Crying Santa Pic as Promised

As I mentioned in this post, here's the photo of Megan and Santa

Videos - including Megan walking!!!

Going down the slide at the park (ps that is some other baby crying in the background)

Walking!

Waving (with a couple steps too)

Megan's not a big Santa fan as it turns out...

Megan and I went to breakfast with Santa at Lifetime Fitness this morning. When Santa came in the room Megan gave him a big smile! He walked over to us and squatted down to say hi to Megan and she was clearly interested :-) When Santa went to go to his chair she started to follow him even. Then when it was time to take a picture on his lap she was still interested at first until she realized that she was going to be sitting on Santa's lap, then really fast she started crying, turning bright red and arching her back to get off! The staff got a quick pick before I scooped her up and tried to repair her relationship with Santa. We stood there a little bit with her in my arms to see if she'd like Santa better being held, no go. So hopefully come next year she'll forget all about this :-) I'll post the crying Santa pic next week when I pick it up at the gym.

Here's Megan when we got home from Breakfast with Santa in the yard. The last two days she's been very interested in the metal street light pole. Oh and that's her snuggly (the pink kitten blanket) that she now carries with her everywhere :-)



This is Megan last weekend on a chilly saturday morning. She kinds looks like a teletubby, hehe!


She's still working on walking, she's taking around 4 steps on her own to get to stuff several times a day but she's very cautious about it. When she's walking holding our hands she loves to go to a squat to pick something up on the floor and then insists on carrying it with her while we walk. It's very cute. This includes leaves and yesterday she even picked up the newspaper in it's bag and carried it around! She can also get from sitting to standing all on her own now! She goes from sitting into a squat and then stands up. We're still working on getting this all on video though....

Getting behind

Wow it's been awhile and I feel behind in blogging, Megan is doing so much new stuff lately it's hard to keep up!

Thanksgiving was GREAT! My parents came in and stayed with us until Tues. Russ's brother and our niece Veronica came in for Thanksgiving too, so we had a wonderful dinner at Russ's parents house. We went to the Zilker Botanical Gardens on Saturday to see the Dinoland exhibit which was really cool!

We took Megan to the park with my parents and had some fun swinging and sliding, and even climbing the rock wall!


It was a great visit and hard to say goodbye, but we'll be in NY for Christmas in just a couple weeks - yay!

Megan took her first steps over Thanksgiving weekend too! Just 2 steps a couple time but it was so exciting! Then last night she took 7! Eek! Megan was holding onto the coffee table, cruising and I had the digital camera trying to take a picture of her. Well she must have decided she really wanted that camera because she let go of the coffee table and took 7-8 steps to me to get it!


Megan added another word, kitty cat. Although it sounds more like kit cat :-) And here is a pic of her teeth

Megan is doing great with her finger foods! She tried mac n cheese and blueberry pancakes for the first time this weekend - both were big hits!

Hopefully we'll have a video with some steps soon!

Dinosaurs

Shortly after this photo was taken, unfortunately Russ and Michelle were eaten by the large carnivorous dinosaur which came up from behind them. A simple trip to Zilker Park in Austin meets a horrible end.


(The Dennys and Bosses had a great time at the "Dinoland" exhibit today in Zilker Park with Megan and cousin Veronica.)

Megan and her cousin Cameron

Send your own ElfYourself eCards

9.5 months

Looks like I missed the 9 month post - oops! At Megan's 9 month appointment she weight 17lbs 12 oz, and was 28.2" tall! She's getting big! We started finger foods at 9 months and it took Megan about a week before she caught on but now she's very into it! She's eating all kinds of foods, we cut up our dinner into pieces for her. She's had spaghetti and meatballs, turkey, baked ziti, steamed veggies, string cheese, cheerios and lots more. Cheese seems to be her favorite so far. And for the past 2 weeks she's been drinking out of a straw cup!

Megan also now has 7 teeth! 6 of which have come in the last 2.5 weeks! Poor girl! I haven't been able to get a picture of them yet though. She's also been getting more into swimming (we go once a week with Gramby!), she's kicking her legs and this week she started making swimming movements with her arms too - soooo cute!

