Hannah's *almost* 9 months old

Hannah is going to be 9 months old on Friday. Also on Friday, Max is going to be leaving for a(nother) house-hunting trip, so I doing think I'll be blogging that day.

It's funny to me now to go back and read what I wrote about Hannah crawling around a few scoots at a time. She can go all around the apartment in a flash now. She had started pulling herself up onto her knees a bit last month, and now she can pull herself up to standing and even cruise around a bit. She's getting into everything, and we're having to move stuff around and put gates back up from when Sylvia was younger.

She's had some adventures this month! Her great aunt, great uncle, and cousin (technically first cousin once removed) came to visit, and they watched both girls for a while. It's only about the 2nd or 3rd time that we've gotten out of the house together without any kids! Unfortunately, I was terrible with my camera during the visit. There's isn't any photographic evidence of how much Hannah enjoyed the visit, but here's Sylvia & Amelia:

The big adventure, though, was Hannah's first plane trip. Max and I brought her with us on a house-hunting trip to Boston, while Sylvia stayed at our house with her Grandma & Aunt Annie. So, it was Hannah's first flights...

...And first snow...

...And first time being an only child for a few days!

 Hannah was extremely well behaved on the planes and on the trip. She was happy on the planes as long as there was someone around to smile at her. And I hear that Sylvia was very well-behaved while we were gone. They both fell apart a little once the 3 of us were united at home, of course. Max stayed a few extra days for additional meetings and house-hunting. Fortunately, Hennie & Annie stayed until Hannah went to bed that night, Sylvia went to school the next day, and then my parents and brother came up to help out after. Again, I didn't take enough pictures, but I did get this one:

The day after Max got back, Hannah came down with a stomach bug, which spread through the family like the plague it was. And so it was that we were too sick to go to work and school or even adequately report on the east coast trip. The trip was good, by the way, except for the failure of the stated objective to find a house. (So Max will be going out again soon.) 

Between being out of town and being sick, Hannah got way off her good sleeping habits. Several nights this week have been half full of her screaming her head off. Hopefully we'll get past it soon.

