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Thursday, July 21, 2011

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

1/2 a year old!! Are you kidding me?!?

So my kid is 6 months old. First of all, it sounds really weird to say '"my kid". Yeah, you would think 6 months later I would be used to the idea, but it's still setting in :) Second of all, it sounds weird to sy MY KID is SIX MONTHS OLD!! We've hit the half way mark--6 months ago I was going through the scariest, most exciting, painful, awesome day of my life. And in 6 short months, my baby will be a year old. Sigh.....it's going too fast. I only want 2 kids, but I tell you what, I'm already having little, bitty newborn withdrawals and if I keep feeling that way, we might end up with 15 kids!! I LOVE watching him get older but it makes me sad that he's getting more independent and less needy of his mommy.

Tommy, at six months old, you are:

*weighing in at---wait for it folks, wait for it---- 20 lbs and 14 oz. Yup, that explains the cramp in my arm after holding you for a few minutes.

*27 1/2 inches long

*still wearing size 2 diapers. We are almost ready for size 3s. The size twos fit around your waist, but because you're so long, they don't go very high on your back and tummy and we're having some leakage problems.

*have tried a lot of baby food and liked most of it!! You've had sweet potatoes, sweet corn, carrots (your fave!), peas, green beans (a close 2nd fave),  apples, pears, bananas and peaches (which you hated--you clamped your lips shut and weren't eating them for anything!).  It's still kind of a hit and miss with the baby food. Sometimes you eat it, but you definitely know when you're full and you will NOT take a single bite if you don't want to.

*sleeping from about 9 at night to 7 in the morning. You still wake up once around 2am or 3am for food and SOMETIMES (rarely, but it seems ALWAYS when you stay the night at a grandparents house) sleep all the way through the night.

*loving the water!! Baths, swimming--you just can't get enough. You smile the whole time and splash and giggle. Mom is so glad you like the water!!


*are on all fours!! It's so exciting to see you get on your hands and knees and bounce back and forth. I know you're just DYING to get going but haven't quite figured out the hand/knee coordination. Mama and Daddy can't wait to see you crawl!

*are driving us CRAZY with your newfound love of being on your stomach. You roll over from back to tummy and you very clearly know how to roll over from tummy to back, but you just won't do it. You get on your tummy or all 4s and then get furious and start crying until we flip you back over. I think you're just lazy! That's gonna have to change :)

*are obsessed with grabbing EVERYTHING. Absolutely everything. My hair, the remote (you ESPECIALLY love the remote), our glasses, food, laundry. Anything within a one foot radius of you, you go for it. And then if you get it, it goes straight to your mouth. Yum.

*playing with your toys a lot. You LOVE your cell phone. It doesn't quite compare for your obsession with our remote (which I still can't find a toy version of) but you like the buttons and the colors. You also really like your stuffed blocks, but you have a hard time holding to them because they're kind of big.

*have the CRAZIEST hair-dos when you wake up. It's actually something I look forward to seeing after you nap or wake up for the morning! No matter what I do, it's always crazy :)


*have been put through the cry-it-out method. Mom's not very good at it, but I'm trying. I let you cry just a little longer each time and I do good until you hit this certain cry that just breaks my heart. Daddy's better at it than I am, but the point is, I AM TRYING!! You've done pretty good with us laying you down in your bed with a bottle and putting yourself to sleep. It's more a matter of when we leave the room, you freak out. That's mostly what we're working on.

Tommy, you are just the best little baby. You're so good natured most of the time and ALWAYS wake up with a smile on your face (you get that from dad, by the way)! I wonder what I did with my life and my time before I had you. While it's still new to me to have a baby, I still marvel at the fact that our life molds perfectly around you. Before you were born,  I couldn't imagine how we would have time to do everything and kept thinking how different things were going to be. But now that you're here, it feels like you've ALWAYS been here! I love you sweet boy! Thank God for you and the love you put in our life!

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Mish Mash


This post is just kind of mish mash of stuff that lets me show off pictures of my kid without seeming like one of "THOSE" moms :) Even though I kinda am sometimes! This summer has been so busy and fun. Tommy has changed so much and has done a lot of 'firsts' this summer.

