10 Months (10/18/2015)

GENERAL:  Dear Joshy,  Happy 10 months to you!  Each month seems to go faster than the month before.  You are becoming more independent everyday.  You just barely weigh 15 pounds and you are almost 27 inches, I think.  You fell off your growth curve a bit at your 9 month appointment, so we are going to see endocrine just to make sure everything is A-OK.  We imagine that your small size is compliments of your small parents, but we just want to make sure.  You are as smart as can be, so I'm really not worried about your development.  You have passed every developmental milestone with flying colors!  The soonest appointment is in December, so we'll see if we still even need to go at that point.

SLEEP:  As my last few blogs suggest, sleep has been less than awesome this last month.  I don't like to complain, but it has been ROUGH.  I need sleep, my boy!  You wake up at least 2-3 times/night.  You've been pretty healthy lately, so fortunately you usually go back to sleep right away, but this isn't always the case.  I typically will nurse you and your stomach is always growling, so I think you are actually hungry!  I want you to get all the calories you can, so I happily feed you basically whenever you want to eat, it would just be more fun if you preferred to eat more during the day and sleep during the night.  You still do a great job with your morning nap unless you're at school.  They say you "didn't want to nap" in the morning almost every morning.  I think you just don't like to miss anything!  You go down to sleep like an angel around 7:00/7:30PM and then usually wake up around midnight or 1:00.  And then I think it's like every hour after that. ;)  Ok, not quite, but it's never smooth sailing after that point!  Sometimes you will sleep til around 7:00AM though, which is nice.  (After you've been up like every 2 hours before that.)  LET'S SLEEP BETTER THIS MONTH, DEAL??

EATING: You still love to eat!  Well, you love food anyway.  I'm not sure that you're getting the minimum of 16oz/day of breast milk that the pediatrician recommended, but you are eating a lot of other things!  You love yogurt and fruit.  You are great at feeding yourself.  You still nurse in the morning and before bed (and 2+ times overnight) and then you take bottles of breast milk during the day.  I think it is usually about 4oz at a time.  We have been letting you try lots of new foods lately and you aren't afraid to try anything!  You've had chicken, noodles, beans, crackers, and more.  As long as I'm asking for more sleep, I might as well ask for you to drink more milk too.  Sound good?

COMMUNICATION/COGNITION:  You have been so attached to me lately!  You cried for the first time when I dropped you off at school yesterday.  I almost started crying!  It is nearly impossible to get ready for work in the morning, because you want to be held the whole time and you are otherwise crying to be picked up or crawling up my legs.  You love seeing Ben in the morning.  You've been reaching and opening and closing your little fist at things you want lately.  You have been so giggly lately and it's the sweetest noise ever!  You do a ton of babbling, but still no "ma ma ma ma," unfortunately!  

FINE/GROSS MOTOR: You have officially taken your first steps!  You seem to prefer crawling though, probably because you are so fast and efficient, especially when you bear crawl!  You are always checking the baby gate at the bottom of the stairs to see if it is open so you can crawl up.  You are still waving, clapping, and banging toys together.  You've been really in to turning the light switches on and off.  You get a big smile on your face whenever you see one.  We still have to be very careful about what is on the floor because everything goes right in to your mouth.  You love music and dancing.  We love watching you bop around on the floor!

I cannot believe that in 2 short months you will be ONE!  How is this possible?!  Thanks for making our lives so bright and happy.  We love you, baby boy!

Pumpkins!

I was going to write Josh's 10 month post, but I decided I wanted to do something that uses less brain power.  It's only Monday and I'm already beat!  I couldn't decide which pictures I liked best, so here are a bunch of pictures from our trip to the pumpkin farm yesterday.  We went about an hour before close and during the Packers game, so there were barely any people there.  Just the way I like it!  We turned the heat on over the weekend, so I was happy that we actually had a pretty beautiful day!

I love fall and my sweet little family!  Ben is so eager to carve the pumpkins, but my guess is that he isn't going to want to go anywhere near the pumpkin guts.  

Grown-Up Vacation

First of all, I know I am super behind on the blogging.  There has been some serious sleep deprivation going on in this house!  Josh (and some times Ben) has been waking up A LOT.  On the night Andy was gone last weekend, I literally slept from 10:30-12:00 midnight and either Josh, Ben, or BOTH of them were up for the rest of the night morning.  It has been exhausting.  We now consider a night with 2 wake-ups to be a good night.  I almost fell asleep getting my haircut last week.  The sleep situation has to improve, right?!  I don't think I'm one of those people that needs a lot of sleep, but after so many nights of little sleep my body starts to revolt!  BUT, despite the lack of ZZZs, I seriously love these boys so much and I'm sure one day I will long for these late night/ early. early morning snuggles.

