My toes are yummy

Yes, Lauren thinks sticking her toes in her mouth is fun.

Here is just a picture of her in her crib with her Sharks hat on. We were in the middle of getting changed so she is just dressed in her bib and diaper. But she likes just being in her diaper, alas it is too cold nowadays to let her run around that way.


She likes to hold on to her bottle when she is sitting in her car seat. This picture is funny to me because it looks like she is trying to defend her bottle... as if I would take it away from her.

It is actually the face she makes when I take too many pictures and the red light on my camera is irritating her. Still a cute picture nonetheless.

December 20, 2007

Your eyes are not deceiving you, there are three cute little asian reindeer! Sophie, Lauren and Hannah sat through a picture session with mommy Joy taking the pics as I tried to distract them. We took almost 30 shots, so by the end Lauren was a little fussy.

This pic is on the couch.

I know you may be asking yourselves how many times will you see her in this outfit. But she is so darn cute, and I do wash them in between the wearings :P

Here is a non-reindeer picture of Lauren holding her bottle. She is now able to hold it if it is not too full. She will also pull the bottle to her mouth when she wants it. You can catch her putting it in her mouth and pulling it out as she familiarizes herself with being able to control the bottle.
It was just a little snack while she was playing...

We have been busy the past few days but no pictures to show for it, so I am going to post ones from a few days ago.

She doesn't look that chubby in this one but I like the candy cane like socks :P! She finally has some red clothes she can wear red socks with!

She is getting better at sitting up now as you can see in this picture. I think she still thinks if she sticks her toes in the air she will magically get into the seated position.


This is from Juney's Birthday lunch. Thanks Dad for the cute picture!

I promise to take some pics tomorrow and post them up!

Another month goes by

How can anyone resist that smile?

She turned 5 months on December 10th which was also Juney's birthday (Happy Birthday Juney). She is getting big so fast. She is no longer this tiny tiny thing. She has some heft to her.

As a commemoration of her age milestone I took some pictures to see how big she grows.

The first one is to show her on the burly bear scale.

The second one is on the Big Gorilla scale.

Look ma I learned a new trick

As some of you know we have been teaching Lauren how to sit up on her own. And as you can see from the pic below she is getting there. She of course does not stay upright for long, especially if she sees something to the other side of her. But she is steady enough for a picture and if you are right in front of her :)



I got her to laugh as well in the picture below. But maybe she is laughing because she is playing with her toes!

Eric will eventually get to the pumpkin story but here are some pics of her during a normal day.

Since she can roll over, the bouts of crying and yelps of frustration are no longer heard when we place her on her tummy to play. She will even pose for a pic every once in a while.

She lost almost all the hair she was born with but I think her new 'do is growing in nicely. :)

"Look mommy I can multi-task!"

Playing with her little rings and toes at the same time is a normal sight when I play with her. She really likes to play with her toes. I haven't caught a picture of it yet but she can get her toes in her mouth.


She always looks so peaceful and angelic when she naps. If I only I could get her to nap for longer than 20 minutes...

Thanks Vincy for the knitted hat, it keeps her nice and warm!

hard sometimes!!!

Mmmmmm taggy blanket.....



Wow.... how time flies...

So I just finished, for really the first time in prolly 2-3 weeks, an actual bottle feeding. Between her sleeping through the night, to her grandparents babysitting, to the constant flow of guests, I haven't had the pleasure of holding her through a feeding in quite some time... I wonder why it isn't that way with the diaper duty too....

So lets see....

First... turning over. This has been a mini-concern of ours for quite some time. It is one of those independence milestones for littles ones to be able to turn over on their own. First is tummy to back, then the much harder one is back to tummy. This of course, is directly related to coordination and comfort in a position. People say that you can put a little one down, and through frustration etc, they will flip over. So, Yes.. we pick her up quite a bit... and yes she used to fuss almost instantaneously when we put her on her tummy. But through lots of encouragement, frustration(on her part mostly), and knowing that she is QUITE strong, she now flips over with increasing ease. At first it just looks like an accident, but sure enough, if you put her down on her tummy, she'll slowly get all the necessary parts into position, and there she goes. Right now she is very partial to flipping over on her left shoulder(you'll know what I mean when you see it) so, if you'd like to see this done, please make sure she has room to roll in that direction!
Given her expression here, she could be holding a cigar and wearing a fedora!

