If we have it, she will eat it!

The title of this post makes me think of the movie Field of Dreams…“If you build it, they will come.” And that quote makes me think of my dad. I watched Field of Dreams with him when I was a kid. I think I might have fallen asleep during the movie. I remember trying so hard to stay awake and knowing he really liked the movie and wanted me to see it. My memory is hazy as to whether or not I actually fell asleep or not, but I just remember being tired and trying very hard to stay awake.
Anywhoo…

Back to the point of the post…if I try to feed it to Callie now, she will eat it. Basically whatever IT is. You may [RECALL] that is a far cry from where we were when I started baby food with her when she was just shy of 6 months old.

I’ve been trying baby food with her every day since I first started with her and she would maybe take a few bites, but more often she would blow raspberries at me and push the food away and cry. She really wouldn’t have any of it. Then about 2 weeks ago, it just clicked. She first started to eat YoBaby yogurt and she loved it! I had seen a commercial for it and decided to give it a try since she wasn’t digging any of the baby food or rice cereal or baby oatmeal or pureed banana or pureed avocado. I bought the blueberry kind and the apple and sweet potato kind. She loved the apple and sweet potato but would have none of the blueberry. So, I just fed her the apple and sweet potato yogurt every day. Then I started adding in other baby food and she would open her mouth and eat whatever I put in front of her! I couldn’t believe it! So we stocked up on all kinds of fruits and veggies and yogurts and baby oatmeal and rice cereal. She loves it all. There isn’t anything she hasn’t liked yet. When we eat out, we give her bread and samples of our food in tiny pieces. She also eats baby food now at daycare too. We've come a long way in the food department! YAY!

Big Girl

Callie has reached some “big girl” milestones at her ripe old age of 7 months. I am constantly amazed at the things that she is doing now or wants to do.

For example, she always wants to be standing up. Usually she does this with our help. As I’ve said for months now, she will pull herself up while holding on to little more than one of our fingers. Now she tries to pull up on everything in sight. She doesn’t want to be sitting. She doesn’t want to be crawling, which might be why she still isn’t, at least not in the traditional ways of crawling. She doesn’t want to be rolling around, which she can do quite well.

She wants to be standing. Like this.

And now she can do it, while holding on to something for support, all by herself!

Another “big girl” moment came when we put her in a high chair at a restaurant for the first time. We tried that out on Mother’s Day. My first Mother’s Day, except Courtney reminded me in my card from the dogs that he gives me every year that it isn’t really my first Mother’s Day. I’ve been celebrating Mother’s Day for the last 7 years since we got our first fur baby, Lambeau. ;) Anyway, we tried putting her in the high chair on Mother’s Day. She’s been ready physically to do that for quite a while, but we always feel like she is more easily contained in her carseat when we are in a restaurant. But, she did great! While sitting in the high chair, we fed her bits of bread and she played with her table top toy.

Callie has also gotten big enough to ride in the shopping cart! Until now, we’ve always taken her into stores in her carseat. We still do that on big trips to Wal-Mart because it’s just easier that way. She is big enough to ride all by herself in the cart now and she really enjoys it. Of course, she tries to grab at everything within reach now too.

I say it all the time, but I just want to freeze time right now. She is growing up way too fast! This age is such fun and I want to keep her here for just a little while longer…or maybe a long while!!



7 Months Old

Callie is 7 months old now!

As I did her 7 month pictures with the sign and teddy bear today, Callie performed for the pictures just like she does in real life nowadays....

Yep, that's about right...she is ALL OVER THE PLACE all the time now. So, I got a few good pictures of her and then she noticed the sign and ripped it right down. If we are at a restaurant and I have her on my lap, she is grabbing at everything on the table within reach. We've gotten to that point. Hide the goods that are within her reach!!

And within reach for her is anything she can scoot around to or grab by reaching out as far as she can. She isn't crawling yet. She gets her arms in position or she gets her legs in position but she can't get them working together. Yet. I don't think it will be long. She wants to move around so badly.

She can hold on to our fingers and go from a sitting position to standing now quite easily. I always say I think she might walk before she crawls. She's got some strong arms and legs. She loves to work those legs too by standing on our laps and jumping up and down with our assistance.

I said she is all over the place and that includes on the changing table. She won't stay on her back for a diaper change to save her life. She flips over on her belly or wriggles all around now every time. It's quite exhausting. I've gotten very good at putting a diaper on when she is on her belly. I've also gotten very good at finding things to entertain her for a brief moment so I can get her diaper on. Whew! We are going to be in for it when she's a toddler, I can already tell.

She still won't really eat baby food...except for yobaby yogurt. She loves it! Her favorite is the apple and sweet potato kind. She sits in her high chair and eats that every evening before her 5:00 bottle.

She typically drinks 6 bottles a day. She has 6 ounces in each bottle. Since Miss Independent self-weaned sometime before Thanksgiving and Christmas, I pump exclusively and feed her breastmilk in bottles. I'm not able to keep up with Callie and the amount of milk she wants to drink at each feeding anymore and so I supplement 1 ounce of formula in 3-4 bottles a day. I'm hoping I don't have to do more than that, but if I do, it will be okay. :)

Since Callie started teething, then got a double ear infection that required 2 doses of antibiotics, she has gone back on our deal of sleeping through the night. I miss that. *sigh* She has starting waking at least once a night quite regularly. Sometimes that's at midnight, sometimes 2am, sometimes 3:30 and most frequently 4:30am. She eats and goes right back to bed until I have to wake her at 7 to leave for school but I do miss the days of her sleeping from 8:30 to 5:30 or 6:30am uninterupted. She still goes to bed at 8:30pm.

She's got such a spunky, fun personality. She is still very serious, not laughing very often but she gives us plenty of sweet smiles and lots of open mouth excited faces. We can get her giggling if we tickle her sides.

