Category: Home Life

I will have photos up from this weekend soon, but I just wanted to post Nadia’s accomplishment today. And I had to put up this cute little photo. We have been working with her on “self feeding” the little Gerber puffs. She doesn’t want to do it, she just wants to be fed. She will go to extreme lengths to get the puff in her mouth without the use of her hands. She could put some Pilates/yoga doing women to shame with these moves.

But today I put the puffs down where she couldn’t quite bend to get them and she put her head down and used her hand to scoot the puff to her mouth. Yeah for her. So I did it again. She tried to get it that way again, but it didn’t work. So she picked it up with her right hand and made a fist. Then she opened her hand and looked at the puff. I said, “You can do it, put it in your mouth.” She opened and closed her hands a couple more times and then popped it in her mouth. I cheered and clapped and she started laughing with a look like, “Sheesh I didn’t know it was so important.” Hee hee.

So she did it two more times with more laughing and cheering and then decided she was done with that and it was time to play. We knew she “could” do it, but she just prefers us to do it. She cracks me up. She is also cruising the furniture like a speed racer and more and more often I see her let go with both hand and try to stay up. She collapses almost immediately, but it’s fun to see her try.

Nadia makes the funniest faces while eating (what baby doesn’t?) and I decided to try and capture some. She is doing great with the solid food and we are working on the hand held pieces for her to grab and the sippy cup. She likes to play with the sippy cup more than use it, but she knows what it does. She just doesn’t care to do it. If I tip it up a little farther for her she drinks her water right up. The little wagon wheels are the stickiest things on the face of the earth, but she can pick them up and get them to her mouth easier than the fruit puffs. She just likes us to feed her the fruit puffs 🙂

Click on the photo above to see the whole set. Her HIPPO chair is the best thing because she is too tiny for the highchair. At every meal she kicks that left foot up at some point while she is being fed. I say, “Are you just chillin’?” The one below just made me want to kiss her!

Here she shoves the whole thing in her mouth to show off.

Now she goes for a taste of the sippy cup.

“I’m mobile, why fall asleep?” If Nadia could speak in complete sentences, this is what she would be asking us each night. It comes out more like, “Ma ma ma ma ma ma ma ma maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa ma ma ma!” She has entered the stage in a baby’s life where they realize that they can get around by crawling and the world is at hand for them to explore. She just goes and goes and goes all day and then when it’s time for bed, even if she is tired, no way!!! Why sleep when there is more stuff for me to check out?? She is still getting her two naps a day in because she just wears herself out, but man at bedtime she just wants to stay up and play. She cracks me up because she is just so curious about the world around her and now that she is the speed racer crawling machine, she wants to see even more.

I love to make lists, so here is some information on our first 8 weeks with Nadia. She has eaten 225 bottles -she goes through a can of formula a week. She has eaten approximately 75 jars of baby food. She has used 340 diapers. She has used more wipes than I could possibly keep track of – seriously…babies use a lot of wipes! I had about 16 containers that I got for free with coupons before we left and now we are down to just a few. If I had realized this, I would have worked that deal a little more to have a bigger stash to match the diaper stash. HA!!

My friend Terri gave me a “You Make me Smile” award on her blog yesterday. Once you get it, you are supposed to tag 10 more bloggers/friends and tell them why they make you smile. I am going to do this in a different post. But thanks to Terri because she said I make her smile for my dedication to World Vision and KIDS HOPE USA. God has blessed me to be able to work with both organizations – one as a volunteer and one as a job through my church. It’s wonderful for me to be able to help children around the world in a tangible way. God is so good to me and I am grateful for it.

Here are some other tidbits about Nadia:

o She still doesn’t like having her diaper changed, but what baby that can roll over does?
o She doesn’t like straight fruit. Examples are peaches or apricots. Now if you give her the baby food with the bananas, plums and grapes mixed up then she goes for it. Otherwise she prefers chicken noodle or vegetable chicken and veggies. She just scarfed down a garden vegetable container. We appear to have a meat and veggie girl for the moment.
o Her current “thing” of the week is to shake her head back and forth like “no”. Of course she doesnt’ know what it means, so it’s hilarious.
o Her current favorite toy is the stacking cups. She likes to get one in each hand and bang them together, then when crawling have one in each hand. It’s fun when they get away from her because they really roll and she enjoys watching them. Then she goes for the chase and it all begins again.
o She is fitting solidly in 6 month clothes. She’s currently 10.5 months old.
o Her hair is growing like crazy, but sticking out in all directions. We are joking that we are going to have a Chinese punk rocker until it grows out 🙂
o She’s going to be baptized this weekend.
o She can roll her tongue and flip it over completely.

P.S. Thanks to Mark H. for ordering from Lil Sugarplum and mentioning my name.

The dress on the left is the one we had made for Nadia in Jiangxi…after I looked at all the fabric choices in the shop. The dress on the right is the one that my sister Michelle bought in San Francisco’s Chinatown shortly before we left for China. She also got Nadia some pink silk jammies that are adorable. Michelle said when she saw the “Red Couch Incident” photos on the blog while we were in China she said, “NO WAY!” We got the package this week and Mike said, “That’s pretty freaky that you guys picked the same dress.” We must have had a sister wavelength going. I would also like to point out that there were MANY red fabric choices in Jiangxi…it’s just that I liked that one best. Cool, huh?

The photos above are of my sister Bayli and Nadia playing that Mike took with his camera during the visit last weekend. Click on it to see the rest of the album.