Ana and Lucas - So cute!

Clairvoyant crap

I was sorting through my e-mail inbox today (something I don't do often....obviously) and I came across this gem!! Last December I did an online clairvoyant reading about my predicted delivery day (I must have been really bored) and here is what is said:

The day you deliver, outside will be sunny. Your baby will arrive in the evening. (So far so good)
After a labor lasting approximately 11 hours, your child, a boy, will be born. Your baby will weigh about 7 pounds, 3 ounces, and will be 21 inches long. This child will have hazel eyes and be completely bald.

So they were right on then huh?

Ana is ace!

Ana is just so entertaining (to us at least). Her latest favourite toy is a bag of crisps (aka chips). We went out to lunch on Sunday and we gave her the bag to play with and she loved them. She banged them around at the deli, then all the way home in the car, and now at home they are her favourite toy. I guess they were destined never to be eaten. They are crushed to bits now :)

Ana's other latest party trick is to get all out of breath and pant when she's excited about something - which happens a lot. She flip flops between being mega excited and thrashing about and her usual quiet contemplation. As I'm writing this she is lying next to me, silently tugging on her foot and studying me. It is quite disconcerting at times!

She is 6 months old next week. Wow. She seems so grown up, although it also feels like we've always had her. Being pregnant feels like another lifetime ago (thank God). I'm still a little concerned about her flat/cone head. It is such an odd shape. I'll have to ask the pediatrician about it. Hopefully she won't need a helmet! Here she is in all her misshapen glory!

Jumping

I went to get Ana from daycare today and found her playing in a jumperoo - she loves it!! So, when we got home I put her in her walker and she was trying to bounce. So I got the door jumperoo out - What fun! She is a real jumping bean.

Gnome!!

I know it's not nice to make fun of a sick kid but how much of a gnome does Ana look in this picture?!

Grrrrr - I hate daycare

We just got back from the Doctor and Ana has strep throat, conjunctivitis, and an ear infection!
She is in great spirits though, other than the night waking you really wouldn't know she was feeling bad. Bless. Apparently a few kids at daycare are ill .... and apparently I'm the only one who calls them to notify the other parents. I can't wait to be home with Ana over the summer away from germs.

Concentration

Ana loves her walker and concentrates really hard on moving the pieces (when her mum is not annoying her with a video camera that is). It makes me think of that steady hand game where you have to move the wand around the wire without making it buzz. She'll be ready for that soon I think :)


p.s. Any suggestions on what to do with her Mohawk? James wants to shave her head but I won't allow it. Pony wants to dye it pink and spike it up!

Little rascal

Unfortunately our little Angel has stopped sleeping through the night. She's also stopped eating, and only takes 2oz at a time and spits out her solid foods. We are hoping this is just a phase! Here she is looking wide awake in the middle of the night. Notice that the little scamp has turned herself 90 degrees and flipped onto her belly!

Rolling and rolling and rolling

Just a quick update - Uni has started back so I'm really busy!

Ana is a rolling fool. Today I tried to video her rolling and I was laughing because I'd put her down and in the time it took for me to switch the camera on she would already have flipped over. Also, this past weekend we were in Tallahassee at Pony's house and I put her down on her mat and went to wash bottles then when I looked back (30 sec later) she was 3 feet from her mat and almost out of the front door!! I assume she rolled and kept rolling over and over but I don't actually know since I didn't see her get there!!



Ana had her first taste of solid food (if you can call apple sauce solid) tonight. She seemed to really like it and ate the whole lot! She has been having cereal for about a week or so which is much messier. I love feeding her like this because she cracks up laughing and I get to see her try really hard to figure out what to do with a spoon. She's come on a lot in a week and now opens her mouth in anticipation of the spoon. It's a lot more time consuming than a bottle though!

Brown eyed girl

My camera isn't really good enough quality to capture this very well but Ana's eyes are changing from blue to brown. The inner part (near the iris) is now totally brown and the colour is sort of spreading from there. It's cute!

Just as predicted she started with a cold tonight. She's in bed now but keeps waking due to her inability to breathe through her nose....this might be a long night :( Hopefully this won't stop us heading to Tallahassee in the morning!

Back in daycare

Ana went back to daycare this week. I have hated it since I have been spoiled and had her to myself over the past 5 weeks. Unfortunately her favourite teacher has moved to the wobbler room. Kids move from infants to wobblers once they can pull themselves up (i.e. wobble). This means Ana will get to see her soon, but probably not for a month or two. It's ok though, I'm sure she'll charm her new teacher in no time. Since she can sit up well now she gets to play in the various walkers and bouncers at daycare so she is far more entertained (not like those 3 month old losers who can't life their heads yet!)

Now Ana is back in daycare James and I are dreading the new wave of viruses. We give it 3 days before she is sniffling again. I really hope this does not disrupt her routine. She has been so good lately about being consistent with her feeding times and bedtime. She is sleeping from 8pm to 6am. She gets a bottle at 6:30am, 10:30am, 2:30pm, cereal at 5:30pm and a last bottle around 6:30pm. Her morning routine is always the same: wake up, coo and sing until James or I get up, nappy change, kick about and play on the floor, bottle, chill in her walker while we get breakfast and showered, short nap from 8:30am-9am then off to daycare. I'm really nervous that if she gets ill again she'll be up all hours of the night crying and we'll be disrupted. Hopefully not!