One Saturday, daddy had to work, so me and Nana took Tommy swimming!! It was quite an experience at first but turned out to be really fun. I had been wanting to go to Rock River Rapids in Derby and they have a toddler time from 11am to 12:30pm when only kids 5 and under can be in the park. It was awesome becuase then you didn't have to worry about your kid getting trampled or splased too much. But it started out with us running a little late (as usual). We stopped at a few garage sales on our way to Derby and I bought Tommy some DVDs (Elmo and Veggie Tales which he LOVES). Then I realized I had only been to Derby once and didn't really remember how to get there. We finally figured it out and had planned to stop at Wal-Mart in Derby but we couldn't find it anywhere. I was going to buy Tommy a floatie becuase he didn't have one yet. So we stopped at Target and FINALLY found one that cost TWENTY DOLLARS!! Really?!? $20 bucks for a baby floatie?? But whatever. So we got to the car and my mom opened it to start blowing it up and it was pink with little mermaids on it. Oh brother. The package had been blue, so naturally, we thought it was going to be blue. It wasn't. My mom blew that thing up until she almost passed out and I took a try but we only got it about half way full. Oh well, at least it could float. Tommy freaked out when we first put him in the water, but after I held him a little bit and slooooowly eased him in, he was fine and he LOVED it! He just leaned back in his floatie with his little hat on and relaxed. It was so cute :)
Nana and Tommy in the trunks and hat she bought him

Mommy and Tommy getting ready to SWIM!!
I really hope Tommy likes the water for the rest of his life. I don't want him to be scared of it, so I'm glad he enjoys it so far!

Moving on to even MORE exciting stuff, in the last week, Tommy has started getting up on all fours!! I got it on video but for the life of me can't get the stinkin thing uploaded.


It was very exciting and I bet he'll be crawling in no time. He gets really irritated though once he's up on all fours. He starts rocking back and forth and screams and then pushes up to where he's just on his hands and toes.


It's quite amusing to us, but he doesn't find it very funny at all.

And last but not least, I have 2 very convincing photographs that will leave NO doubt in your mind whatsoever that Tommy is a prodcut of me and Nick. :)

Proof that Tommy belongs to the Davis family--Brooke, my mom and I have woken up with hair do's like this SEVERAL times in our life!

Proof that Tommy belongs to the Wilhelm family--I have seen similar cracks on his father more times that I can count :)





Monday, July 11, 2011

Table Rock and the 4th of July

Well, it seems like our vacation this year FLEW by. Probably because we only were able to stay 3 days since I had a kid in January and used ALL of my vacation/sick days :) But the 3 days we had there were so nice. We go every year with Nick's family and usually camp in a tent. Last year, being 4 months pregnant and extremely nauseous, I was SO over camping and boating. This year, it was MUCH better. We rented a cabin that was just right across the cove from his family's camp site. They were able to park their boat at our cabin's dock and then just drive 5 minutes back and forth to their campsite. 

Tommy did SO good on the boat. I wish so bad I would've taken a few pictures of him in his life jacket because it was rediculously large on him and if we would've zipped it all the way, it would have covered half his face!! Haha....it was so funny, but I felt bad for the little guy because it couldn't have been comfortable. It kept squishing his cheeks and giving him squinty little eyes. He just wasn't quite long enough for it to fit. I did get a picture of his bath at our cabin! We only had a shower and not a tub, so the kitchen sink did the trick.
In true Tommy fashion, he kept trying to lick the faucet--gross. He puts EVERYTHING in his mouth. But anyways, it was so nice to get away and this time (since we weren't hauling our tent and sleeping bags and living out of suitcases) it didn't seem like quite so much work and it was actually very relaxing!

On the way home from Table Rock, we stopped at a fireworks stand to buy some firecrackers for Tommy's very first 4th of July! Nick always likes to stock up on bottle rockets since they're illegal in Kansas. Personally, I don't see the appeal to bottle rockets since they aren't pretty, but whatever. I was excited for Tommy to see all the fountains and pretty fireworks.

Notice how excited he is in his picture with his dad and how annoyed he is that his dad's not holding him in his picture with me. Oh yeah, he's ALL momma's boy when he's cuddly and tired, but when it comes to anything else, he wants daddy. I see how it is.......carry a child for 9 months, gain 30 pounds, waddle for 3 months, go through labor AND a c-section and he doesn't even care. I see how it is :).



We had some family over on the 4th and we grilled out and gorged on delicious 4th of July food. It was SOOOO yummy and fun. Michael and Nick had a good time with all the bottle rockets. They kept scaring Brooke (better her than me!). They emptied out a Roman candle and then put a regular firecracker in it. Brooke didn't know that so when they lit the fuse, she thought it was a Roman candles that were going to shoot out. They pointed it right at her and she FREAKED out!! It was great.

