For Reals

Okay, she is really actually crawling now.  Last Saturday she decided to get serious by getting up on all fours and crawling clear across the room.  Now she is regularly making her way into the kitchen to spill the dog water bowl.  Ryan finally agrees that this developmental step has not made our lives better. 

She slowed down a little bit this week because she came down with a cold.  She was pretty pathetic with the teary eyes, snotty nose, and drooly mouth hanging open.  She couldn’t close her mouth because her nose was too stuffed.  Of course the silver lining of a sick baby is a cuddly baby!  She was big into hugs.  She still has a little bit of a runny nose and cough after sleeping, but she appears to be on the mend. 

This morning I woke up with a ridiculously painful cramp in my bicep.  It pretty much lasted all day.  I don’t know if I’m cut out for this personal training business.  Good thing I’m a glutton for punishment.

And then there were two.

The second tooth on the bottom is poking through the gums.  She woke up at 5:30 this morning for no apparent reason.  I’m guessing it was tooth pain.  She didn’t fall right to sleep tonight either, but she may have been over tired.  My cousin is done with school and had her first day at home with Keating.  Whenever Taesun is home from school, things are just too darned exciting!  Who can take a nap when you have the constant attention of a 6-year-old to dance and entertain you?

Since I know you’re dying to know, I did not die at the second personal training session on Tuesday.  I made it through the entire hour!  It has also inspired me to get more exercise in general.  Yesterday we took the dogs for a brisk walk with the jogging stroller.  I had a dog on each arm, so not only did I get cardio from the walk, I was strength training my shoulders and arms while trying to hold the beasts back.  They are not very well-behaved dogs on a walk. 

Uh oh…she just woke up…I am thinking this may be a long night.

UPDATE:  She woke up a couple more times last night, but nothing that required me getting out of bed, thankfully.  I don’t know if it was tooth pain or the thunderstorm.

I dislike puking.

Which is why it is a little unclear to me why I plan to go back to the personal training sessions with my cousin.  Okay, I didn’t actually puke, but I came very close.  Seriously, I’m only talking about 15 minutes of exercise before I bit it.  I had to spend the rest of the session walking on the treadmill.  I am out of shape.

My cousin invited me to join her with her personal training sessions for free, and how can you really pass up free?  I was of two minds about it because it means less time with Keating during the week, but I think taking care of your health should be an important priority, so I’m going to move some things around to make it work.  It’s hard to find time in the day to do all of the things you want to do.  Between the dogs, the baby, work, Ryan, and the house, there is rarely time for anything else.  I guess all we can do is try to do the best we can and try not to feel guilty about what we don’t get to.

Keating continues to attempt crawling.  Her tooth is really starting to come out now.  I think there may be another one on the way soon because she has been a little crabby and has been waking up in the middle of the night crying.  Fortunately for us, the crying only lasts a couple of minutes and she promptly goes back to sleep.

We have lift off!

Sort of.  She’s crawling, but not very far.  She seems to be particularly motivated when there is a yucky dog toy just out of reach.  Crawl an inch, insert kong covered in dog slobber and hair into mouth.  Yuck.  I don’t have any video because the camera battery died last night when she was doing it!  But I’ll get some and post it later.  Sharky is no help because she keeps bringing the gross toys and rawhides to Keating so they are in reach.  Sharky understands which toys are hers and which are Keating’s, so I don’t understand why it isn’t working vice versa. 

I’ve stepped up the solids.  Keating had her first taste of brat this weekend.  Of course we immortalized the moment with photos.

Okay, so it wasn’t as exciting a moment for her as it was for us.  She did eat everything she was given, which is a feat because it takes awhile to gum brats…  The one tooth has broken the surface, but I don’t think it’s usable quite yet.  (Please note the Brewers jersey she is wearing while having her first brat.  She may not live in Wisconsin, but I think Ryan is going to do everything possible to make her feel like she does.)

Big goings on

There is a lot to report!  First and foremost, Keating is getting her first tooth!  It’s just barely poking out and hard to see, but it’s there!  Nevermind that the 5 month old we visited last weekend already had two teeth…  I didn’t have any teeth until I was one, so I guess she’s still beating me.  In other important news, she started doing “So big!”  As you can imagine, it is extremely cute. 

