9 months old!

Here are some favorite pictures from our "9 month" photo shoot that I did with Lydia:

Some fun new things about 9 months old:
-Weighs 21 1/2 pounds.
-Popped through her first tooth
-Has learned the power of the "pick me up arms"
-Climbs up into my lap
-Still doesn't quite do the coordinated arm/leg crawling, but army crawls and scoots and rolls wherever she wants to go
-Can go from laying to sitting easily
-Has started to try and pull herself up
-For sure says "mama" now.  And says it a lot when she is teething...
-Loves being outside, swinging, and splashing in water
-Wants whatever her brother has or is doing
-Is still very loud and very happy!

8 Month Old Lydia

At 8 months old Lydia:
-Weighs 20-ish pounds, probably closer to 21 by now.  At her last dr. appointment about a month and half ago she was 19 lb 15 oz.  Which is in the 93rd percentile.  Weird (as in different than the numbers I am used to seeing!).  No wonder my arms are tired.
-Is still not a fan of pureed baby food.  (Obviously this is not affecting her growth any so I am not too worried.  :)  She flat out will not eat anything from a jar (and really, who can blame her).  She has done okay with a few of the purees I have made her from scratch and I need to get a little more adventurous in the flavors and see how she does.  She loves sucking on apples and recently discovered almost finished watermelon.  She has also started with Cheerios and loves those.  She can even get them in her mouth on her own.

-Doesn't have any teeth yet.
-Can sit up just fine but you can't actually leave her unattended because she will throw herself full force backwards at any given moment.

-Is so, so close to crawling.
-Rolls and pivots all over the place.
-Waves
-Loves playing with toys.  That may sound obvious, but I don't remember Noah loving to play with things the way she does, at least not as early.
-Thankfully she loves her bouncer

-Says "mama" and "dada" among other sounds and seems to do in on purpose sometimes.  Either way it is cute.
-Is excellent at blowing raspberries
-Loves her brother more than anything.  All he has to do is look at her and she giggles and screams with happiness.

-Is seriously the loudest baby I have ever seen.  She yells loudly, a lot.  They are happy noises, but still loud.

-Is such a happy baby!  This is what her typical smile looks like:

 
 -Is not the greatest sleeper, to put it mildly.  Just like Noah did at this age, she takes half hour to hour power naps and that is it.  (Unless of course she is being snuggled.)
-She is not exactly a dainty and delicate little lady.  She loves playing crazy and rough. She is always flinging herself around and the other day she cracked her head right against mine.  Did she start crying or be scared?  Nope, belly laughed and kept doing it over and over.  And did I mention that she is loud? :)
-Gets many of the same comments her brother did at this age--about her eyelashes, how she looks like us, and how alert and aware of things she is.  And one comment her brother didn't get so much--"Whoa, look at those rolls!" :)
-I love my 8 month old!

Starting solids AKA Sweet potato raspberries AKA We love breastfeeding

Since our little baby is already 6 whole months old (!), it's time to start the whole solid food thing.  The person most excited about this was actually Noah.  He often asks if she can eat what we are, and was very happy when we said she could start eating some baby food.  He did a great job helping to feed her her first taste of cereal:














Since then we have also tried pears and sweet potatoes, but I've got to say she isn't a huge fan.  (And she also has thrown up about an hour-ish later just about every time.  Any other mommies had this happen?  Is her tummy not quite ready yet?)

At this point Noah asked her, "Do you want to be excused GirlBaby?"

Then before the next time we tried sweet potatoes she learned a great new trick that helped her out:

I've still been trying to give her a little bit every couple days, but she just isn't as excited about it as Noah was when he started solids:

This has turned out to be one of those first baby vs. second baby things.  With the first baby you are so excited that they have reached a milestone and get to add this very exciting thing to your day.  With the second baby you think, "here is one more thing to add to my day and more dishes to clean, and I'm not sure I want them to be growing up that fast." :) 
A huge shout-out to breastfeeding: no prep, no mess, and everyone is happy.  Plus they don't call it "liquid gold" for nothing.  Yup, we love it! 

"I have a question for you. . ."

I hear those words many times every day.  (Of course I hear many other questions that are not prefaced by them either.)  And so here is a list of some of the questions I answered today:

"Why?"
"What does that song mean?"
"What does 'glory' mean?"
"Does Jesus have a throne?"
"What does the throne look like?"
"What does heaven look like?"
"If I make good choices and Jesus takes my sin, will I go to heaven someday?"
"Will you still be my mom in heaven?"
"What was Zaccheus' mom's name?"
"Why is Goliath a giant and Jupiter is a gas giant?"
"Is Goliath real?"
"Why did David fight Goliath?"
"Is Jesus a warrior?"
"Who does he fight?"
"What is that thing up by the ad. building?" (referring to an electrical pole and wires)
"Is electricity on the inside or outside of wires?"
"What does electricity do?"
"Do cars have electricity?"
"So if cars need electricity to go but they don't have wires, do they have big batteries?"
"Does Leo's house have electricity?"
"Does the whole town have electricity?"
"Why do Tiggers not like honey?"
"Is Lucy sick?" (because we all have colds)
"Can GirlBaby have some of my pancake?"
"Why did you give me this?" (referring to something he specifically just asked for)
"Why did he say/do that?" (referring to random things in books)
"Can we read Frog and Toad again?" (for the fifth time... that is his favorite book at the moment!)
"What did you say?"
"Why?"
"But why?"

That is just a sampling of the most memorable ones. I swear those were all straight from the mind and mouth of my 3 year old.  And those were all unprompted; I often set up activities or pick specific books to teach him something and of course that leads to many questions, but these all happen to be all Noah.  That boy is always thinking; sometimes you can practically see those little wheels turning.
So now I am going to sit for a while and not answer any more questions.  Until Noah wakes up.  Good night.