 As you can see, she is a little chunk. :) She certainly isn't starving from not eating baby food! HA!

She still has just the two bottom teeth. I think she is starting to work on some more teeth now though. The slobbering has gotten pretty bad again.

We are loving every second with our 7 month sweetie. As I pray with her before bed each night, I thank God for trusting us with her. What a true blessing she is to us!

a girl and her dogs, part 2

I did a post of Callie with her dogs when she was very small, in fact, she was a month old or younger in THAT post.

Thought I would share some more. Here are some recent pictures of Callie and the boys. She adores them, especially Lambeau. They think she's pretty great too.

Braddock, looking annoyed, but he really loves the attention.

Braddock, showing off for her.

I looove this picture!

She has a blankie in one hand and Lambeau in another.

Spending a lazy morning with Lambeau

Checking out Lambeau. He always gets her attention.

You knew this day would come eventually.

Hitching a ride on Lambeau. ;)



Just a-swingin!

Callie enjoyed her first time swinging on real swings on a playground!

She held on like a big girl. So cute!

This was at a park in Hot Springs Village we visited while celebrating Mom's birthday.

Fun times!

All she needed was a highchair...

Obviously, if I had broken out the high chair in the beginning, we wouldn't have had the eating issues we've been having.

Obviously.

Who knew? We borrowed this high chair from our neighbor and it's been sitting in our garage, waiting on me to get it cleaned up. Today Callie sat outside on the porch while I cleaned it up with a hose in the yard. Classy, I know...sort of classy like our overgrown flowerbed that hasn't gotten any attention since the night before I went into labor...

Then I brought it in and got her all set up in it.

 And she chowed down on sweet potatoes and applesauce like it was no big thing. Except that it is a big thing, because she has yet to really eat any food at all since the day she ate sweet potatoes and peas back a few weeks ago. We offer baby food each night with her sitting in her bumbo seat but she won't eat it.

Tonight, she did! All because of that high chair! :)

Here's hoping I don't jinx myself by publishing this post! HA!

Grow, baby, grow!

We had Callie's 6 month appointment on March 25th. She got her 6 month shots which she took like a trooper. She only cried a little. They also did all her measurements.

Weight - 16.4 lbs - 51%
Height - 26.5 inches - 73%

Then the nurse measured her head.

Head - 46.2 cm - 100+%

The nurse remeasured because she said she knew the pediatrician would make her do it again. Same thing. Then Dr. Day came in and he measured her head. He got an even bigger measurement than the nurse. I started to get a little nervous since they were making such a fuss about it. I asked what it means for her head to be so big and he told me to hang on for a second while he put some information into the computer.

Let me give you some backstory on this girl's head. It was big when she was born. You might recall from her birth story that the doctor had to use forceps to get her big ole head out. Then after we got her home, she started to get a flat place on one side. We had to position her so that she laid on the other side of her head in her carseat, bouncy seat, crib, etc. There was even talk of putting her in a helmet at her 2 week and 2 month appointments. Luckily, that worked itself out and at her 4 month appointment, the shape was fine and the doctor felt good about it. I, however, being the new sometimes worrisome mom I am, have always worried about her head. It's always the top of my list of questions to ask her doctor at every visit. So, this measuring and remeasuring of her head had me getting a little tense.

Now, where were we? Oh, yes, he was putting info in the computer.

So he got it all put in and showed me why he was concerned about her head size. Because you may be thinking what many people have told me since this day...don't all babies have heads that are bigger than anything else for a while?? Well, his concern was more about her head growth from 4 months (our last appt) to 6 months. Apparently it had grown exponentially faster than anything else in that time. He showed me some graphs charting her growth and her height and weight had always been on this nice curve that is considered "normal" development. Her head had been on that curve at 2 days, 2 weeks, 2 months but it had started to spike up off the curve at 4 months, but not too much. But now her line was spiked completely straight up, showing an abnormal amount of growth. Then he started to speak to me about what that means. The long story short version is that he used words like "neurosurgeon" and "cat scan" and "surgery" and "fluid on the brain" and other similiarly scary terms. But he also said that since her development is right on for where it should be that he wasn't too concerned but he wanted to get her checked out just to be safe.

Okay.

He really did share that information with me in a very gentle way. I think he was expecting me to lose it. To cry. To go all new mom crazy. But I didn't. I was very calm. I think mostly because she is on track developmentally. However, since I have always had concerns about her head it was a bit scary. Plus, with brain surgery as the cure for what may be ailing your 6 month old, it's pretty scary. They told me they would set up the appointment for us for Callie to get a cat scan asap. They reassured me that she is fine and nothing would happen to her before we made it to the appointment. Thank you God for that.

That was a Friday. Fast-forward to Monday. They call me to tell me her appointment was on Wednesday at 8am and that we would have results by noon that same day.

On Wednesday we went to the appointment for Callie to have a cat scan. I wondered how in the world this would work! Turns out it's pretty simple. Courtney and I got to go in with her and after they got  her laid down and strapped in, Courtney kept her arms down and still and I held a bottle then her pacifier in her mouth. It was very noisy and her little eyes got so big when it started but she did so good. It was only in like 15-30 seconds and we were out and on our way.

Then we waited. UGH! That noon phone call did not come until 3pm. Waiting is so hard! But the news was GREAT! She is completely and totally normal!! No fluid on her brain...her bone structure is perfect...all is well! He said even if her head continues to grow that he wouldn't be concerned because everything looked perfect. YAY!

You know what that means though, right? We've got one big headed little girl on our hands! hahahaha! We can laugh about it now. :)

So, grow baby Callie grow! But that head can slow down a bit! ;)

And here's our sweet girl playing in a trash can

at my parent's house in Hot Springs Village.