6 Months of Lilli

Happy 6 Months of Lilli!

Your Birthday - January 24, 2009

7 lbs, 6.5 ounces 19 inches

One Month - February (first smiles!)

9 lbs, 1 ounce (45th %) 21.5 inches (55%), head: 70%

Two Months - March

10 lbs, 12 ounces (50%) 22 5/8 inches (55%), head: 65%

Three Months - April

(No official weight)

Four Months - May

13 lbs 1 ounce (35%), 23 7/8 inches long (30%), head: 85%

Five Months - June!! And starting to sit on your own with a little help from Boppy!

Unofficial - Measurement of 25 inches and weight measurements - 14.2 pounds

6 Months - July Official Stats from the doc today (which is actually 6months, 1 wk) -
25 3/4 inches long (50th percentile!), Weight: 15 lbs, 8 ounces (40th percentile), Head: 75th percentile

So, in the last two months her weight and height have really starting catching up to be closer to average and she's growing into that head! She got a great review from her Doc - sat up happily and played, smiled, laughed and showed Dr Rauth all the fun things she can do. She also really wanted to play with all her instruments and was all about ripping up the white paper on the table. Dr Rauth gave us a prescription for a steroid cream to hopefully help clear up her cradle cap once and for all, other than that Lilli's totally normal and developing right on track. She was NOT happy about her shots, but thankfully when we go back at 9 months she'll only have to get a flu shot and that's all! She cried for just a couple of minutes, but once we got outside she was fine and has been in a great mood ever since, hardly napping at all this afternoon because her toys are just SO MUCH FUN!

Practice makes Perfect

Here's more video (not in HD since these are all from Brent's camera) of Lilli's progress in the whole blowing bubbles arena! This was taken last night, so after 5 days of practice with this new "skill" she's come quite a way! And she's now soaking wet at all times.....

We go tomorrow morning for her 6 month shots. It'll be great to hear her official weight/measurements but I never look forward to the shot portion of our visit!

Sleeping Beauty

Things I am thankful for:A baby who takes naps in her crib now, versus her previous swing-only nap stance! Saves us a lot in batteries, for sure! Actually, she's pretty much outgrown her swing now, I don't think we've used it in weeks. It will be VERY nice to pack that thing back up into the attic as it's currently the only piece of baby equipment in our living room!

She's also been taking shorter and shorter evening naps, so it probably won't be long before she doesn't even take one anymore, which would be great and give us more playtime together! Tonight she only napped for about 15 minutes, probably because of all the fun new toys I bought her last night at the consignment sale. She loved her new activity table! Ironically, her dayschool director went to the same sale and when I picked her up this afternoon her classroom was full of fun new toys for the kiddos to share, yay!

Visits with Grandma and Grandpa

Last Saturday Grandma and Grandpa Carden decided to drive up to Nashville and help out and play with Lilli for the day. Grandma spent lots of time playing with Lilli so I could get my laundry done much more quickly than normal, do some dusting and cleaning that hadn't been done in ages, and whip up some more homemade baby food for Lilli! Grandpa helped Brent with the dining room renovation and also got some Lilli time in too! She had a great time with her grandparents!

Bubbles, Two Ways

Here's a couple of recent videos from around the house, in High Def for your viewing pleasure!

It's always a good thing when a toy/game can amuse both Lilli and Pippin! Anytime we go to a wedding with bubbles I usually try to snap up an extra leftover bottle or two because Pippin loooves to chase bubbles. I was trying to think of something fun and new for Lilli, and my eye caught a bottle of bubbles by Pippin's treat jar so I grabbed. She enjoyed it....and then Pippin came wandering into the room and made the game a lot more amusing! Two birds, one stone: Win-Win!



Monkey-See, Monkey-Do syndrome has already struck our house! There's a little girl in Lilli's class named Jada who is one month older than her who blows bubbles ALL THE TIME! Man, this kid gets INTO it - and she's great at it! Friday afternoon when I was picking Lilli up Jada was going at it and I was laughing at her along with her teacher and mentioned Lilli doesn't do anything like that. (International way to JINX!) Mrs Dameah laughed and said "Just wait, she will! They mimic each other all the time!" About an hour after we got home we were still sitting in the floor playing with Brent and all of the sudden - she started doing it too! She's nowhere near as advanced as Jada is, and she mostly just spits everywhere, but she practiced a LOT over the weekend - at church, at restaurants, while trying to feed her solid foods, etc etc. This video is from when she first started doing it, she's progressed a lot over the weekend so I'll have to get a better video of how she sounds now. This afternoon when I picked Lilli up I told Jada she wasn't allowed to play with Lilli anymore and she just smiled at me, no doubt scheming up her next bad habit to pass along!

