Emery Harper 9 Months

I can't believe Emery is 9 months old. Today! And that I'm posting this on time:) That is mostly due to the fact that she started sleeping like a good baby. This last month was hard. She had a big sleep regression and woke hourly. For weeks. And the only thing that would comfort her was me nursing her. So I've been a zombie. The hourly wakeups stretched to every 2 hours, then every 3-4, then last night she went to bed at 7pm, woke up ONCE at 12:30am and that was it until she was up at 6:30 for the day.

This isn't my first rodeo. I KNOW that sleep progression isn't linear and it has its ups and downs, but man, when you're in a "down" it seems like it takes over your life. Hoping we're on the up swing for awhile!

This month we took Emery swimming for he first time.

She loved it.

St Patrick's Day:

Her favorite thing right now is taking things in and out of baskets. She'll do it over and over and over.

Crazy hair:

She's getting easier to take on the boys playdates. She'll happily play in the grass, sit in the stroller, or swing. Even if it means she misses a nap she's usually in a good mood.

I asked my mom to see what clothes she had left from my sisters and I when we were little. She brought a big bag and I've been having a lot of fun dressing Emery up. I remember my littlest sister Addy wearing this watermelon dress:

And this sweater was mine!

I need to have her weighed at her next Dr. apt, but our scale puts her around 16.5 pounds. She's in 9 month clothing (and has been since 5 months) and if she follows in her brother's footsteps, will be until she turns a year.

Two weeks after she turned 8 months, her bottom front two teeth popped through. I can't believe it took so long. I've felt like she was teething forever with all the drooling, chomping, and fingers in the mouth. Both her brother got their first tooth the week before they turned 7 months old. She likes to be on her own timeline apparently since they were both crawling and cruising furniture by the time they turned 9 months as well.

She is a ridiculously happy baby. Like, the kind of baby that makes me want 500 more or to just bottle her up and keep her tiny forever. Then night comes and I remember what a horrible sleeper (until the last few days) she is and I think "no more kids ever. I can't do this again."

She loves Marshall and Miller so much. Her eyes light up the second she sees them. The feeling is pretty mutual. Marshall has been enamored with her since the second he met her, but this last month Miller has really fallen in love too. She likes to mimic sounds so Miller will lay with her on the floor and say something like "ma ma ma ma" then she'll try to say it back and they'll both just laugh and laugh and laugh.

Two nights ago she was able to stand up while holding onto something (the bathtub) for the first time. The boys were so proud and cheered her on.

She's still unsteady so I'm sure it'll be awhile until she's cruising along the furniture. She still isn't officially crawling, but she scoots and army crawls to get where she wants to go. She's eating solid foods 1-3 times a day, and nursing about every 3-4 hours so play dates and errands are getting easier because she doesn't always have to eat the second we get there.

Other current favorites include baths, and swinging:

You can see her teeth a little in the next picture. Another one of my hand me down dresses:

She's sassy and funny. She claps with one hand on the back of her other hand, waves, gives huge open mouth kisses, and if she does something that makes us laugh she'll do it over and over.

Going through old photos I found these of me around her age. I see a lot of similarities! Especially the mouth and hair:

This is her "funny face:"

Happy 9 months baby girl! I can't wait to see what the next month brings!

Returning to normal.

Jerad got back late Tuesday/early Wednesday from his out of town project in Twentynine Palms after being gone almost 2 weeks. The beginning was rough. The boys weren't listening, Emery wasn't sleeping, Marshall was waking up multiple times with growing pains, it was raining, even the dogs were being high maintenance. I was feeling pulled a million directions and like no one was getting the attention they deserved. At the end of every day I was just exhausted, feeling guilty for not enjoying my children as much as I should be, dreading the hourly night wakeups that were sure to come, resenting the fact that its always up to ME to make everything run smoothly without any help, and wondering how I was going to keep it all together until Jerad got home. Then the dryer broke, which meant I was lugging the kids to the laundromat on top of everything else.

I went back through my blog archives and read this post from when Marshall was the same age as Emery is now and we were going through the exact same thing. He was in the middle of a horrible sleep regression, it was raining, Jerad was working out of town for 11 days... Somehow reading and remembering how much I was struggling then was exactly what I needed to turn my attitude around. Like, this is just a bad season but it will pass soon and I won't remember it or something. The next day the clouds (literally) parted, we were able to go to the park, the kids all took good naps, and I felt like myself again and that it was no big deal having to solo parent for another week or more .