Last weekend we took a trip to Sheboygan Falls, WI, to visit my college roommate and their new baby, Maris.  She is five months old (as stated above) and gorgeous!  It was a really nice, relaxing trip.  I enjoyed getting away, even if it was just for the weekend.  Keating was great on the car ride.  She either slept or played with her toys.  She got a little crabby when we tried to push on past her feeding time because we didn’t want to eat at McDonald’s, but that was hardly her fault.  In the end, we did stop at McDonald’s.  I had one of their new angus burgers.  It was disgusting!  It tasted worse than their normal burgers.  Gross.  Buyer beware.

The most amusing part of the trip was Keating’s first trip to the park.  She loved it!  We did the baby swing and the slide.  This is how much she liked the swing:

She did the big slide on Ryan’s lap.  She didn’t really find that very exciting, but then we put her down the slide by herself and she loved it!  I could only do the fast slide about four times before we had to stop because it was too scary for me.  She definitely would have kept going if I had the stomach for it.  The moral of the story is that we need to take more trips to the park.

It’s a tie!

Keating came in at 22 lbs, 7 oz, which is exactly how much Paige weighed at her appointment.  The only thing I don’t understand is that they told my brother and sister-in-law that Paige was 92nd percentile, but they told us Keating was 94th percentile.  Do they have different pools if you have different insurance companies?  I don’t get it.  Or was there just a rash of large babies in the past week coming in for their nine month appointments?  Her height was 2′ 5.5″ (96th percentile), and her head circumference was 18.27″ (96th percentile).  She is big, but very proportional – just like her mother. 

If you don’t want to read me brag about my child, stop now.  She cried minimally after the vaccine and not at all when they pricked her finger and squeezed a bunch of blood out of it.  The doctor was appropriately charmed by her cuteness (she was trying to talk to us, and Keating kept blowing raspberries, which made the doctor laugh mid-sentence multiple times).  She also asked if she was always this good-natured (which she is) and told her she must be very loved (which she is).  She commented that not all babies were like this, and the way she said it made it sound like she was telling the truth and not just trying to be nice.  And before she left, she told us she wished she could stay and play with our baby all day.  Okay, bragging done.

In other news, Ryan wants me to write on here that he just saved almost $30 at the grocery store because of his sale and coupon savvy.  I bought the Coupon Mom book a while back because it was only $9, and I was buying some other stuff, so I thought I could try to learn about how to save more money.  I never got around to reading it, but Ryan did, and now he is all about the coupons.  We had to order the Sunday paper so he can cruise the ads and save us a bunch of money.  I am very happy that he has taken an interest in this.  I’ve always thought coupon clipping was a good idea (who doesn’t, really), but I never had the motivation to actually do it.  It’s the same with cooking.  In the past year or two, Ryan has developed an affinity for cooking.  I’ve always thought it would be nice to have lots of home cooked, unprocessed foods to eat but really don’t have an interest in doing it myself.  But now Ryan takes care of it for us, which will be nice for Keating now that we’re going to start giving her what we’re eating.  I’m not sure what I’m bringing to the table…

(I know you are shocked that I wrote two posts right in a row.  It probably won’t happen again.)

Clap clap clap

Keating is officially a clapper.  You don’t necessarily appreciate the coordination it takes to do something that seems so simple as clapping until you watch a baby struggle to get the hands together.  She has about an 80% success rate.  As for other feats, she is definitely up on all fours and rocking like she wants to crawl, but hasn’t quite taken the next step, so to speak.  I think it will be any day now.  Regardless, she still moves quite well around the ground with scooting and rolling.  We really need to get a handle on baby proofing the house.  I am starting to regret some furniture choices (ie. TV stand with no door on the front so the DVD player and TiVo are right out in the open for a baby to play with). 

Tomorrow Keating has her 9 month appointment at the doctor.  I am very excited.  I can’t wait to find out how much she weighs.  (Yes, I realize I have a similar post from right before her 6 month appointment.)  Her cousin Paige came in at 22 lbs, 7 oz.  Her appointment was 6 days after her 9 month birthday, and Keating’s appointment is 6 days after her 9 month birthday, so the weights should be comparable.  When Keating was little, she was long and skinny.  Over the months she has filled out and appears to rival her cousin in weight.  The great weight challenge is on!  I’ll let you know how it all comes out…

Today in the lunchroom there was a grand debate about spanking.  To spank, or not to spank.  The whole thing made me dread the terrible twos.  I mean, she’s just naturally going to be a model child, right?  I won’t need to worry about discipline…right??

