7 Months Old

I cannot believe that my baby is seven months old already!  Where did the time go?  She has hit all sorts of milestones now too.  She is crawling and has been since she was about 5 1/2 months old.  She chases her brother constantly and always wants to do what he is doing.  This week she also started pulling up on things.  She has 3 teeth and I think a fourth one is on the way.  She is a drool machine.  She is starting to eat solids a little bit better.  We can convince her to eat most fruits and a few vegetables.  She also loves baby cereal.  She is a stubborn little girl though.  She absolutely refuses to drink from a bottle, so she eats solids at daycare and nurses before bed, in the middle of the night, and when she wakes up.  It obviously isn't hurting her though because she weighed 20 pounds, 4 ounces at an impromptu trip to the doctor this week.  They told me that she is in the 93rd percentile.  I don't think that I need to worry anymore. She is the cutest, sweetest baby in the world!  We love you Julia!

Rough Start

I started back to work this week.  For me, it was a pretty easy week of setting up the classroom and getting ready to start school.  I found out a couple of weeks ago that I wouldn't have to change grade levels, so my stress level went down a little bit.

It was not such an easy week for my children because they had to get back into the schedule of going to daycare everyday.  It was a lot easier for Alexander than I thought it would be.   He walked right into his babysitter's house and got right back into the routine.  Julia had a much rougher week.  She didn't understand what was happening.  On Monday, she didn't eat all day.  She didn't take any bottles and didn't eat any baby food.  I felt bad for her, but I felt especially bad for her teacher who wanted to get her to eat so badly.  Then for the rest of the week, she refused to take a bottle.  We tried everything!  I took a cup and a different bottle.  We gave her formule instead of breastmilk.  Nothing worked.  I got really worried that she wasn't going to get the nutrients that she needs.  However, her babysitter is AWESOME and mixed formula and breastmilk into her baby food, so she managed to get between 3 and 5 ounces a day. 

Then today, she was home with me and she didn't drink very much, so I don't think that she was missing a lot of feedings at daycare.  I have decided that I'm not going to worry about it anymore.  If her doctor thinks it is a problem, he will tell us and hopefully, he will have a solution to the problem.
Maybe this week won't be a rough either!  Let's hope!

Naptime

I think that naptime needs to be a thing of the past all the time for Alexander.  This summer, the naps have become fewer and fewer.  He ends up taking a nap about every 3 to 4 days.  Then, when he does take the nap, it is impossible to wake him up and we can't get him to go to sleep at night.  When he doesn't nap, he goes to bed between 7:30 and 8:00 and it takes roughly 10 minutes for him to get to sleep.  When he does nap, we start bedtime at the same time and it takes a good hour for him to fall asleep.  We end up wanting to pull our hair out at around 9:00.  He can't feel very good about himself either because we end up getting really frustrated with him.

He goes back to daycare next week though and I'm not sure what is going to happen with naps there.  All of the kids take a 2 1/2 hour nap during the day.  I'm going to have to talk to his teacher to see what we can do.  I don't think we can handle bedtime that takes over an hour every night.  We need some evening time without kids!

Preschool

Alexander is 3 1/2.  His birthday is in January, so he won't start kindergarten until 2014.  We have started debating when to send him to preschool and where.  It feels like a huge undertaking.  We have pretty much decided to leave him where he is for the current year.  He likes it there and he gets to be with his sister.  We also love his daycare provider and they get some preschool every day.  The reason that we want him to go to preschool though is that he is not with any children who are the same age as him during the day.  We also want him to be in a school for one year before going to kindergarten. 

We went to two different open houses last weekend and I think that we have a good first choice as of now. My biggest problem with it is that the school that we liked, still has naptime for the four year olds and the other school doesn't.  Alexander has almost grown out of naptime now.  I worry that we won't be able to get him to sleep if he naps during the day.  The curriculum is good though and it is a really good school.

 It just feels like such a big decision.  I keep telling myself that it is only preschool and he will survive no matter where he goes.  So many kids don't even go to preschool.  Why am I worrying so much about it.  I guess we'll see what happens as the year goes on and everything will work out.

Time Flies

It feels like I just brought Julia home from the hospital and she looked like this.

I know she wasn't a really little baby then because she was almost 9 pounds at birth, but now she is huge at almost 19 pounds. 

This week, I really realized how big she is getting and how fast time is going.  We had a lot of firsts this week.  She sat in the bathtub for the first time without her bath seat.  She absolutely loved that.  She went to the waterpark and sat in the pool by herself.  I managed to get a picture of that.

She also sat in a shopping cart for the first time with her brother and without.  I love that the got to sit together.  It was so cute!  They also entertained each other for the whole shopping trip!

We had a big milestone at the end of the week.  Julia has been trying to crawl for the past few weeks and this week, she succeeded and is moving all over the room.  I managed to videotape her as she was learning.

Then, this morning, she pulled herself up in her crib!  Again, time is moving too fast!  Of course, we have started installing baby gates everywhere and we lowered the crib this evening.  I love that she is learning all of these new things and every milestone is exciting, but I feel like she is moving out of the baby phase too fast.  She will probably be my last little baby and I want to savor it, not speed it up.