Hands Free!

Lilli has been sleeping completely un-swaddled for two weeks now! She spent around 2-3 weeks sleeping with one arm free, and then she was having trouble going to sleep again so we tried transitioning her to the sleep sack and she is doing great!


An added bonus is how cute she is in her polka dot sleep sack contrasted with her polka dot sheets. She also has some sheets that match her sleep sack perfectly - as seen AGES ago when we mistakenly went through a phase of not using the Swaddle Me, before we knew how fabulous the Happiest Baby on the Block teaching were. (BTW, that pic was from a post on March 5th - so tiny!!)
Tomorrow I'm hoping I can upload some video from my camera - Lilli has a fabulous new trick she picked up at school that I'm sure is going to go over ACES in church tomorrow.

Happy Half Birthday!

Happy 6 month birthday to Lilli! It's hard to believe it's been 6 months since we headed to the hospital and came home a little family! We celebrated by going out to dinner at a Greek restaurant, where Brent and I enjoyed some delicious food and Lilli enjoyed the live music they have on the weekends. Brent bought her some presents (a new toy and a new pair of shoes) and we went to the mall to redeem my Gymbucks and buy her some new clothes for next summer from Gymboree and BabyGap. I pretty much wiped out the remaining babyGap clearance rack because they also have a great sale right now! And then we kept her up way past her bedtime thanks to a side trip to Trader Joes.

More of the portraits Brent's been doing for Lilli's 6-month milestone to come, but I just had to share these! There's still several other poses/locations I want to do, but we're done with the "dressy" ones and the "naked baby" ones. The camera is not a stranger to her!

Maybe it was all the salsa....

I was organizing some pics tonight and came across this one I'd forgotten about from a few weeks ago. We went out to eat at Chili's and she fell asleep in her car seat - one foot straight up in the air!

Swingin'

I think she really enjoys her swing! And she's definitely filling it out better than when we first got in a month ago.

And those socks - all Brent. This was last Saturday, which is "daddy day" on clothing - which pretty much always means she'll be wearing an I Love Daddy shirt (which she was) and some random accessory - this time, some really awful looking socks. (They came as a set with a pair of cute penguin socks.)

Pure Joy

This may be one of my new favorite pics of Lilli!We're working on her 6 month portraits, and yesterday we did some "dress" pics. (I want some dressy, some casual, some indoor, some outdoor, some with us, and some 'naked' baby pics of her hands, toes, etc). When we started doing this set in the floor with her sitting Pippin REALLY wanted to help. He kept going back and forth, bringing his toys into the pic and just generally being a distraction - which Lilli LOVED. Brent snapped this one during one of his walk-bys. All he has to do is walk by and she is in LOVE!

The Difference

It's always interesting to me to see how Brent can capture Lilli's personality so well on camera. So many people take snapshots, but he really takes pictures, and there's such a HUGE difference. Last night we had a takeout picnic at the park to enjoy the beautiful weather, and afterwards we played around on the playground for a little bit.

Lilli checked out the slide....although she totally didn't even understand what she was doing, but she's down for pretty much anything.

Then we took her over to the kiddo swings. She's way too small for it but we figured we'd at least put her in one and snap some pics. So out come both our pocket camera and parent paparazzi ensues. We each have Cannon cameras small enough to fit in your pocket, Brent's is actually my old camera that was starting to act up so I got the newest version in May (and I LOVE it!) He sat on it or something so it's even more broken now and you have to tug on the zoom lens to even get it to work.

Here are my pics of Lilli in the swing:
Cute stuff, huh? Until you see Brent's awesome take of the exact same moments....
Both pocket cameras, no Photoshop or anything to any of the pics. That's why he is the photographer and I am the assistant - wonderfully skilled at making babies smile at the camera, and I'm pretty good at getting dogs to look, too!

Speaking of, I hear little miss starting to wake up from her afternoon nap! Time to play!

Voting for Evan....

The only show we're watching this summer is So You Think You Can Dance. Most TV is awful and we'd rather do fun things than sit around and watch a bunch of junk, so we TiVo it and usually watch it over a few days since we can't sit still for 2 straight hours! Last night we were watching a little bit of last week's episode and Lilli was cuddling in my lap. Since we don't have the TV on much in front of her it completely took us by surprise when she started laughing at it! My favorite contestant this season, Evan, was dancing his solo and every time he did a particular turn she would just die laughing. We figured it was a fluke, but every time we bloop-blooped back she'd laugh at that SAME exact spot again! We even played it for her again today, and once we got her attention on the TV she laughed at the exact same spot. What a funny girl! I guess I'll have to vote for him every week so Lilli can keep on laughing!

