I'm sucha slacker! I know :/ I completely skipped an entire month of updates for BOTH Jadon and Macy, and the one I missed for Jadon was him turning TWO!?! It was just too overwhelming to put all of the changes that have been happening with Jadon, in particular, into one well-written blog entry. I KNOW I'm going to want to go back and add a hundred things because Jadon cracks us up and also challenges us everyday with all of the new things he does and says, but here goes...
Macy first. Macy turned five months old on July 4th! We did a little photo shoot the day before to celebrate, since we knew we'd be busy on Independence Day.
Geisha baby
She always looks more Asian on her back.
Baby doll
She is the SWEETEST, smiliest baby girl I have ever met. Think Will Ferrell in the movie Elf, she "loves smiling." :) She started eating a tiny bit of cereal on Father's Day (about 4 1/2 months old), and was honestly so horrible of an eater that I regretted not waiting until she was 6 months. She would spit more out than she ate, but since we had already opened the can of organic formula (NOT cheap!), we didn't want it to go to waste, and it has to be used within 30 days.
We persisted. A few weeks later, and a stretch of six days without a BM, she's doing somewhat better.
We knew she'd adjust to the extra iron eventually. Thankfully (???) she's back to her old self in that department. It still takes two people to feed her because she is the world's messiest baby eater, but she's getting better. She just can't grasp that eating from a spoon is not like nursing from Mommy. She will only suck on the spoon. She SLURPS every drop of cereal, and gets made and fusses now everytime you have to refill the spoon. Pretty funny to see her get frustrated.
Speaking of frustration, she's pretty good at throwing a tiny tantrum at least a few times a day now. She cries when she drops a toy in the car or if Jadon takes a toy away from her, while she's playing on the floor. She loves her new Eric Carle toy caterpillar and elephant rattles and a wooden alligator on wheels that was Jadon's.
Macy is spending more and more time in her exersaucer/walker, or according to Jadon, "Macy drives car." She gets to spend most of her time in it, when Jadon is either in another room, at Gramma's or taking a nap...so really not as often as we'd like. If Big Brother is around, Macy gets to go around and around and around for about 30 seconds, until we put Jadon in timeout and take Macy out of her "car."
Since she's spending so much time standing in her walker and moving around all over the floor now, she's starting to thin out. Her arms, legs, and belly are losing their chubbiness :( Both Jamie and I are a bit sad to see this change happen so soon. Soon enough, she'll be trying baby food, and maybe some of it will come back :) We love us some chubba bubba!
I will not be surprised if I'm updating, before she's six months old, that she is crawling. If we lay her on her playmat, many times we will find her at least 3-4 feet away from it facing another direction on her belly. We always ask, "Now how did you get all the way over there?" She seems quite a bit ahead of Jadon with her physical development, and he crawled (not always with butt in the air) at six months. I just can't wait until she can sit up without support. Pictures will be much easier and look better without someone's hand or arm on one side of her ;)
Other than that, we are also excited that Macy's attention span is increasing daily, and we can have the good old Baby Einstein company watch her for a while...well, maybe just 10 minutes at at time, but still :) Jadon doesn't mind watching some of his old school DVDs, so we sometimes get 10 minutes of complete silence in our house! Wow!
A few pics of Macy snuggling with Daddy this month:
As alway, what Macy does...
Speaking of Jadon. Whew! He is now a month past his second b-day, and oh my, whatta handful he is becoming! Seriously. Wow! He talks and talks and talks and...honest to goodness, so much that we cannot wait for bedtime, and even there he lays and talks himself to sleep. He has sooo much to say about everything, and he is such a stinkin' parrot!
SOME (read: very few) of the funny things he says lately:
Person of Authority (Mommy, Daddy, Gramma, etc.): "Jadon, do you want to go to timeout?"
Jadon (every, single time): "Nooooo...now staaaaohp!"
What do you say to that???
Jadon (too busy playing and waits til the last minute to run to the potty).
Mommy or Daddy: "Oh, man, Jadon. You..."
Jadon: "Jadon! Don't peepee in udderdayer! Peepee in da potteee! Ah meeeyan!"
Everyday, a hundred times a day, we hear: "(________insert name), let's play cars/trucks/airplanes/helicopter/garage." You never really have to play. You just have to sit there. Haha. Can get annoying, but it's pretty cute to hear him say...the first five times, at least ;)
Making things with Play-Doh is a daily duty. "Momma, make a brown truck. Daddy, make a purple pizza. Momma, make a pink rabbit. Daddy, let's make a big ball." It's endless, and no matter how many times we teach him to make things, he never does any of the work. I'm excited for that day to come!
Random, but he also tells us that a triangle has "three sides," and a stop sign is an "octagon." Thanks educational DVDs! So funny! Oh yeah, and he is getting really good at pronouncing his last name...gotta getta video clip.