The next steps in her mobility progression is going to be her learning to crawl. This is also going to be a funny and clumsy guiding thing. So she loooves to do little sit-ups. Unlike me, she doesn't like to slouch at all... so if you put her down, she'll either try and kick out her feet to lay down, or you might see her trying to grab her toes in an effort to sit up. She doesn't quite have the lower-body mass to be able to off-set her upper-body and head weight yet, so that's why the legs just come up.... she'll figure it out eventually.

So how this works so for is that when you help her up onto her bum, spread her legs open to a "V". This will help her concentrate on forward/backward stability a little bit more than the lateral stability. What then happens is that she'll wobble forward and backwards. Sometimes she'll eventually end up doing a mini-header, so please make sure she's on something soft. When she ends up leaning all the way forward, she'll wiggle a little bit to pull one of her legs out from under her so she's flat on her tummy again, pull her hands up into position, then she'll bust her roll-over move, and she's back to square one!

Here's an action shot!


Playing in her excer-saucer has been a progression as well. At first she used to sit for maybe 2-3 minutes and inspect the toys in front of her through staring at them. Now she's gotten to the point where she can spend somewhere in the range of 5-10 minutes, rotating around the different toys, fidding and playing with them. This is NOT a babysitter... but it does provide short and often needed breaks to do things here and there.


So going back to the fact that I'm up at 2am and doing a feeding and how this is a rare thing. Over the past couple of weeks we've tried quite a few new things, one of them is having her sleep through the night. As mentioned before, raising Lauren has been quite the moving target. Without going back into too much depth on that, understanding her sleep schedule is always a point of high interest. So sleep training is when you try and get the little one to put herself to sleep. And yes... this involves more drama than it sounds like. We established a bit of a routine. About 6:30-7:30, we give her a bath, Bethy takes her for a feeding, and then puts her down in the crib. The key here is that she's not necessarily asleep when Bethy puts her down.

The idea here is that over time, she'll learn the routine, we'll put her down, and she'll go to sleep, only to wake up somewhere in the range or 10-12 hours later in the AM, full rested and ready to go. What isn't mentioned is that the first couple times that this happens, she' cries.... and cries..... and cries. :( :(( :(((!!!!

So the first night took a while, I think somewhere in the range of 35 minutes or so. In order to reassure them that you haven't just left them, you are supposed to stop by in the 15-20 minute range and remind them that it's bedtime, but not pick them up. She woke up in the middle of the night maybe once or twice, but ended up putting herself back to sleep then. This night wasn't actually so bad.... the next couple of nights turned out to be harder, for us, or at least for me. It seemed as though she was learning to cry more effectively and it was REALLY hard not to go pick her up!!!

As it turns out, we think that she had a slight allergic reaction to the rice flakes that we were giving her, she was having some tummy-aches which weren't helping the situation much. So... sadly we've backed off the spoon-food, and we are being a little bit more conservative with her sleep training, but I think we're getting back on track.

Where'd my pot go???? So I mentioned earlier that our little girl is strong. How to measure this? its deceptive!! First off, its nice that she knows when she's being picked up and stiffens herself so she's easier to handle. She does her own weight and body part management so it's more like picking up a bowling ball with holes already drilled, vs, 3 5lb weights tied together with rope... next... she doesn't have a pot anymore!!! When I grab her by her mid-section... there's no rolls there!! no chubs, watermelon... you can actually feel her mid-section... and it's solid!!! Yes.. she still has some rolls and some chubbiness in her arms and legs, but sadly, I prolly have more relative mass around my mid-section than her.

So.... dating back to when we went to the pumpkin patch, I always had in mind that I was going to try and do something fun with her and the pumpkin. So the pumpkin sat around... and sat around... and sat around. It had a tiny little hole in the bottom and was starting to go bad, so this past weekend, while the accomplices of her grandparents, Auntie June and Uncle Greg were around, I figured it with time to give it a shot.

Wow.. it's getting late/early... I'll leave you all with this shot as a teaser for the next installment.... ;)