Our Fun Day

Last night before bedtime we told Lilli we had a surprise for her - School was out today!! Her daycare was closed today for teacher inservice, so we were both taking the day off to hang out with her! Yay!
She was very excited about a long weekend with us, so she started waking up promptly at 6 am but we were able to get her back to sleep until around 7:30. We got up and played for a while before heading out to the mall to do some shopping. We have a ton of gift cards we needed to use, so we got quite a few things but only had to spend our money on lunch! Sweet! Lilli was great, she napped on and off but was actually awake most of the time. She also enjoyed a bottle in the middle of the mall while watching everyone pass by. After we got home she had another bottle and then we headed out to the pool at the Y. She really had not napped much at all, and we thought she might want a nap after her bottle but since she kept fighting it off we decided to go swimming. Naturally she was sound asleep when we got there.

So, we found some shade near our chairs and parked her there until she woke up. It worked out great because the water was pretty chilly, so we got to splash around a while and as soon as we were done and got out to lay out she woke up. She sat in my lap enjoying the skyline view, watching swimmers and playing with toys for a long time.
We also sat on the side for a while and dipped her toes in. We're smart enough to know that putting her in the water with it being so chilly today would've ended in meltdown! When she started getting bored we put her in her robe and headed downstairs to get her changed back into dry clothes.The rooftop pool is either 4 or 5 flights up (you NEED a dip in the pool by the time you get up there!) and the whole way down today Lilli was laughing hysterically at my ponytail bopping down the stairs ahead of her. Pony tails crack her up. It's hilarious.We capped the day off with more playing, grilling out, a nice walk for all of us around the neighborhood and a good ole bath. It was a great day!!!

Sitting Pretty

We've really been working a lot with Lilli on her sitting capabilities. I've moved away from my obsession with rolling to sitting, because it really is a much more useful trait and a major milestone. (On a side note, it's been about 3 weeks since she started rolling from back to stomach and it just cracked me up how casually she did it this afternoon, like it was never such a big thing at all!) She's doing great with her sitting, but she's still apt to just lean towards something and topple over, so it's really hard to use both hands and move away enough to take a good pic without risking her bonking over. And since the rug in her room is fairly thin, and the hardwoods underneath are mega hard, we're always very nearby to avoid accidents. So, here's the best I could do this afternoon!

She's very interested in the cell phone and how our voices can get in there. I had called Brent (on speaker) to see where he was in traffic and she spent several minutes trying to figure out how to get Daddy out of the phone (while sitting on her own)!Still playing with the phone....A different angle of her sitting...I'm not holding her up, just using my legs as bumper lanes while taking pics!Another sitting pic...Hopefully within a couple of weeks she'll have her balance all sorted out and really be on her way to being an accomplished sitter!!! (Also notice how much her hair has grown in! It can now be a little crazy on the sides, and she tugs at it the same way Brent does. It's hilarious!)

Something tells me he's really enjoying my old camera

My old purse camera started acting up in May, so Brent ordered me a new camera and he's started keeping my old one in his pocket. Something tells me he has a lot of fun having a camera on him at all times!


Saddest face, ever! She's really started making that bottom lip pout when she's not happy about something. Brent does a pretty good Lilli impression.

And another classic pic from last week. Luckily she's a pretty easy going baby and doesn't mind being placed in, on, or underneath strange objects. Brent had a lot of fun with her last week!

Today two of her buddies moved up to the next class at school! Tristan (her "boyfriend" that she's been spotted holding hands with) had already moved up once but there was extra space in Lilli's room until some new babies started, and then Cleo moved up. Cleo is just one week older than Lilli, but she's quite the "Wonder Baby" - as in the youngest baby they've ever seen "and-fill-in-the-blank" with any activity. There's two more itty bitties in there now that started this week. Lilli's the second oldest, Jada is actually younger than Cleo but must not be as good of a sitter. (Lilli will get to move up when she can sit consistently, which is also when she moves up in Sunday School). She's doing great with sitting, but doesn't think about how she'll topple over when she leans for something, so you still have to have an arm right there with her much of the time. So, Lilli's class is now: Jada, Lilli, Maevy, Aaron, Madden, Allie, Griffin and Liam. 8 full time handfuls! Whew! And tied at 4 girls and 4 boys.

Have a great night!