We have had a ton of fun stuff going on lately!  We have yet to make it to a pumpkin farm (GASP!) but I hope we can find a day that isn't too freezing!  I want to write a fall post soon, but for now, I'm going to write about our little vacation.  Andy and I left the boys for 4 whole nights!  I was so anxious about it, but we all obviously survived.  We went to California to visit my friend/old co-worker and her family.  I was really, really, really sad to leave my baby boys.  It was probably better that we left before they woke up, or Andy probably would have had to drag me away, sobbing.  We flew in to Sacramento on Thursday, rented a car, and drove to out friends' house.

We arrived at their house in Davis around 1:00PM and we wasted no time in seeing the city!  Davis is such a cool place!  It has a college-town feel (thanks to UC-Davis) and it is also one of the most bike-friendly cities in the country.  Her kids were in school, so the 4 of us hopped on bikes and went for a little city tour.   The bike paths are awesome!  We passed a bunch of parks along the way and we ended up at a coffee shop downtown.  The weather was perfection the entire time we were there.  They are in a bit of a drought right now, which isn't ideal, but it made for low-humidity days.  

We enjoyed some wine at a local wine bar before going to dinner.  On a side note, I realized that I only took a fraction of the number of photos I typically take of the boys, so it wasn't as hard selecting which pictures to post, but I also don't have pictures of every single thing we did.  

The next morning, Andy and I headed out to Napa to check out wine country.  We took the scenic route and it was so much fun!  I was getting a little carsick on the winding mountain roads, but we were listening to the Indigo Girls pandora station while taking in some gorgeous views, so I really couldn't complain!  We didn't do a great job of planning in advance, so the hotel room prices were kind of out of control.  (Like $1700/night!)  We ended up finding a super cute place on airbnb.  We had an entire house (like we could have slept 6+ people) to ourselves and it was so cute!  There were even chickens outside in case you wanted to "get your farm life on."

However, when we went out to get some eggs the next morning, the chickens had all gotten loose!  Luckily, Andy was all about getting his farm on and he was able to get them all back in their coop!  And he was able to enjoy some farm fresh eggs!

Neither Andy nor I had ever been to Napa before, so it was a little overwhelming trying to decide where to go!  Luckily, we have several friends who gave us some excellent recommendations.  Our first stop was Domaine Carneros Winery.  We didn't have the greatest service, but we did have good wine!

Our next stop was Artesa Winery.  It was a more modern building, and it was built in to a mountain.  We were surprised that most of the wineries closed at around 5:00, so after this one closed, we headed back to our place.  We were within walking distance of downtown, so we headed out for dinner.  We ended up eating some pizza at the Oxbow Market. 

We continued walking around and saw a cool looking rooftop bar in the distance, so we went to check it out.  I'm a sucker for hanging lights and mountain views.  Plus the company was top-notch. ;)

We went to one more bar as we were waiting for one of Andy's classmates who was in town, but we ended up getting too tired so we headed back.   The next morning, we headed to San Francisco.  It has always been on my list of places that I wanted to see, so since we were so close, we couldn't pass it up! We drove in over the Golden Gate bridge and it was pretty amazing.  I was a HUGE Full House fan back in the day, so it was kind of a dream come true seeing the bridge in real life. 

It was "fleet week" and the Blue Angels were also in town, so we watch the show over the bridge/bay. We ate lunch in Fisherman's Wharf.  It was a little touristy for our liking, but we had to check it out.

My phone was only working intermittently in San Fran, but thankfully I was able to get it to work long enough to Google "Full House" things.  We were able to find Alamo Square, the home of houses seen here:

We found the house that is supposed to be the house that the "Full House" house was modeled after, but it looked totally different so that was a bit anticlimactic.  It's blue now.  Truth be told, all the houses look quite similar, so I was happy just seeing houses that looked like the "Full House" house.  And while I'm on the truths here, I was keeping my eyes opened for the Tanners and company, but no such luck.  ;) 

We spent our last day full day in California back in Davis with Maya and the fam.  We were going to head out to see Lake Tahoe, but that was a 2 hour drive each ways, so we decided to just hang around Davis.  Andy found a bar to watch the Packers game while the girls went shopping in downtown Davis.  Later in the afternoon, we went to Old Sugar Mill, which, as the name suggests, is an old sugar mill that has been turned in to a winery.  There were a bunch of different wineries within the building so we got in a lot of tasting!  Oh to live so close to all that good wine!

We were up before the sun on Monday to catch a 7:00AM flight back home.  I truly missed Josh and Ben so much and it felt like we were gone MUCH longer, but it was also AMAZING to get away!  We made it home safely with 4 bottles of wine and over 4 pounds worth of pumped milk for Josh--hah!  The reunion with the boys was so sweet.  Ben sprinted in to my arms and Josh sprinted via crawling right after him.  A huge, gigantic thank you to my mom, aka the best mom in the world, for watching the boys while we were gone.  She did have some help, but did the bulk of the dirty work herself!  She got to witness the sleep deprivation first hand.  We are so thankful that the boys were so loved and well cared for while we were gone!