Megan's been talking a lot more too. She's got her mama's and dada's down, she even seems to use them with some purpose. And she's making new sounds all the time. The latest is a gaht gaht which we think if for cat!


Here's Megan walking down our sidewalk


Last weekend Russ and I went zipling in Spicewood, TX at Cypress Valley Canopy Tours, it was a blast! Here are some pics.




I have some videos to post too but for some reason they keep timing out when I upload them. I'll get them up soon though. Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!!!

New Videos

Just a quickie post for some new videos.

Here's Megan with her lion again, you can see how she's progressed in her lion pushing skills :-) She gets upset at the end though because she get's the lion stuck and can't get it to move again.


The second one is also of Mr. lion (as we call him) but in the beginning you can hear some great Megan "talking"

Happy Halloween!

We've had a nice halloween - would have been better if Russ was feeling better but still we had fun with Megan. Thursday I picked Megan up at daycare early and took her to my work for the Halloween kiddie party! We had fun; mostly it was me showing her off in her ladybug costume snice most of the games were for toddlers and older kids, but still fun! They did have one game where you fished out halloween duckies from a little tub - Megan loved that! She loves her bath duckies at home. Although it was hard to give back the duckies after she fished them out! On Halloween we went "trick-or-treating" to our neighbors early to show them Megan's costume and then headed over to Gramby and Granddaddy's. When we finally got back home we had one tired baby (who slept well last night!).


Megan and Mommy at work on Thursday! In my cube :-)


On Halloween night in our yard


Crawling in her costume. Yep that's sweet potatoe that we didn't get totally off her face from dinner...



Megan with Gramby and Granddaddy!


Dad and Megan with the jack-o-lantern at Gramby and Granddaddys!

Pumpkins!

Here's Megan hanging out in the pumpkins at a local nursery! She loved the pumpkins, even though we couldn't get a photo of her smiling in them....


Here's a cute one of her crawling in her cute jumper. She's still working on standing, she stood about 10 seconds today! She got a pretty bad cold last night and today, but we still had a pretty good day. Hopefully she'll be feeling better soon.

More Photos

Our second try at professional photos went only slightly better than the first. Megan and I got there early to get her more comfortable, she was great and all smiles when Lyndsay (the photographer) arrived. However as soon as the camera was out the smiles were gone. We got the pictures back last week and I just LOVE them! I can't imagine how much more I'd love them if she were smiling! But even without smiles they came out great!

Megan's doing great, she's pushing her lion all over the living room. She sometimes even pushes it from the side as if to steer it! And she's been testing out her standing skills lately. Today she stood by herself without holding onto anything several times for 5+ seconds each time!

Megan's favorite things lately seem to be: chasing the cats around the house, her leapfrog activity table, being outside and walking on the lawn, being held, zerberts, being sung too, walking around the house holding Mom's hands, playing in the cats water dish, swimming with Gramby and lots more. She's just so much fun these days we're just enjoying all our time with her!

8 Months and ....

... Megan is walking with her push toy!

We had a nice weekend, it was Russ's 20th High School Reunion! Russ went out on Friday night and then the two of us went out on Saturday night and had a great time. Megan stayed home with Gramby and Granddaddy and also had a great time :-)

On Sunday we had some professional photos taken by the Lyndsay at Life in Motion Photography (http://www.lifeinmotionphotography.com/photoblog/), unfortunately Megan wasn't in the best of moods:

But Lyndsay was really sweet and offered to re-take them later this week, so we're really excited about that!

Oh and we believe tooth #2 is around the corner! (or at least we think that's why Megan's not sleeping as well the last couple days/nights) Here's a pic of tooth #1

That's it for now, hope everyone's having a great week!

Babies, Babies Everywhere!

We had a nice weekend. Sunday we had friends over for dinner, including ourselves there were 2 Mom's, 3 Dad's, 1 Mom-to-be, 1 Dad-to-be and 3 babies!

Sunday we went to the park and Megan got to feel sand for the first time

This one is from today, it's just such a cute photo I had to post it!

