes so she just got that thing going and it had his full attention.

Thanksgiving.

So I'm clearly scattered all over the place, but whatever.. that's just how it will have to be until I catch up on this bad boy!!

Thanksgiving was a little over a month ago, but I realized I never wrote about it, and probably should before I forget it! It was definitely not an easy 1st holiday to celebrate with Reilly, but hey.. live and learn right? We are still trying to come up with the best possible solution to celebrate holidays with three sets of grandparents in town. I think it would be best to just divide Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, and Christmas Day between the three sets because I can't really enjoy a holiday driving around town stressed out to make it to each place in time and upset about not getting to spend quality time with each family. It seems incomplete, but.. Jeff would rather rush around than miss anyone on a holiday- so we will do that until he realizes he hates rushing around and changes to my way. :)

Reilly and I woke up that morning just in time to watch the parade, my favorite part of the day, and from the looks of things- his also, until he fell asleep sitting up on my lap!

Once he was up from his nap we got ready to go and our first stop was my dad's house at 2pm.

Jeff and Reilly.. watched the football game while Rhonda, Ashley, and I worked on dinner.. any Amy and Karen ran around taking pictures. So like them!

We ate dinner and then of course people starting passing out on every couch, I washed some dishes and then we were off to stop #2, Uncle Bob's house with my mom's side of the family. The had already eaten, but we just wanted to stop by and see everyone, especially the twins who are only a few months older than Reilly, so the closest thing to cousins his age he has right now.. until any of our combined 7 sisters get on it! Let's go ladies! :) We hung out there for almost an hour and then our final stop for the day.. Jeff's Mom's house! They had also already had dinner, but Jeff was ready for round two so he made a turkey sandwich, we visited for a little while, then took our exhausted little man home! Definitely a stressful day, we tried to enjoy it as much as we could though, but hopefully we come up with a better routine because I don't think it's fair to us, to Reilly, or to our families to get an dine and dash appearance from us!

Bring on the Calories!

Making baby food is so addicting! Every batch makes like 6 little containers of food, and he can't just have the same food all day long, so I have quite the collection gathering.

Reilly's new favorite, once squash, is now "Potatoes, Carrots, and Corn". So I thought I'd share the recipe. :)

2 tbsp unsalted butter
1/2 cup onion, chopped
2-3 medium carrots, peeled and sliced
1 medium sized potato (8oz), sliced into little squares
2 tbsp water or vegetable stock
1/3 cup of corn
1-2 tbsp milk

Melt the butter in a saucepan, then saute the onions for 1 minute. Add the carrots and saute for another 5 minutes. Add the potato and water/veg stock (i used water.. veg stock takes too long to make for my liking right now.. and I used a whole lot more water than it called for.. just kept adding it when it looked like it was getting dry). Cover and cook on medium heat for 15 minutes. Then stir in the corn and cook for another 5 minutes. Add the milk and puree.

I also didn't add the milk before puree'ing, because I don't want to put his food in the microwave with breast milk in it and kill the milk's nutrients. Took a little bite.. SO good! Going to have to try it as a mash potato recipe. :)


I'd hoped that the butter would give him a few extra calories to get through the night, as I was going to see Harry Potter at midnight and didn't want Rei to be too rough on Jeff. Umm.. nope, instead he woke up at midnight ready to play and talked Jeff's ear off until 2am, until Jeff just put him in his crib and let him talk himself to sleep. Oops.

Zombieland!

We're there! That movie with the zombies running wild killing each other and riding on roller coasters. Probably won't kill anyone anytime soon, and I can't ride a roller coaster to save my life.. but the rest is my world right now. That's not why I haven't updated the blog though.. that's an array of other excuses. The capslock on the keyboard got stuck and nothing is worth typing that much holding down the shift key, then the computer got attacked by a virus. But I think we're clear now.. so voici! BLOG!