Fat Cat

At a loss for ways to entertain ourselves in Oxford, GA, James and I decided to weigh the whole family on our bathroom scale! Amazingly our cat Smudge weighs more than Ana! She weighs 17lb - jeez!! Ana weighs 16.5lb and our other cat Dogg weighs in at a much more respectable 12lb. Briscoe weighs 75lb. He has gained 10lb since we had Ana - a sure sign of neglect! He's a weird dog and hates to be walked on a leash. He sits down and digs his heels in and we have to literally drag him down the driveway. He loves walking in the woods though and any place he can roam free. Before Ana came along James took him to the woods every night and I went hiking with him pretty regularly, but now he is a couch potato! Lastly, I'm pleased to announce that my baby weight has all gone!! I now weigh 2lb less that I did before I got pregnant. Wah hoo. Unfortunately this doesn't really translate into dress size since I'm still a size larger than I was, and I have loose skin, but it is better than nothing. I also finally weigh less than my husband which is a relief (and not an easy thing to do). I think salmonella helped, but I'm also completely addicted to running. I run every day if I can and I get really cranky if I can't go. When I was pregnant I vowed never to take being able to run for granted again. Last night I was literally bounding down the road full of glee at the fact that I have my body back and I can run if I want to. This makes me wonder if I'll ever get up the nerve to get pregnant again. A really good friend of mine is pregnant now and I'm so excited for her and jealous of the fun stuff, but my stomach literally turns over when I think of the feeling of it all. Blurggh. No thanks!!

This post got a bit of track didn't it? What I meant to say was my cat is fat, and so is my dog.

Rolling over and other things

Ana finally rolled all the way over yesterday. She has been close for a few weeks but actually accomplished it today. Unfortunately James and I weren't looking :( All we know is that we put her down on her back then a few seconds later we looked at her and she was on her front! She has made a lot of progress in the last couple of weeks with sitting up as well so now she gets to play in her walker! She seems to really like it.

She has learned how to manipulate things with her hands so she can sit and play with all her cool toys now. She has also started to be really interested in our pets. She reaches out and strokes Briscoe and the cats which is cute. Briscoe is very mellow and doesn't mind being pulled about. I'm more wary with the cats because....well... they are cats and cats aren't very tolerant, but they seem to like her. This morning she was petting Dogg and suddenly grabbed a whole bunch of his fur in her baby vice grip and wouldn't let go, but he didn't seem too fazed by it.

Ana has also been getting her first taste of baby cereal. At first she wasn't too sure about it and cried when we tried to feed her, but today she seemed more interested and actually managed to keep some of it in her mouth.

The weather is unseasonably warm here at the moment. It was 70 degrees here yesterday so we went for a walk by the river. It was fun. The highlight of the whole day was when Briscoe fell in. He is a big scaredy cat around water, he paddles his toes in but won't go further than that. Well James threw a stick in and he was perched on the riverbank trying to reach it and "spladoosh" in he went!! Poor thing! He got his own back by shaking his fur out all over us though.

Travel update

Well, Ana and I made it back to the USA. The flight itself was fine and Ana was an absolute angel and slept almost all the way. The airport was a nightmare though. Security is ridiculous these days and trying to navigate security while carrying a baby and all her paraphernalia is a real trial of patience. I had to check my stroller at Manchester and didn't see it again until after clearing immigration in Atlanta. This amounted to 18 hours of holding a 16.5lb baby. My poor back! I had a layover in London (never again) and spent 25 minutes in a queue for security. Ana decided to poo as we were waiting to board the plane to Atlanta. Not wanting to give up my place near the front I put her mat down and changed her on the floor. She had drooled all over herself too so I changed her entire outfit. While I was doing this they opened the plane for boarding and rather than board row by row (like they usually do) they just called everyone at once. Ana and I almost got trampled in the stampeed that ensued. People were actually stepping over her in their rush to the front. One woman almost kicked her in the head. I was fuming! When I eventually got to Atlanta I spend 45 minutes in the queue for immigration, then I had to reclaim my extremely heavy bags and take them through customs. Now I thought I was home free, but I was taken to one side for an immigration grilling that lasted another 30 minutes. Apparently since I have lost 2 greencards I've been flagged as some kind of international theat :( After all this I then had to go through security AGAIN just to exit the airport. What the hell? The lady there asked me questions about Ana's formula and I was thinking "What, can I not take formula to my HOUSE?" Seriously - it was ridiculous. I landed in Atlanta at 4:15pm and finally got through to meet James at 6:30pm. The whole time Ana was strapped to my front and being swung around all over the place and she didn't make a peep. I'm so lucky! Still, I have resolved never to travel with her without James again. I just don't have enough hands!

Laughing

Everybody's favourite thing to do this Christmas was to make her laugh. Here she is laughing with Nana and Chiz

Ana and Jake