And this video is from today also, I don't think we've posted a video of her in her jumperoo before, she's still likes jumping in it!

Megan loves her baths!

First off, we got the MRI results back on Thursday and everything is good! Yay!

Here's a video of Megan taking a bath in her duck. It's so cute because she's laughing and the shower spray hitting her! She LOVES baths! She likes water on her face, loves splashing - it's one of her favorite things!

I tried pretty much all weekend to get a video of Megan clapping and this was the best I got. It's of her playing with her new laptop from Grandma and Grandpa! She loves to close the laptop, which is so cute. In the middle she does one clap - it's usually so fast like that it's hard to catch on it's own.

Megan is doing more and more every week. She's cruising on the coffee table now. And we got her a leapfrog activity table off craigslist that she can stand and play on - which she loves! It seems like it's something new everyweek - it's crazy! But we're loving every minute of it!!!

MRI

Today Megan had an MRI to look at a dimple she's had since birth. Her pediatrician wanted an MRI to make sure it's not connected to anything. She did great and is home sleeping (fell asleep on the ride home).

Background
We found out about the dimple not long after Megan was born. Her first pediatrician showed us it in the initial exam. That pediatrician wanted to do an ultrasound to rule out a possible tethering to the spinal cord. So at 4 weeks Megan had an ultrasound. That was tough, she had to lay on her stomach and be very still, which as any parent knows, was quite difficult. Sucking on my finger proved to be the answer though and after that she was still and they got their pictures. Everything came back negative - yay! So we put it out of our mind. Fast forward to Megan's 6 month well check with a new pediatrician (ended up not liking the first one). He wanted to do an MRI on the dimple; said that the ultrasound can only see the spinal connection but can't rule out a sinus connection (which could lead to an infection). After getting an additional opinion from a pediatric neurosurgeon, and friends that are doctors / pediatricians we scheduled the MRI.

Back to today / last night
Since she has to be still for the MRI for almost an hour, she needed to be sedated. So last night she had to stop breastfeeding at 2am, could have water / pedilyte from 2am - 4am and then nothing after 4am. We had to be at the hospital at 6am, which meant leaving the house at 5:30am. I woke her up at 1:40am to feed her so she had something in her stomach in the morning. After that she slept until 5am. Russ rocked her while I got ready. She cried awhile when she realised there was no milk coming, but really she was pretty good. She babbled most of way to the hospital, falling asleep just as we got there! And then waking up when I took her out of her carseat of course!

They used a gas to sedate her and I held her as they gave her the gas. That was pretty hard since she got pretty upset, turning bright red while she was crying. It took about a minute, slightly longer than normal *I think* because she was crying too hard and not breathing in as much. I sang to her and talked to her and once she was asleep they escorted me out to the waiting room. It took a little over an hour and then I was called back to recovery where she was awake and fussing a bit. She nursed and nursed so more. They wheeled us to a room, all the while Megan was nursing :-) When we got to our room we had to stay another 30min while they monitored her vital signals; she kept nursing :-)

Then we were free to go. There was some crying while they removed her IV (they put it in after she was asleep) but once I picked her up she was good. Then she wanted to nurse again! Finally she was ready to go. She babbled the whole way home until we were about 5 minutes away when she finally fell asleep and she's still sleeping 40 min later :-)

Yay for the MRI being done, I'm so relieved! We should hear from our pediatrician by the end of the week.

These Days...

These days Megan is:

• Standing with one hand!



• Sometimes letting go and standing independently for a second or two before falling to a sit
  
• Crawling and pulling-up on everything!


• Pulling up in her pack-n-play



• Has one tooth (bottom center) that has broken through


• Eats 2-3 pureed foods a day including: brown rice cereal, bananas, peaches, sweet potatoes, green beans, zuchini, chicken and applesauce (all homemade except the rice cereal and applesauce)


• Is still nursing, although very easily distracted!
  