Not sure what I'm doing wrong. Unfortunately I don't have many mommy friends that I talk to on a regular basis with older babies. I have some of those friends, just.. not the ones I talk to often-they are all days apart from Reilly due to meeting at a mommy mixer when they were weeks old and you tend to draw to the babies the exact same age because you're going through the same things.. you get it, so basically I learn my skills from books and internet sources. I'm pretty much winging this parenthood stuff. And people..specifically my father, tend to get annoyed when I say "well the book says blah blah blah", but as for now.. the "book" is my bible, and I follow every verse. Anyway.. as to the "where I'm going wrong".. WHY WON'T MY SON SLEEP THROUGH THE NIGHT ANYMORE!? He used to and it was beautiful, and we were a happy little family. Now he is a happy little baby and I am about to put him on formula just so I can have more than one caffeine a day. Yeah.. it's that bad! Here is how it goes. 7:30pm comes around and we start his sleep routine. He gets a bath, splash time in warm water with his toys, lotioned up-sometimes massaged, nursed, and then 2-3 books-always ending with Goodnight Moon. Then he gets put into his crib still awake and usually just talks to himself or rolls back and forth for about 10 minutes and is asleep. No crying, it's beautiful. He even has naps perfected. When I'm home with him, he gets put down around 10:30am and 2:00pm. Again, I lay him down completely awake, this time I give him a blanket since it's only for an hour.. he plays with the blanket, rolls to his side, and is out for a good hour. Love it.. piece of cake. However.. the hours between midnight and 8:30am are a nightmare! I feel like I have a newborn, every 3 hours on the dot.. he wakes up. I've tried letting him whine, but whining turns into full on screaming until I nurse him. Maybe he is really hungry? But maybe he has learned to wake up every 3 hours. I could understand if I put him to sleep nursing, but I don't.. I put him to sleep wide awake, so I know he has the skills to fall asleep on his own. Last night when I would respond to him I nursed him WAY less than usual, I cut him off instead of him letting go, and.. he slept the exact same 3 hours. So then I wonder what the function of him waking is and if it's really a hunger thing at all. Maybe a growth spurt.. maybe teething.. maybe I'm doomed for the rest of my life.. I don't know!? I don't know anything because my brain is going on very disrupted sleep. If it's a spurt/teeth/hunger thing, I'm fine with that, I just don't want to continue reinforcing a behavior that I should not and conditioning him to wake up every 3 hours for.. ever! So if you had advise.. spit it out! I've considered even moving him back into my room and starting all over with the sleep training, but.. that would ultimately be reinforcing. Last night I even got into his crib with him for a minute-his face lit up with smiles! But.. that's not realistic. Anyway.. that's my rant.

Onto more exciting news! Reilly sits up, rolls over, and is uncomfortably close to crawling. If you put your hands behind his feet and just.. follow him around that way, he will push off your hands and travel all over his room, can even steer himself in different directions. He still isn't a fan of his stomach, yet, put him on his back and he will flip himself right over, but has forgotten how to flip back. It's pretty funny. During his three hours of sleep he flips himself over guaranteed and sleeps on his stomach. He is napping right now and I just found him on his stomach.. face down. Not okay. He is definitely enjoying all the new views thought, and I think a little more independence, if he wants a toy he can get to it, and doesn't have to stare and squawk until I get it for him.

Solids are going great! They're so much fun. Like I mentioned before, I make his baby food and I love it! I love preparing things for him to eat, it makes me feel like I'm doing something more for him. And I love cooking anyway, so cooking for my baby is that much better. He has mastered carrots, sweet potatoes, peas, green beans, squash (his FAVORITE), pears, apples, broccoli, parsnip, avocado (my favorite to give him).. I think that's it. Only had a reaction to spinach-which really is fine by me. We have started mixing his vegetables now, today for lunch he had sweet potatoes and broccoli, and also on this weeks menu are "trio of root vegetables". I have been using Annabel Karmel's 100 purees or whatever it's called. I like it.. seems like a lot of tasty things. We've also brought rice cereal back, because before we introduced fruits, giving him vegetables for breakfast seemed weird. So in the morning we sit together and I eat my Rice Krispies and he eats his rice cereal.. sometimes he sucks on my banana, it's probably one of my favorite times of the day with him. Oh.. and he has started doing the best thing during meals. After every bite he sits there with a mouth full of food and says "mmm" over and over, no matter what he is eating. It's hilarious! I'll have to get that on a video that I can upload here.

What else, what else. OH! I would like to call "bullshit" on the "you can't spoil a baby before 6 months" bit. He is 5 months old and becoming quite demanding. We were at Town Square for a date with his Leram. As we were walking, she reached into his stroller to hold his hand. He yelled, pulled his hand away, and kicked his feet. When I noticed that he did this, I tried it and he did the same thing, only.. yelling louder- expressing that he was really not having it. The next day while Rhonda was preparing his lunch she had him sitting in his high chair and he began squawking (I know I keep using that word.. but it's what he does, he's not much a cryer.. just.. a squawker.) and pounding on the high chair table. I don't want to say he is all little bossy though- he is also very helpful. Whenever he is able to carry things, he does. For instance.. halmark card bags.

Ahh, nap time is over, thus is my blogging time. That's the update. Hope you enjoyed. Bye!


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