Tommy spent a lot of time in his exercauser and on this foam mattress thing we have. He got pretty whiney because it was so hot so he took a little nap and woke up in a better mood.


Brooke bought him a fountain. I don't know if you can read the label in the picture but it was named Tommy Rocks! It actually turned out to be his favorite one of the night and it was a really awesome fountain. It lasted for like 5 minutes and was really pretty. Tommy was just staring at it in a daze and then kept looking at me like, "Mom, what the H is that?!?" But then he would start rocking on my lap and gurgling, so I think it was a hit.

Is it kosher to let your kid eat fireworks?
As for the rest of the fireworks, it was pretty funny because he would hear the loud boom and stare at the ground where it came from which kept him from seeing the pretty explosions in the air. But oh well, he's too little to care much anyways. It was just fun being with the family and watching him experience everything for the first time. 
This was his look most of the night :)


Brooke doing sparklers--my personal favorite!!
Overall, we had a GREAT vacation and 4th of July. Hope everyone else did too!

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

This kid.......

has absolutely STOLEN my heart. I didn't plan on writing a mushy-gushy post, but after I saw this picture, I just had to. Motherhood.........there's really no way to sum it up in just a few words. There were a lot of things that I THOUGHT about motherhood when I was not a mother. When I was young, the majority of those things were the typical, "I'll never say that to my daughter when I have one" type of things. I'll never tell my kids that I hope they have a daughter who acts just like them when they grow up, I won't ground them because they said one more word after they were told not to say ONE MORE WORD and I will NEVER dress them in any rediculous outfits just because I think they are super cute. Nope, not me. When I became a teenager, my thoughts switched more along the line of, "If that kid screams one more time, I will rip my hair out" and "That mom just yelled at her kid and then hugged him afterwards--how is she not still mad at him??" I couldn't understand why my mom would always say, "Can I not get just a LITTLE privacy even when I'm in the BATHROOM?!?" I mean, it's not like I was IN the bathroom with her.....we were just trying to talk to her through the door :) There are so many things that unfortunately, just can't be understood until you are a mom. I realize now how much work motherhood is. I have sympathy instead of contempt for the mom at Wal-Mart whose kid is hiding in a rack of clothes and she is screaming at them if they don't hurry up and come out of hiding, she's going to leave them at Wal-Mart for the bad people to get them. I empathize more with the woman in pajamas at 2:00pm with a diaper bag on one arm and pushing a stroller with the other. I used to wonder why my mom never went out much and I would feel bad for her on days when  all of us kids had something to do and she was at home by herself. Ha! That thought actually makes me laugh out loud. I bet when we left, she was dancing around the house in her underwear, watching trashy TV shows that weren't kid friendly and shouting praise to the Lord for the few hours of peace and quiet she had to herself.

And while there are SOOOOO many things about being a mom that make me think, "Dear Lord, please just 10 minutes....that's all I need is 10 minutes alone and I'll be fine", there are that much many more things that make me want to cry with gratefulness at the end of the day. I look at my sleeping baby with his bottom lip all puckered out and his body curved in the shape of a C and I think, "What did I do that was so good I deserve to be this kid's mom?" He can cry and scream and throw a fit and even though I KNOW he's being a little bratty, as soon as the episode is done, we can go right back to being the happy mother-son duo we are :) It makes me feel SO good knowing that I am the one he wants when he is crying. I know how to get him to go to sleep in 5 minutes or less. I know which cry is his scared cry or his hurt cry or his hungry cry or his "someone-better-pay-attention-to-me-NOW" cry. I know that he'll startle at a loud noise but if you distract him really fast, he won't start crying. I know that when he's done eating, he is DONE eating--his lips close tight and there's no way on earth you're getting that spoon in his mouth. God has entrusted this little person that I will get to know like the back of my hand and that I will get to watch grow up into a man. What a priviledge. It breaks my heart to know that there are people who have children who don't want them. How is that possible?!? How can you grow something inside of you and not feel the kind of love that only comes from another human actually being made from a part of you? I feel like Tommy literally has a chunk of my heart that hurts when he hurts, laughs when he laughs and cries when he cries. Corny, but true. So thank you God, SO very much for giving me and Nick this little guy. Please help us to take care of him and to love him the way You would love us. Keep us sane in moments of chaos, keep a smile on our faces when there's not one on his and lead us where we need to take this boy to live the best life we can for You.