Any parent of at least two children quickly learns when the older one becomes the authority...ummm...immediately! You hear that, Auntie Em? It's all about birth order. As sweet as Jadon can be to Macy, showing her EVERY, SINGLE toy that he has on an hourly basis..."Look, Nacy (yes, Nacy)...it's a purple van. Etc. Etc. Etc," he has also started correcting her, uh em, wrong behavior. "No no no no no, Nacy. Don't eat da airtane." FYI, it is permissible for her to eat a Matchbox car, so long as Jadon was the one placing it in her mouth. Oh my!
He's becoming braver and braver by the day in the pool.
He LOVES Mommy's homemade smoothies, and has no idea they have spinach, flax seed, squash, kale, tofu, and cabbage in them. Yummy :)
He would be outside all day, if only we could stand taking Macy in the heat. He'd likely want to "cutdadass (cut the grass)". He calls a lawn mower, "cutdadass." How funny is that? When we were leaving my mom's the other day, he said, "Bye bye, cutdadass." LOL
He always says, "Hi, Elijah," through the door every morning.
Other favorites: watching his "Little People" DVD over and over and over, at least this month. Last month it was "Bob the Builder." When given several options for breakfast, he almost always chooses "Special K and a danana," (yes, danana). He even pointed the box out to me at Costco the other day. Haha. His favorite books are If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, Please Baby Please, The Foot Book, Oh David!, and his two Look and Learn books from which he has learned EVERY motorized vehicle/machinery known to man!
Other favorite foods he loves: homemade waffles with berries, tomatoes and cucumbers with vinegar, green beans, ANY fruit (especially berries, grapes and bananas), grilled chicken, cheese and crackers, dried cranberries and raisins, pizza, grilled cheese, mandarin oranges, yogurt with flax seed...hmmm...oh yeah, and he became slightly obsessed with these Captain Booty's brand cheese puffy things, so I forbid Jamie from buying them for the rest of summer. He would stand at the pantry door and whine for "treats" several times a day. We need to decrease temper tantrums, right? Sheesh.
Speaking of tantrums. Oh. My. GRACIOUS!!! I cannot even go into it. They require an entirely separate entry. It was a slow start, but they are in full-effect (I pray they get no worse), as of two weeks ago. So many meltdowns a day over ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! In a nutshell, lots of whining, lots of tears, lots of frustration, timeouts, occasionally stomping in place(!?!), and running in the opposite direction of Mommy and Daddy. Blah. And I read someone's blog the other day who said age five is a million times worse than two :/
Can I just say though that Jadon has been with his Gramma for the last two hours, and I've had enough silence to last me another week? I missed him from the time he kissed me goodbye and said, "Bye, Momma. Bye, Sisser." I love that little boy (and his baby sisser), fits and all. I'd go back and relive these 25 months a million times over, and if I had one wish, it would be that I could store each tiny memory and experience with them in a marble that could be put in a mason jar on a shelf, so that I could pull them down anytime I wanted to relive them for the rest of my life. I savor each day with these babies and their amazing daddy. Sappy, but it's true. I am blessed.
As of today, we are still putting her in her swing in the kitchen floor. It is just really convenient to have them both strapped into something at the same time, so Jadon gets the high chair still, however, during other snacktimes, etc. Macy uses the high chair...as you'll see in the pics below.
She's been doing a GREAT job at eating solid foods (despite having no teeth yet) and perfecting her pincer grasp. Her favorites are pieces of banana, puffy Os and Kashi crackers. We plan to try pieces of carrots, broccoli, and green beans this week. She's pretty aggressive, if you're holding her and she wants a taste. Today, she had Daddy convinced she wanted pizza. I think you need to get some teeth before that happens, little one ;)
Although you would think she might prefer cold, pureed fruit, she really doesn't. She's not much of a fan of any baby food. We have started adding hard-boild egg yolk to her cereal, and she does like it a little more. Tomorrow we plan to start adding ground flax seeds too. It used to be Jadon's favorite meal. It's so nutritious, so hopefully she'll grow to like it more.
Another of Jadon's favorites was my homemade organic sweet potatoes and avocado (I know, sounds icky, BUT again, sooooo nutritious). Macy is not so fond of it either, but I refuse to give up. She can't live on breastmilk, Kashi crackers and puffy Os! Can you believe she only eats 1/2 of a container of Yo! Baby yogurt??? Jadon used to lap up that stuff. Hmmph! She's just too cute for words though :)
We've had this push toy out for a few weeks now, but honestly you have to give Jadon time to experiment with anything that is new to him (since he has no memory of using it), before he'll give Macy a chance to play. It is always a battle that takes time, so we are forced to give him time to adjust (for the sake of many tears/tantrums/arguments...yes, they argue at this age already!). Sooo FINALLY he has come around to the idea of Macy being able to push the "stroller" by herself (only a few minutes at a time), and today she started moving right along, one step at a time. Seems like yesterday we were hearing that tune, "Walk along, walk along, take a step and sing a song..." with Jadon behind the handle. 
