flying baby

oliver loves being tossed in the air. here are a few of the many pics from pool tossing last week.

orange is the color of the day

i love that my baby has red hair. i sure hope it stays red. i think it is kind of funny that we call it red hair, because it really is orange. but wouldn't it sound so strange to say, "i love that my baby has orange hair?" i wish we did as the brits do and call it ginger. anyhoo, anyway you call it, it is cute, and even cuter when he is wearing orange on his body and his face :)

yumm

so... we joined an organic buying club a few weeks ago. we thought we would just try it out and see if we liked it and, hoo-hoo, boy do we like it. genius idea really: you pay $45 for a full share and you get a random assortment of fresh, mostly local, organic fruits and vegetables. a full share is mucho fruita and uber gemüse. it opens the creative eater and creative cheffy in you too, gotta admit i wouldn't normally buy cauliflower or bok choy, but the wisconson calliflower soup and stir fry we made with those were great, better than what we usually would do. getting a different assortment each week kind of puts in a Iron-Chef quality into cooking that spices things up (pun intended... you gotta a problem with that?). Anyhoo, consider this a commercial for the organic buying club, support your local farmer, and down with canned/processed/high fructuose corn syrupeey/fat-o/killer food! I am talkin' to you Frito-lay!!! (except for flamin' hot cheetos... so good.

Here's a link to the club for any florida-folk: http://www.anniesbuyingclub.com/

my 12 hour man

so, i never realized before having oliver how much sleeping and eating would dominate my world. i mean, i didn't think that having a baby would be a walk in the park, or wouldn't change my life, but i was pretty surprised at how these two events could take over my life.

sleep, the elusive treasure of all new moms, especially nursing moms. the beginning is just a marathon of days and nights that blur from one to the next. i honestly felt like i was running on adrenaline or something like unto it. it is exhausting, but i felt so much purpose in nursing him and helping his little body grow. as the weeks and months wore on he started sleeping more, and therefore so did i. even at 2.5 months or so he started doing some pretty long stretches at night. i think at around 3 months he was even close to sleeping through the night, one night sleeping 10 hours. this was encouraging and exciting, but then the dreaded teething came. and with it all hope of sleeping through the night anytime soon.

i have plenty of friends that swear by the "cry it out" method, and plenty of people told me that he "shouldn't" be waking up to nurse in the night. but i just couldn't bring myself to do it. plus i knew we would be going to utah in may and didn't want to try and then have it be messed up by traveling and the time change. so, i decided that after we got back from utah we at least needed to try something, or i would go nuts!

like i said, i just don't have the stomach for the "cry it out" method, so i decided to try an experiment. my pediatrician suggested trying a bottle of water in the night instead of nursing. but that just felt a little too harsh. so i decided to combine that with something i read in a book. we started by having clarke feed oliver a bottle of expressed milk, beginning with 4.5 ounces, and slowly decreasing by .5 ounces every night after that. when we got down to the smaller amounts like 2.0 and less we offered him a bottle of water after the milk. he wasn't a total fan, but there wasn't a ton of crying either. when he got down to 1.0 oz of milk he started batting the water away afterwards, basically letting us know that he wasn't fooled.

so monday night would have been the night that we offered him only water, no milk. i was rather dreading it because i figured that we would have many a nights of crying it out ahead. well, much to my surprise and delight the boy wonder did not wake up once, not even ONCE! he slept from 7 pm to 6:30 am! the Enigma, who woke up three times on sunday night slept all the way through the night the next. go figure.

i was worried it might be a fluke, but tuesday and wednesday were awesome too, in fact almost eerily so. tuesday night i kid you not, he slept from 6:54 pm to 6:54 am. wednesday night was another 12 hours. on top of that, he started taking at least one 2 hour nap each day.

i have to admit. i love it, but it kind of creeps me out. i have been so used to such an erratic schedule with him that it feels strange, almost indulgent to have him sleep so well. now we just have to work on me. although he is sleeping through the night, i am not. i still wake up out of habit at around 4:00 or 5:00. hopefully as if he keeps sleeping so well my internal clock will eventually give up and actually believe that i can sleep through the night as well!

p.s. this video is from a while ago, maybe a month or more. i just thought it was cute.

i'm a little inch worm

so oliver has always been a very physical baby. from the beginning you could just feel the energy to move bubbling around in this kid. he held his head up very well starting at around 6 weeks. he flipped from back to belly at around 4 months and now at 6 months he is actually quite mobile.

he has started crawling, well at least his version of crawling. i think there is some dispute about what constitutes crawling. he doesn't crawl as in on hand and knees cross-lateral moving, but i think that whatever he does to get from one place to the next that isn't walking is crawling for now. or maybe motating is a better word, or inchworming, but what ever you call it, he is moving. the old changing pad is useless with this kid because he flips and moves all over the place. the floor and our bed have now become the changing grounds. he can pretty much get whatever he wants, it just takes him a little bit of time. i think the farthest i have seen him go so far is about 7 or 8 feet.

i honestly can barely keep this kid in my arms. i was on solo oliver duty during sacrament this week since clarke was sick. he literally climbed, jumped, lunged, bobbed, and moved the entire meeting. i kid you not, by the end of the meeting my upper arms were burning!

don't you wish you were me?

so oliver has been a VERY spitty baby. i wouldn't go so far as to actually call it reflux (because i think those babies scream a lot more), but i am surprised that he is so chunky (16.5 lbs at 6 months) because he barfs up so much milk. it really is beyond me that he isn't a skinny fellow based on how frivolously he has wasted my hard earned liquid gold.

the barfing has slowly subsided over the last few months, but friday was just a major reminder that he still knows how to barf with the best of them.

so he woke up from his nap and we nursed. he is always very happy after nursing and he was happily jumping and babbling and lunging on my lap (it is really hard to keep this kid in my arms). i made the misake of raising this cute little stinker over my head, intending for a little giggle and a kiss and snuggle, but instead i got THE BIGGEST BARF i think he has ever done (besides the one he did at about 10 days old where i was petrified he had pyloric stenosis, paranoid new mom) right in between my eyes.

i could see it starting to come out of that adorable smile and there was no time to dodge the bullet. it went SPLAT on my eyes and then rolled all down my face and chest. i honestly had to wipe it out of my eyes so that i could see. my eyes were stinging with barf juice. i was shocked. i looked in the mirror and knew i had to get proof.

to top it all off, the doorbell rang right as i was taking the picture. a friend's husband was dropping off their little boy for me to watch for a bit. i had to answer the door looking like this.

first night out withOUT oliver

so we figured that it was about time to venture out on a date sans the oli-man. well, more like way over due. we are starting to do a babysitting swap with another couple in the ward. so we should be getting out once a month now.

we had a great night (minus the pounding headache that afflicted poor clarkie). we swung by the cheesecake factory for Dutch Apple Caramel Streusel cheesecake and Chocolate Tuxedo Cream cheesecake. and then over to mac-and-schony grill for a Chef's Trio to go. then it was off to the beach for a little moon-light picnic.

we had a wonderful time enjoying the sound of the surf and the cool night air. we talked about the future and where we see ourselves in the next few years. it was lovely.

thank you laura for babysitting!