Potpourri

It feels like it has been forever since my last post - I will admit I have been busy with Hayley and life in general, but now I have some down time and thought I would catch up a bit.

Here is an update of the munchkin. Hayley has become quite vocal these days, always the chatterbox with blah blah, da da da, etc...She is so funny and I laugh, hard, everyday at her smile and sense of humor. She is very happy, most of the time, with the exception of when she is tired. She also is extremely interactive with us now, she gets upset when we takes things away from her that she can't have or if we move away from the window, for example, and she wants to continue to bang on it. She eats 3 meals a day - table food and baby food. She loves yogurt, turkey lunch meat, cheese, and avocado. I think those are her favorites. She also eats chicken, veggie burgers, carrots, pancakes, bagels, just about everything...She wants what we are eating, and often we allow her to try it, and most of the time she loves it. With all this eating, she has very little time to nurse, which is fine by me. She is now nursing once or twice during the day and in the morning and before bed. I foresee a smooth transition to weaning when she becomes a year - I hope at least. Every time she sees me eating she opens her mouth, something like this, to mean gimme some too mommy! Dave has been working a lot at usual, and doesn't get to see her as often as he would like, but when he comes home from work, she hears the door open and she looks for him to come around the corner. As he pops his head into the room, her face lights up with such joy! I know it makes his day, and probably hers too.

She is now rolling in both directions and tries to pull herself up on everything, without much success, but she loves to stand. She constantly puts her hands out to us to grab her and help her up to a standing position. She sings and shouts and just loves standing up. I can foresee her pulling herself up on everything shortly. Now that she is rolling all over, nap times have become an adventure. At first, she would roll herself to her belly and get stuck and cry and get upset, then I would have to go in and lay her back down and man, it would make it worse! So I decided to just let her be and see what happens. The last 2 days she has fallen asleep just fine, first on her side, and today on her belly. It is so beautiful to see her sleep! If it wouldn't wake her, I'd take a picture.

Hayley loves Josie so much, and all dogs for that matter. When she sees Josie come close she squeals with delight and loves watching Dave or I toss her toy as she runs to retrieve it and back again. She just shrieks and laughs and it is surely a site to see! If she can get close enough, she grabs her ears and her tail and anything she can to get close to Josie and give her "kisses" (which she does to all her babies and is more like a big wet lick/suck, but soooo cute). Josie is so patient and jumps up to get away as soon as possible...But they are great friends.

This week my mother turned 58. She loved her cake from Antina:

I think she loved even more having us all there to sing Happy Birthday, and on the actual day, she called me at 7 am and said all she wanted for her birthday was to see Hayley, so 30 minutes later she was here and we all had birthday pancakes and had a lot of fun. Hayley loves her Grandma and it is really cute to see her smile at familiar people and reach out her arms for her to hold her. The weather has been splendid and I am so happy spring is here, actually this weekend was in the upper 60's and we went hiking at Wadsworth twice with Sarah and the boys and I was actually in a short sleeve shirt! Yeah! These pictures were actually from last weekend when we walked out in the woods at The Big House. We didn't have Hayley's pack, so we tried the jogging stroller instead. It was awfully bumpy, but we made do just fine!

Being home is great - I get so much done and love spending all this time with Hayley. I can't imagine going back to work now, but I guess we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. In 18 days, we will be sitting on the beach or by the pool at Marco, and it can't come soon enough! We are ready! We can't wait to see Dave's family and to just have 9 days of rest and relaxation!