(I know, it’s not Halloween anymore, but I see no reason to let a good holiday-themed bib go to waste.  It will do it’s duty until it is too small or too stained and gross to use anymore.)

Blogging Flunkie

So it turns out I’m not a very good blogger.  When things get busy, blogging doesn’t appear to be a priority.  All I can say is that I hope to do better in the future but that you shouldn’t get your hopes up. 

What is Keating doing these days, you ask?  She’s getting really close to getting up on all fours.  She manages to get around fairly well by rolling around on the floor.  As I’m sure I’ve mentioned before, I am not looking forward to the day she starts crawling.   She notices when we leave the room and when we walk by her without picking her up.  This has made cleaning the house and doing chores much more difficult.  She loves peek-a-boo.  This morning when Ryan put her in the car seat, she was kind of staring off in to space.  He put her lion (as seen in “Keating and the Lion that Got Away”) near her face, and, while still staring off into space, she opened her mouth and put her tongue out to try to eat the lion.  Everything must go in mouth. 

I took Keating to her first baseball game at the new Twins stadium.  It was pretty cool.  She seemed to enjoy herself and took a little nap near the end of the game.  I had to dress her in Badger attire because it was the only sports gear I had.  I kept freaking out that she was going to get a sunburn, but thankfully with three applications of sunscreen, she survived. 

Don’t forget to vote for Keating in the Cutest Baby Contest starting April 30 at 10:00 am through May 1 at 9:00 am.  You have to register before you can vote.  You can register here: http://startribune.upickem.net/engine/Welcome.aspx?contestid=15579. See the picture we used below.

I know, I know…

Okay, so I’m little behind.  Give a girl a break.  It’s been a busy couple weeks.  There was the car accident, the gas leak, the court appearances (for work, not for myself or anyone we know), the Easter weekend away, the trial (again, for work)…  It appears that everyone has survived these things unscathed, but not a lot of time left over for blogging. 

The biggest news is that Keating learned to roll over from her back to her front, and now she’s a rolling fool!  If you put her on the ground, she’s all over the place.  Roll to the left, to the left, to the right, to the right, to the right.  You can’t keep up with her!  And then when she’s on her tummy, she pushes herself up on her hands and tries to get her butt in the air.  So far, it’s only been a couple of inches, but I know it won’t be long before she’s crawling.  Ryan is very excited about this.  I, on the other hand, think that the longer she stays immobile, the better for us.  Luckily we have doors on the stairs going up and down, so we should be able to confine her in a mostly safe area.  A couple of days ago when we went to get her from her crib, she was on her tummy, up on her hands, and looking at us like, hello, how’s it going?  I think it’s time to drop the crib down a little bit. 

The other big news is that we entered Keating into a Cutest Baby Contest!  The prize is $1000.  I think we’re going to win.  I’m going to need everyone’s help, though.  So when the time comes for voting, be ready to do your part.  This is the picture we used – what do you think?  Are we going to win?

St. Paddy’s Day

Or better known as my second favorite holiday.  Actually, I love almost all holidays, including Veteran’s Day.  The celebration began when Keating opened a St. Patrick’s Day card from Grandma Goo (my mom wanted all her grandchildren to have their first word be her name, hence “Goo”). 

Ryan’s parents came to visit over the weekend so his dad could run the 100% Irish 5k.  Keating donned her outfit from them for the occasion. 

We went to my mom’s on the actual day to have corned beef and cabbage, soda bread, and pistachio pie.  My mom even took the time to dig out the green shamrocks out of the lucky charms box to sprinkle over the top of the pistachio pie.  Keating wore her green outfit again, but she had pooped all over it by the time we picked her up from my aunt’s house.

We finished the celebration with a corned beef party at my brother’s house.  We meant to get there around 2:00, but didn’t get there until 4:00 because right before we were going to leave, Keating pooped on the green outfit again.  Ryan insisted that she wear it, so we had to wash and dry it before we could leave. 

I refuse to take these acts against the green outfit as acts of aggression because I can’t believe that Keating doesn’t love St. Patrick’s Day as much as I do.  I will chalk it up to coincidence and monitor next St. Patrick’s Day closely.