Thanks to my strange personality quirk of having to be able to control something when I feel like things are out of control, I also completely cleaned the house from top to bottom including changing the sheets on all 6 beds, and baked banana bread and homemade butter with the boys (a recent favorite). I stayed up late after the kids were asleep to finish cleaning which meant I was already up for a bunch of Emery's on-the-hour-wakeups so even those didn't seem as unbearable.

The rest of the time Jerad was gone the weather was good, the kids were pretty well behaved, and by the end Emery had gone to only waking up every 2 hours which made a world of difference. We went to and hosted play dates, made sure to play outside a few hours a day (this is such a part of our routine that it really feels like the end of the world when we're stuck inside because of rain), did crafts, went to the library, loaded up on some yummy treats at the grocery store for me to sneak after the kids were asleep, and took nightly walks and instead of feeling like I was hanging by a thread I was able to enjoy our time together.

Then Jerad got home I got to sleep in until 9am yesterday, Emery slept a 3 and a 4 hour stretch last night, and we have all sorts of fun plans this weekend. It feels like life is back to normal.

Miller Cash, 2 Years

On December 13th, Miller turned 2. I feel like I blinked and he went from this:

To this!


We've been doing one present for each year, so this year Miller got two. A Disney Planes Duplo set, and a fire truck.

We celebrated at home with his favorite breakfast, pancakes.

And presents.

Later that day my parents dropped off his present from them, a Lightning McQueen powerwheels. He loooooves "A-wide Ma-keen" and was in HEAVEN.

Miller is the biggest snugglebug.

He loves trains and can name every Thomas engine. He also loves the movie Cars.

He still sucks on Aiden and Anais blankets as if they were pacifiers for naps and bedtime.

He takes a lot of selfies on my phone:

He has a huge vocabulary and talks in sentences. If you ask him a question like "what should we have for breakfast?" instead of parroting back the question or repeating the last word like most 2 year old's do, he will answer it "wet's haf pancakes ana sum oh-gurt too!" (Let's have pancakes and some yogurt too). When he doesn't know a word he will point and ask "what's dat fing called?" One morning he asked me "what's pancake honey called?" because he forgot the word for syrup. Another evening he was in the bath and pointed to the shower curtain and said "look, there's an owl way up there, and one down there too." When I call his name he says "are you wookin fer me, mama?" He has the deepest voice I've ever heard come out of a two year old (sadly at 2years 4 months when I'm finally finishing writing this his deep voice is gone). this video was taken 1.5 months before he turned 2. He's saying "I like to jump mama" and "watch this mama:"

 

His laugh is infectious. In fact, he gets out of trouble a lot because he starts laughing his big belly laugh and I forget all about whatever naughty thing he's done. 

He knows all his ABC's and can count to 20. But he doesn't know ANY of his colors. And only like 3 animal sounds (but he does know all the animal names). I think that's partly my fault, I didn't think to teach them as much as I did with Marshall.

Don't tell him he's two, he thinks he's a big kid. In fact, he will tell you that he's 5. His favorite person in the whole wide world is Marshall. They pal around and do everything together. If Marshall gets put in time out, Miller voluntarily goes and sits with him. If Marshall falls down and gets hurt, Miller cries too. He likes Emery of course, but at 5 months old she just isn't that interesting to him yet. Most of his frustrations stem from not always being able to keep up with Marshall and his big kid friends. He will run and jump and climb and if you attempt to help him he'll be quick to tell you "no hawping, I do it myseff!"

Happy 2 years Mill Mills, we couldn't imagine life without you!

38 weeks in, 38 weeks out

Emery Harper 8 Months

The biggest changes leading up to 8 months were starting solids (right before she turned 8 months), napping in her crib, clapping, and waving. She also shakes her head "no" and "talks" with the boys. Emery is so ridiculously happy and easy going most of the time. If she wasn't such a terrible nighttime sleeper, she'd be the perfect baby!

Naps are going really well, she takes 2; one at 9am and one at 1pm. I can feed her, turn on the white noise machine, then set her in the crib wide awake and she'll pass right out. This feels like a HUGE victory because for the longest time she hated the crib. She's going to bed between 6:30-7 and sleeping in there for most of the night too. When I say "sleeping most of the night" I mean she wakes up every 2 hours and I feed her then put her back in the crib and she goes back to sleep.

She loves being outside, swinging, loves baths, loves the pets, and mostly loves her brothers.