She still loves to take baths, loves to play with toys, and loves her sister.

~~~

Some more cute pictures:

Hannah is 8 months old!

And she's doing great!

She (still) comes to work with us 3 days every week, and she's usually quite good: naps twice for 1-2 hours, plays alone a bit, sits quietly on our laps for a bit, and usually only fusses a little bit. She (still) thinks her sister is the best thing since pacifiers. She (finally) regularly sleeps through the night (7pm - 7am, usually waking up briefly around 5am to eat) and takes decent naps in general. And she's usually very easy to put to sleep these days.

It's unanimously agreed that she has an absolutely gorgeous smile, and she shares it quite freely; she loves having people to smile at.

One week ago, her cousin Cole came to visit, and she set a new crawling record. Before that, she'd only ever managed one scoot when up on all fours before falling down onto her tummy or sitting up. But she wanted that baby, and she made 2 quick scoots before her trademark fall-and-reach move.

Without the motivation of trying to poke her baby cousin in the face, though, she regressed for a couple days, and I was heard to say, "She's never going to crawl!" 

This was my (failed) attempt to motivate her last Sunday:

It's been less than a week now, though, and she's definitely a crawler.  She only ever goes 2-3 scoots on all fours, but then she collapses and army crawls or pushes back up, and she can really move around that way. She can also use furniture and toys to pull herself up onto her knees

In the last couple days, she also seems to have gotten a hang of the "How big is Hannah? ... So big!" trick. I'm pretty sure that she thinks that it's she who has trained her daddy to say, "So big!" when she raises her arms, and she is very satisfied with her accomplishment.

She loves to eat.

And she LOVES bathtime.

Still no teeth.

Sylvia is 3-1/2!

For her half birthday, she got a cupcake and a dance party with Daddy at the Farmer's Market:

Hannah is 7 months old!

All my friends with kids told me: It goes faster with your second. It's one of those things that you can hear and believe, but you don't know it until you know it. I know that I was in disbelief as Sylvia's first year flashed before my eyes, but this is nuts!

Hannah is 7-months old today! She reminds me of a rhyme my mom used to tell me:

There was a little girl
And she had a little curl,
Right in the middle of her forehead,
When she was good,
She was very, very good,
And when she was bad she was horrid.

No curls yet, and she's mostly a dream baby -- happy, cute, sweet. But then the monster comes out!

No major developments since Jan 2, but here's the scorecard:
She still looks like she has a major growth spurt coming (chubby!); she is an excellent roller, and trying so hard to crawl; still no teeth; her eye color is sort of hazel; she loves to play and to bounce; she loves attention and smiles.

And she just started crying. So, here's a bunch of pictures I already uploaded, sans the incredibly insightful and clever captions that I certainly would have included:

Goodbye, 2012

When 2012 began, I was expecting a baby but did not yet know if it was a boy or girl. Sylvia had never been to school; never been away from us for more than a couple hours -- let alone spent a night away from us. Max was applying for jobs, and we had no idea where we would be by the end of the year. 2012 brought Hannah, two job offers, my cousin's baby Cole, and a million changes and milestones for us and our girls.  2013 will be another big one.  We'll be leaving Santa Barbara, our home for our adult lives and for our daughters' whole lives.  We'll be living outside of sunny California for the first time -- first time out of driving distance from our families.  And when I think about how much Hannah and Sylvia are going to grow and change over the next year!  It's more than I can try to comprehend!

Well, my previous posts covered noteworthy occurrences of 2012 through Halloween.  We've been on another whirlwind since then.

For Hannah's first Thanksgiving, we drove down to my uncle's house in Orange County. Hannah was super charming, and Sylvia had a great time - especially playing with her cousin Amelia.

We leapt straight into full holiday mode with Chanukah & Christmas decorations, and Sylvia really got into it all.

Max turned 32, and got the best birthday present: a visit from our friend Aaron, who we hadn't seen in about 2 years.

After his visit, we drove down to San Diego for the last few days of Chanukah. Sylvia had a blast. She sang, danced, and helped make cake; and she wanted to open everyone's presents! She especially loved playing with her cousin Brynn ("Baby Binn").

  

And Hannah was the picture of cuteness. She turned 6 months on the trip. Even though she's a little bigger than Sylvia was on her first Chanukah, she still fit in Sylvia's first Chanukah dress.

On our way north, we went back to Legoland (using the free pass we had after our October trip), and had an excellent time; it was even better the second time!

  

As Sylvia would say, the girls both "conked asleep" for the next few hours in the car. They "conked awake" (also a Sylvia-ism) just in time for us to stop in LA to visit my cousin Michelle, who was a few days past her due date. We dropped off a few things and asked her baby to stop dawdling.

Less than 24 hours later:

 

Thanks to Sylvia being in school most of the day and Max offering to hold down the homestead, I was able to drive down and be there for his birthday.

It was hard to leave him, but it was some consolation that I knew we'd be back a week later for Christmas! We didn't see much of the little tyke. (He was only a week old after all.) But Max & Sylvia got some snuggle time.

As I have done almost every Christmas of my life, we spent Christmas Eve with my dad's family and Christmas Day with my mom's. The girls were gorgeous, and had lots of fun. 

Hannah did an amazing impersonation of a kid on Christmas morning.

 

In the meantime, these girls keep getting bigger and older. Sylvia seems to have gone through a major cognitive transition. She had a period of peak limit-testing and fighting, and then seemed to have some kind of major reorientation and became much more responsive and agreeable. She's still stubborn and likes to push us (sometimes to get something from us; sometimes just for fun), but she's generally very cooperative, helpful, and pleasant. Which is extremely nice for all of us -- she has fewer time-outs and gets what she wants more, and we get to enjoy her company instead of disciplining her constantly. It's especially nice because Hannah -- while still mostly sweet an adorable -- has been having more fussy, difficult times. She's gone through a lot of changes. She's totally competent at rolling in both directions and pushing herself up onto all fours, and she's on the verge of crawling. She can sit for almost indefinitely long periods of times and can hold herself completely upright with stabilization help. She seems to have fairly advanced fine motor skills for her age -- she's quite good at getting her pacifier into her mouth, holding her bottle, and manipulating toys.

 

 

She's recently expanded her dietary repertoire beyond milk. In spite of what these pictures look like, it's actually going really well:

 

On Christmas, she went for her first ride on a swing

and loved it!

At her 6-month checkup, her doctor said she was doing great. She measured in at 90th percentile weight, but only 25th percentile height! We're expecting a growth spurt one of these days...

On New Year's Day, we sent Sylvia to zoo camp. I was nervous about her having some kind of emergency, so I decided to stay close enough to get back quickly. I ended up spending almost the whole time walking around the zoo with Hannah, which was actually really nice. The Santa Barbara zoo may be kinda small, but it is gorgeous. There are lots of big grassy areas to sit, and there are many spots from which you can see the hills or the ocean in the distance. Sylvia had fun, too.

Of course, if yesterday was New Year's, then today must be Kurt's birthday!  Five years old.  How did that happen?

We miss our sweet boy, and can't wait to see him (and his family) again!

Hannah is 0.5!