Easter!

So. . . Easter! It's my favorite.  It is one of my goals to make Easter the biggest deal of the year in our home, even more than Christmas.  Because, well, what it celebrates IS the biggest deal.  Which is tricky, because I love my Christmas too, and it is way easier to find fun Christmas-y things.  But we're getting there!  Noah was so excited for Easter Sunday!  He asked for weeks if it was here yet and the night before he didn't actually go to sleep until like an hour and a half after his usual bedtime...  When I would stick my head in to check on him and remind him to go to sleep he said, "Happy Easter!  Happy Easter!  Happy Jesus Easter!"
Now we don't celebrate just the day of or right before, oh no, we have about a month of Easter-y goodness.  Of course my obsession resource of Pinterest helped out a ton in finding ideas.  (You can check out my Easter board here.)  The main thing we spread throughout the month was work on our Easter tree.  Most days we added a new egg ornament with a different name of Jesus on it that we learned about.  Noah loved this and asked often to make a "Jesus egg." 
(I got this idea from a pin I saw of doing something similar with Christmas ornaments for Advent, and am pretty proud that I thought to adapt it for Easter. :)  Plastic eggs work great for this because they have two small holes in the top, so I just stuck some thread through and we were good to go.  Noah was thrilled that he got to use my Sharpies to decorate them.  Sometimes we did other activities that went with the name for that day, like decorating a candle for "light of the world" or making bread for "bread of life."  

 Almost all of them were actual biblical names of Jesus, but when Noah had another idea we would throw that it there too, like "super hero."  We did a super hero unit in Sunday School and he loves the song "Jesus Is My Superhero." :)

We loosely used some of these ideas for Holy Week.  The Jesus Storybook Bible has a great story about Jesus being the Servant King and washing the disciples feet.  We painted with our feet and then washed them for each other.  Noah loved the painting but we found out he is not a fan of touching other peoples feet... oh well. :)  Although a few days later he told me to put my feet in the tub while he was taking a bath and proceeded to wash them for me while quoting "I am doing this because I love you" and other parts of the Last Supper. 
We also worked on our Easter garden throughout the week.  We made a salt dough tomb like we did last year, but couldn't go outside to get dirt because we still have two feet of snow!  We used potting soil from a bag and actually tried to grow some grass.  We got a few random long blades of grass growing, but I don't think I have the greenest thumb.
There is an idea I have seen on a couple of my favorite blogs of putting rocks in an Easter basket and talking about how sin is like rocks in our hearts, and then replacing them with gifts and putting the rocks in a new basket with Jesus' name on it to talk about how he took our sins and gives us good things.  I didn't know if this would be over Noah's head or not but decided to try it and see what happened.  He didn't seem to be getting into it as we were getting the rocks ready, but as I was tucking him in that night he said, "I think Jesus is going to get that sin out of my basket.  I'll check in the morning."
So on Easter morning he woke up to our Easter garden looking like this (we had put Jesus in the tomb on Good Friday):

And his Easter basket with gifts and the "sin" rocks in another "Jesus" basket.  Then he had the idea to take the rocks and throw them outside, which is actually kind of an even better illustration!

And now this post is getting pretty long so I might have to do a Part 2...  Happy Jesus Easter!

What's pink, poofy, and oh so pretty?

Lydia in her Easter dress, of course!

Palm Sunday

We had a great Palm Sunday, how about you?
Of course it started out with kids waving palm branches. :)

There hasn't been young kids in this church in quite a while, so we tried to keep it a surprise from as much of the congregation as possible and then march them out while they were singing.  Fun stuff. 
Then Noah got help lead his favorite song, "Hosanna."  You can't hear it well, but he sang every word! (He really did pick this as his favorite song on his own, without persuasion from his Easter-loving mom. :)  Ever since he heard it last Palm Sunday he has loved it and asks to sing it every day.)

Remember all those kids that came last week?  Only 2 came this week, the 2 that have families that come every week, and one is Noah...  that is pretty typical for this ministry.  It is kind of hard not to be disappointed and makes it very hard to plan, but that is just how it is.  But we did have a couple of sweet boys visiting for the week.  And we always have a good time, no matter how many are there.
We talked about what "hosanna!" means--save us--and acted out Palm Sunday.

When it was Noah's turn to be Jesus his buddy said she wanted to be the donkey and Noah was happy to go along with that.

We talked about what "Holy Week" is and some of the other things that happened, including reading about Jesus washing the disciples feet out of one of our favorite books ever, the Jesus Story Book Bible.  Then to talk about Good Friday I read another of my favorite books, "The Tale of Three Trees."  If you have never read this book, you are missing out!  The tie-in to Good Friday is that one of the trees is made into the cross. . . "And every time people thought of the third tree, they would think of God."

We also made these really cool crosses where you fold a paper and then make 1 cut and unfold it to a cross shape.  (It's really not very hard either!)
The cross can become this giant symbol of sin and a way to talk about feeling bad for your bad and almost shaming people into following Christ.  Don't get me wrong, realizing the weight of our sin and that we need Jesus and what he did is absolutely necessary, and it scares me how that sometimes seems to be left out these days.  But if we leave it there and make that all the cross is about, I think we are kind of missing the point.  I am a big fan of the cross as a bridge analogy.  Because what was accomplished through that "paying for our sins" thing was the way for us to get back to God, for God to have what He wanted in the first place--to be with the children he created and loves.  I asked the kids to think about the idea that God really likes them, not just loves them.  I know the word "like" doesn't sound very Sunday School-y or theology-y, but it's true.  God wants to be with us; He made us to have a relationship with Him; He really likes us.