Tulips

As expected the Tulips fields were a zoo of people, but we managed to take a few pictures and make a run for it.

Pepere and Madelyn

New Push Toy :)

Kitchen Chair

Madelyn is starting walk forward with the assistance of her favorite new toy, a kitchen chair. It's just the right height for her to grab on to and push all around the kitchen. Of course she has to stop on occasion to gum the wicker but then it back to trotting around. It's great fun to watch and she loves the fact that she can move around. She has started to wave hi/bye and seems to almost know what it means, of course she waves to you in the tub, from her high chair and most any other place, grins and smiles are to be had when other people wave back to her.

Karin had these pictures taken the other day, if the weather holds out we'll have some pictures from the Tulip fields this weekend to share.

He nine month checkup went well as did her checkup at Children's Hospital to have her hips checked out again.

Ahhhh Sleep....

Yogurt tends to make a mess, but she seems to like it :)

Sleep training is going well much to our delight. Madelyn will sleep for 10-11 hours at a time now and will go to sleep with little coaxing. And perhaps most importantly she can put herself back sleep when she wakes up. Neither Karin or I have slept for 8 hours straight for about the past year, so we are elated and crossing our fingers that this behavior will stick.

Madelyn has been very quick to giggle this week. Peek-a-boo, watching the cats or an unexpected sound from Mom and Dad put her into all sorts of giggles. She will crawl over to you and hoist herself up on your pants leg when she wants to be held. Sometimes you can get her to walk for a few steps when she does this as well. She's also discovered how to splash herself silly in the bath tub, its amazing how much water a 9 month old can toss around when she really wants to.

Finger Food

Our friends the Gustafson's had their second girl on Friday, Claudia Bea, yippie.

Mealtime is always fun, after 20 minutes of trying to convince Madelyn to eat we finally gave in and let her just play with her food, none of it ended up in her mouth but she enjoyed making a mess of herself. We are on to cheese and yogurt this week and she seems to like them so far. Anything with spinach and peas are still her favorites.

This was a big weekend for us. 1) Karin has gotten her to take a few steps while holding her arms this weekend. 2) We finally got more serious with sleep training on Friday night. The first night was rough to put it bluntly, but last night she slept for a 9 hour stretch, her last record was about 6 hours so we are impressed and hoping for good results on Sunday night.

Her bottom two teeth are in, these are hard to take a picture of as you could imagine, she likes to hide them from people when you go looking for them.

In the backpack with Dad. We went to the zoo on Saturday, she saw a few animals but seemed to enjoy looking at all the people instead.

9 Months

It's hard to believe that 9 months have slipped by in what seems like the blink of an eye to us. Each weeks brings us something new to marvel at, be it a new tooth, a new sound or the realization that Madelyn is big enough to ride on the swings at the park now. Teething has started up again this week and for some reason it has made her more clingy and quick to cry when other people pick her up. My bet is that the top two teeth are on the move.

Her favorite thing to crawl over is still her mother and her father. We spend several minutes every day playing the crawl over daddy game.


Our neighbors the Glovers gave us this Tiny Tot garden. She absolutely loves it and checks the mailbox every day to see if we have stashed something new in it for her.

Behind Bars

Well, the house has now been baby proofed, gates downstairs, and locks on all the drawers in the kitchen and the bathrooms. No sooner had the gates gone up than Madelyn was trying to figure out a way to break out of them. The cats can wiggle though the sides of the gates so they get some time away from baby when needed now.

Maddy is still showing interest in eating much to her parents delight. She has taken the occasional step sideways and a few steps forward but seems content at the moment to pull herself up on anything that she can find be it a pants leg, the wall or a one of her toys. She's figured out the concept of inside this week. One of her toys has a compartment where we keep several small plastic toy blocks. Karin had thought I was the culprit in tossing the blocks all around the family room lately, that is until she watched her daughter reaching her hand inside the toy and tossed the blocks all over the place today. We are also hearing lots of new sounds this week, she often turns to us from time to time and speaks her gibberish baby talk, it must make perfect sense to her but it just sounds like, "Bahhh Bahhh MMMmmm AAAAHHHH AHH!" to us.