6 months

How can it be that she is already six months old?

A little bit about Danielle at 6 months:

• She thinks she is the only child. She is happy as long as you are paying attention to her and only her. As soon as you try to multitask, she gets pissy.
• She has good lungs. We learned this immediately after her birth and we are constantly reminded.
• She is teething, but has no teeth yet. I expect to find some any day now.
• She rolls over all.the.time. She is never where I left her anymore.
• She sits up on her own now and seems to prefer to always sit up. Which means I spend a good deal of my day sitting on the floor next to her to catch her when she falls over.
• She is fascinated with her big brother and sister. She always wants to see what they're doing.
• The days of sleeping through the night are a distant memory. Damn the newborn napping station. Since we removed it, she has only slept through the night twice.
• In an attempt to get her sleeping better, we moved the crib into our room last night and took down the pack & play. As a result, she slept in her crib for the first time ever last night. The main reason she had never slept in it before was that I'm too lazy to walk upstairs.
• She slept much better last night than she had been in the pack & play. That is not saying much though.
• Luckily, when she does wake at night, she nurses and goes right back to sleep. This all happens in our bed. We bought a king just to have lots of room for her. (We are bigger than we were when the other two were cosleeping babes and couldn't fit all of us in the queen comfortably.)
• I love sleeping with her. I love that she sleeps so well in our bed, but would like her to sleep a little better in her own bed too.
• She is the worst napper. Sometimes I give in and let her sleep on me (and usually nap with her) just so she'll sleep.
• Today she took TWO real naps in her crib. I'm hoping this trend continues.
• Despite my plans while pregnant, she has not taken a bottle yet. I haven't even tried to get her to take one. I hate pumping and already used up my very small stash mixing it with cereal. It doesn't bother me that she doesn't take a bottle. I don't want to be away from her for very long anyway and wouldn't want to leave her with anyone (except Doug) at this point.
• So far, she has had rice cereal and oatmeal. She doesn't seem to care much for either of them. She will discover the world of fruit and veggies soon.
• She has really long eyelashes, as all of our kids do.
• Her eyes are blue, which means nothing since both kids had blue eyes at this age and neither have blue eyes now.
• She has blond hair.
• She is beautiful and we love her.

Sisters

These two love each other so much already. I can only hope that they become good friends, like I am with my sister.

Sitting!

Danielle has been trying to sit up for a while, but last night she finally did it for longer than 5 seconds.

Doug took tons of pics before she fell over. :)

Yikes! Does this mean crawling is next? I'm so not ready for that.

First day of school

Gracie is a third grader this year. She really loves her homeroom/math/science teacher. She is already making new friends and is happy to see old ones from last year too.

Doug went in late on Monday so we could all walk her to school. I forgot the camera, so there are no pics from that morning. Here is one I took of her when she got home.

Notice her name tag says Gracie (instead of Gracelyn, which she chose to go by last year).

Sick Baby Update

She seemed fine all day today. No fever overnight or today. So we thought she was all better... right up until she started projectile vomiting tonight. Poor baby. She threw up all over herself and me (and the blanket and my chair). I've never seen such a little baby get sick like that. She spits up a lot, but this was different. She cried for a few minutes and then was happy. And a half hour later, she was asleep. Here's hoping it was a one time thing and she sleeps well tonight with no more puking.

Tomorrow is the first day of school for Gracie, so I would really like it if I didn't have to wake up a lot overnight. Getting up at 6:30 will be hard enough without being up during the night with a sick baby.

Sick baby

Danielle is sick for the first time. She had a low-grade fever on Thursday. Yesterday, it was a big higher. She woke up at 3:30 am with a fever last night and is still sleeping after 10 this morning (pic above). My poor babe. I'm guessing she has the virus Gracie had last week. She is also a little congested, like Gracie was. I'll never understand how she got it and Bradley didn't though. Since B&G play together all.the.time, I would have expected him to get it before D. I hope it doesn't last 6 days for her like it did for G. Yesterday was a long day with lots of fussing.

Variety

After nothing but breastmilk for the first 5+ months, finally Danielle's diet has variety. We started her on rice cereal Sunday night.

She loved her new chair.


The big kids were excited about the big event, G especially.


Yum.


She seemed to like it ok.

We'll stick to cereal for a bit and then add other foods. I like that the cereal mixes with breastmilk, so it's more like what she has been used to. Once she gets the hang of the cereal, we'll expand and add even more variety.

Cedar Park train ride

A few weeks ago, the big kids mentioned to me that they had never been on a train. So Doug and I went looking for a nearby train ride for us to go on. And that led to the weekend in Austin.

The train ride we picked went from Cedar Park, TX to Bertram, TX and back. A trip of about 3 hours.

Here are the girls on the train, waiting for it to pull out of the station.


A random cute baby pic.


The name of our car: The Buckeye Trail. (We went with the car with a/c since it is August.)


Me and Danielle.

Gracie, excited to get going.

Bradley was so excited he was sitting with Doug.

We started moving and the kids were glued to the window.

The views as we went by.

Bradley's interest was constant.

G was sleepy, so she looked like this for a lot of the trip. (D was also napping here.)

Random cute baby feet pic.

Cute pic of me with the littlest two.

Doug got a turn to hold the baby.

Still looking out the window.

At the Bertram Depot. When we stopped, Gracie didn't want to get off. So Doug and Bradley got off the train to walk around and take pics while I stayed on with the girls.

B inside the depot.

B in front of the train.

Once she saw the boys walking around outside, G decided she wanted to get off too. So we all got off. Here are the big kids in front of our car.

G at the ticket window.

Another view of the inside of the depot.

Walking up to the front to check out the engine.

The engine. The engineer blew the horn to tell everyone to get back on the train and it was really loud and B was in tears as we reboarded.

G was in tears too, but she was walking with Doug so I didn't know that. But right as we boarded, G threw up in the aisle. So I handed Danielle to Doug and stayed with G in between cars while she threw up off the side of the train as we pulled out of the station. When she felt ok, we went back to our seats and she laid down for the rest of the trip. There are no pics of the return trip because we were on puke watch and didn't want to have the camera out.

We went back to the hotel so she could rest. She didn't puke again and we thought maybe it was from motion sickness from riding backwards on the train or heat exhaustion from being out in the heat at the stop or a combination of both.

Bradley played on the computer.

Gracie slept.

She woke up feeling better and hadn't been sick again, so we went to meet old friends of ours for dinner. Through dinner, G complained of being tired and only ate a few saltines. When we got back to the room, we discovered she had a fever. And the fever remains, 4 days later. Looking back, I realize she wasn't feeling well that morning. But at the time, she seemed okay.

We plan to go back again sometime to ride the train. Hopefully next time, it will be enjoyable for all of us for both ways of the trip.

Round Rock game

Last weekend, we went to Austin. First up was a Round Rock Express (the AAA team for the Astros) game.

Since temperature at first pitch was triple digits, we waited until about 8 to get there so it wouldn't be quite as hot.

Dell Diamond from the parking lot.


The awesome pitcher. (7+ innings of shutout baseball.)


"I'm hot" was all we heard from the big kids.

Little D went to sleep on big D.

The scoreboard, which the kids pointed out was "so much smaller" than the Astros'.

Ice Cream= the way to get your kids to quit complaining about being hot.

Fireworks after the game!

I suck at taking pictures of fireworks apparently.

(They were much better than this in person.)

All the kids loved them.

Except B didn't like the loud noises they made.

We had a great time. It was the first minor league game for the kids and I. I'm sure we'll go back sometime, though maybe not to Round Rock, since they will be the Rangers' AAA team starting next year.