• Goes to bed around 7:30 / 8pm each night and wakes up around 6/7am (although she still wakes up 1-2 times a night)


• Laughs when we're silly - she's especially likes raspberries on the tummy, when Mommy jumps around and peak-a-boo


• Loves the cats; she gets very excited when she sees them and tries to grab them (so far so good and the cats get away, although Killian has sat there and let her pull on his ear and tail before without flinching!)


• Babbles - ba ba ba, da da da, ma ma ma


• Sleeps on her tummy (although we still put her to sleep on her back)


• Puts EVERYTHING in her mouth!


• Claps her hands together!


• Wears jeans (I couldn't resist adding this photo they're so cute!)

Megan is no longer a vegetarian

It's official, after 7 months of being a vegetarian + all the time in the womb, Megan has had her first bite of meat! And she liked it! :-) Homemade baked organic chicken breast pureed with some water. Here's a picture to mark the occasion. We thought it was only fit that Russ feed it to her, since he (unlike me) eats meat. But all your non-vegetarians would be proud because I actually made the chicken myself; I touched the raw meat, rinsed it, baked it, broke it into chunks to puree it (with my hands!). Crazy huh?

She's Crawling!

Thursday night (9/4/08) Megan crawled!!! But it was just a short distance. Then Friday at daycare her teachers said she was moving! And this weekend she's definitly crawling all around, here's a video from this morning:

Pulling up

Megan has been trying to pull up on things for a while now, but today she pulled up on her crib all on her own and stood there very proud of herself :-) It was so cute! Here's a video of it:

Sweet Potatoes and Laundry Baskets

Megan had homemade sweet potatoe puree tonight and seemed to really like it! Yay! The first food she had was brown rice cereal - which wasn't really a hit, and we followed that with bananas - which were ok, but the sweet potatoes went over much better! She likes to feed herself as in the pic, we put the food on the spoon and hand it to her.


Tonight we went to Gramby and GrandDaddy's (also known as Russ's parents) for dinner and Megan rode in her laundry basket wagon that Gramby made her!


And here's a video of her in her "wagon"

Little Drummer

Here's Megan banging on a pot!

That is until she realised it was more fun to eat the spoon!

Laughing in NY

My Mom just me a video of Megan laughing in the car during our trip to NY and it is too cute! She's been laughing since a little before 4 months but this is the first time we got it on video!

Walking (while assisted)

Happy 6 months Megan!

Half a cake for a half birthday!

Megan turned 6 months on Friday! She got her first taste of solid food Friday night - organic brown rice cereal. I made the rice cereal, which was easier than I thought and kind of fun! I used the brown rice recipe found here http://www.wholesomebabyfood.com/cereals.htm

More food ends up on Megan than in her but we're all having fun with it!

Oh and Megan weighed in at 15lbs 4oz and is 25 1/2"

Trip to NY, Meeting Cousin Cameron and Megan's Baptism

Last week we took a GREAT trip to NY to visit my family and meet our new nephew Cameron. We were also very fortunate to be able to have Megan's baptism at my parent's church with lots of family! Our flights out went pretty well, although I don't think some of the passengers appreciated Megan's screeching too much!

On our first full day we had a lot of fun at the Saratoga Race Track.

Amy and Cameron at the track

Russ and I with both babies!

Megan and Cameron sleeping on the way home from the track :-)

On Friday we went over to Amy and Vic's for lunch and to hang out. That night Russ and I went out to Saratogra Performing Arts Center (SPAC) to see the Police! Grandma and Grandpa watched Megan. We had a great time - along with 40,000 other people!

Megan and Grandpa showing off their Ohio State Gear!

Satuday was Megan's baptism! She was soooo good! She stared intently at Father Kelly, loved the water and didn't fuss at all! She really enjoyed the party that followed and was up "partying" way past her bedtime! :-)

Boss Family at Megan's Baptism

Megan's baptismal gown - which was orginally Grandma's (my Mom's) wedding dress!

Yummm Cake!

Sunday we had a nice relaxing day at my parents house

Cousins!

Amy and I with our little ones!

Standing Pretty!

Megan trying out the rocking horse that Grandpa Boss (my Grandpa) made