Just Pictures

I feel like blogging, but I don't really feel like writing a whole bunch, so this is going to be a picture post. Enjoy!

This makes me smile.

Good picture of her bottom teeth. She has four now, two top, two bottom. Have I mentioned that?

Just a day at the park with Mommy and Daddy.

Ben and I at the top of the Ferris Wheel at the Puyallup Fair. We had a really fun time there.

Lily liked looking at all the animals. Other than that, she slept a lot.

Recently, Lily has discovered that she can take toys and clothes out of her baskets, and she very much enjoys this! So her room has been a huge mess lately, but she has lots of fun, and Ben and I can get up to 20 minutes of quiet while she just plays. It's cool.

Recent foods she has tried and thoroughly enjoyed:
Chicken Noodle Soup
Cottage Cheese and Pineapple
String Cheese
Beef Sticks (like viena sausage things, completely disgusting, but she likes them)
Biscuits (like the kind you would eat with soup :) )
Peach Pineapple Salsa (I gave her a taste thinking she would hate it and leave my food alone, and she actually really liked it. Who'd of thunk?)

So, life's great and Lily's cute!

Bibs

So I was just changing the laundry from the washer to the dryer, and I noticed that a clump of clothes were all stuck together and when I went to separate them, I realized that it was about 6 of Lily's bibs, all strung together in a row by the velcro straps. It was really funny.

I showed Ben and he laughed too, and said I should blog about it... so I am. Now that I read what I just wrote, I realize that it was a lot funnier in person.

I would have taken a picture, but my bra was in the middle of them all. I didn't think the world needed to see my bra.

I promise she's not a gimp...

That's just how she crawls! Though she has gotten better at it in the last few days and she looks less gimpy now. This video was taken on Monday.

Speaking of Monday, Lily and I met her Aunt Andy and cousin Rachel at the Bellevue Botanical Gardens on Monday for a play date. Rachel is two months older than Lily, and since Andy, Dan, and Rachel live only 45 minutes away, we get to see them a lot. Most of Ben's family lives in Utah/Oregon/Colorado. It was fun for us all to get together, and the gardens were really pretty. After walking among the trees and flowers, we sat the girls on the grass and let them crawl and explore and eat cheerios. Good times!

I couldn't get as many good flower pictures as I wanted to because I'm still learning about my new camera and I couldn't always get it to focus the way I wanted it to. Oh well. I got a lot of fun pictures of the two girls playing on the grass later, and they're more important than flowers anyway!

There were a lot of bumblebees everywhere, understandably.

Lily was happy to be out of her stroller and to see Rachel.

Rachel and Lily going for the cheerios

Eating Cheerios and grass - but I guess you can't see the grass that well in this picture. Oh well. There's a little piece sticking out of her mouth.

Lily has a seriously annoyed expression on her face :)

And now Rachel does too.

This is my favorite picture. Happy cousins!

Eat!

Once Lily turned about 6 months old, we started doing some sign language with her. Ben and I had talked about it even before she was born and we both really liked the idea of her being able to communicate before she could talk. We'd read that it helps give babies confidence, plus it's just got to be nice for them to tell us (adults) what they want and for us to actually be able to understand them.

So when Lily started eating solid foods, we introduced the sign for "more" and and "all done" and a made up sign for "do you want to be picked up". After a little while we started to do "milk" too. She didn't do anything for a really long time, but a few weeks ago, maybe two or three, she started doing something with her hands that looked a lot like "more." We were really excited, and we started watching more closely for it, and I realized that she would do "more" whenever she wanted anything. Absolutely anything - if she wanted more food, or even if she hadn't started eating yet and she wanted to eat. She would do "more" when she was all done eating, and she wanted out. Sometimes she'd do more when she was just sitting in the shopping cart at the store and I wasn't sure what she wanted then.

So that was when we started doing "eat" on a regular basis. I think we'd already been doing it, just not consistently enough. Just a few days ago, we noticed her doing the eat sign! It was really awesome, and she was so proud of herself! She's doing it a lot now. She does the "eat" sign in the morning after she wakes up, so I'll do it back to her along with the "milk" sign, and she gets really excited that I understood her. Ben and I are really glad that she's understanding and trying to do the signs. I think she's been trying to do the sign we made up for "cheerios" lately too. She really likes cheerios, and I thought it was worthwhile to have a sign just for those since she seems to want them all the time. :) We're really proud of her.

Crawling Now!

So, yes, it's a little backwards, but Lily has recently started crawling! I know a lot of people have been worried about her walking before she crawls, because apparently there's all sorts of studies saying they really need to learn to crawl to help them develop right, and we definately tried to help her learn, but until now she just was not interested in crawling at all. Ben and I kind of thought that she would start crawling after she started walking and realized that she needed to crawl to get to someplace where she could pull herself back up, and that's basically how it happened. She started to understand that crawling got her to where she wanted to go just as well as walking does, so she's doing both now. She still doesn't do either on a regular basis, but it's really fun to watch her learn. She's doing so well, and it's so cute to see how proud of herself she is.

Going for the cheerios. She'd do almost anything for cheerios, so it's a good way to encourage her to crawl. :)

In other news, Lily is 8 months old as of yesterday! I was curious as to how big she's gotten, because she's really sprouted in the last few months, so accuracy is probably not as good as it would be at a doctors office, but Lily weighs between 17.0 and 17.4 pounds (our scale is finicky and rarely gives the same answer twice) and her height is now at 27.5 inches. I have no idea where that is on the percentage thing, but she seems a lot bigger than she used to be, so I figure she's doing pretty good. She has four teeth now, and her favorite foods are cheerios, bananas, and rice cereal with bananas. Carrots are usually receieved with much enthusiasm as well. She still loves being outside and I'm hoping the non-rainy weather sticks around for a while longer yet. Other favorites right now include my phone and keys, trying to get at the power button on the computer, and any and all computer cords. Combined with her newfound abilities of walking and crawling, the babyproofing is about to beging in earnest. Fun fun.

Our big girl!