Napping on the Go

A week ago we were doing our laundry and put Lilli in the warm pile of clothes (careful not to have any hot zippers/snaps on her) to see if she'd enjoy warm laundry as much as we do. About 2 minutes later she was sound asleep in a pile of our underwear!
As cute as it was it was a bit of a pain since she napped there for about a half an hour. She's such a scooter that we constantly had to check on her and make sure she hadn't gone anywhere. She is doing much better with napping in her crib, which is great! She took about an hour and a half nap there Sunday. She took two of her naps today on me (I fell asleep too....you know the whole nap when they nap thing!), and another one in her swing (I was almost certain the world was about to end from the fit she was throwing, and the swing was the only thing working!!)

Lilli and I had fun hanging out at home today, playing, grocery shopping and just being girls! Tomorrow it's back to the usual office grind which is going to be hard after a week out of the office doing things a lot more fun than staring at a computer and answering a billion emails. It was fun while it lasted!

Back in Baby Couture!

Hello! I am glad to be home! Market was fun and even though our hotel was fabulous, nothing beats your own bed! (Except we have modeled our bedroom after upscale boutique hotels we've stayed at, so our down duvet is exactly the same as the one I enjoyed last week at the Westin!)

Of course Brent did a wonderful job with Lilli and from all the pics I've seen he, Pippin and Lilli had a great time without me. One of the perks of going to Market is the opportunity to slip away for a few minutes and shop some of the cash and carry for Kids. We work HARD, all day long, and don't get back to our rooms until around 9 or so at night (after leaving around 8 every morning!) so we earn the occasional 30 minute shopping break and then some! One afternoon our vendor dinner wasn't until 6:45 so we had about an hour to kill before so we shopped the 13th floor of Bldg 3 where you can score some Children's Samples. The baby samples weren't quite as good because most of them were made in size 0-3 months, and many of the ones that would fit (now or down the line) were still somewhat pricey. In baby sizes, to me it's not really a bargain at $50 for an outfit, even if it would have originally been $100. Since it was late in the day several showrooms had already closed, and we were staring in the window of one with a sign about all Samples being $10 when the shop owner came back by and let us in. Most of the samples in there were DKNY and everything was $10!!! I scored a REALLY hip and trendy jacket for Lilli for this winter and this cute little handmade dress that she wore today. SO adorable and of course one of a kind! There's really no telling how much it would have been in the stores.

This morning Brent was still in the shower when she started waking up on her own so I went in to grab her and when she saw me she just started lauuughing! I guess she had forgotten I was home. We got back from Atlanta around 6pm Saturday night, so we only had a couple of hours before her 8:30 bedtime.
She's been in a great mood all day, and even fell asleep during church this morning instead of fighting her nap and making us take her in the Cry Room to get it in before Sunday School. It was nice being able to stay in with the "big people" as lately I've felt like we should leave some personal items in the Cry Room since we've pretty much been owning it the last two months or so. And she took a great 1.5 nap in her crib this afternoon so Brent and I took a nap as well! I have tomorrow off as a comp day so Lilli and I will have all day to catch up, play and maybe take a nap or two. I'd say tomorrow is going to be a very good Monday!

Good night!

Happy 4th of July!

Happy Belated 4th of July! I hope everyone had a nice holiday. We were gone for a few days to my parents house for their annual 4th of July cookout. This marked Lilli's first overnight trip away from home. She did pretty well, we packed as much of the house as we could, but life (and naps) would've been easier if we could have had her swing. As the weekend wore on she got more tired and more out of synch, but overall I'd say she did pretty well! She fussed a good portion of the way home, and then it took about an hour for her to go to sleep last night (and usually she's extremely easy to go to sleep). She didn't have any sleeping issues there, so we're not sure if it was being so off from the trip, the pouring rain, or all the redneck firecrackers that kept her up, but luckily tonight we didn't have that issue!! Whew!

Here are just a couple of pics and I'll upload more probably next week since I'm packing up and heading out to Atlanta for the week for work! Our July Market trip should be a lot more fun for me this year since I won't be nauseated the whole time! Last year I was just plain miserable (except no one could know!), so I'm looking forward to enjoying it more this year. Maybe Brent will update with some pics of all the fun he and Lilli have this week!

We packed everything we absolutely could, and we did use it all!
The annual "grandkids" photo - my Pippin and Lilli, my brother's kids and Brent's brother's kids:Pippin was the best behaved of any of the kids for photos (really not a flattering angle for him though!):

Pippin and Lilli:The whole family (my family + Brent's family) Poor Pippin was worn out and you can hardly see him for the shrubs!