Jamie update!

As of yesterday, Jamie is 8 months old!

And since it's been a while since I did an update, here he is at at 6 months:

and 7 months:
So much has changed since I last wrote a Jamie post. For one thing, he is crazy mobile now. Right around 6 months, he started sitting up unsupported. He was quite wobbily at first, but within a couple weeks he was pretty steady. He had been pushing up on his hands and knees for quite a while, and while we were home over Christmas, he started kind of inching his way forward by pushing up, scooting his knees forward, and flopping on his belly. Right after we got home from Christmas, a few days before he turned 7 months, he started full on crawling and was a pro shortly thereafter!
And it seemed like the minute he started crawling he started pulling himself up on everything in sight.
One of his favorite places to pull up is on bookcases, and he LOVES pulling books off the shelf.


On Christmas Eve, Jamie had his first taste of solid foods. We started with sweet potatoes. He did okay with them that day... but this picture gives a pretty good indication of how it's been going since:
He doesn't like purees, and he basically won't eat anything that he can't put in his mouth himself. We use the fresh feeder a lot, and I keep trying with cereal and purees, but I never get more than one bite in. I'll be glad when we can try more finger foods. Also, he will not under any circumstances drink from a sippy cup...but he LOVES drinking from a regular cup (with help obviously). Of course, I don't know how much he's actually swallowing; I think most of it just ends up down his front.

On the day he turned 6 months, Jamie cut his third tooth. Within about 2 weeks, he cut 3 more. They are ridiculously sharp, and in the past couple weeks he has become a biter. Fortunately not so much while he's nursing (we did have an issue with that for a couple of days in December, but I think I managed to teach him that if he was going to bite, he wasn't going to be eating), but he likes to bite everything else. Particularly my forearms and shoulders. I'm guessing he's teething again, but I can't feel any new teeth yet.

Jamie babbles and shrieks and squawks all the time; it is too cute! He also has started clapping in the past few weeks and I can't get enough of it. He loves to play peek-a-boo and to look in the mirror. Since it's been nice out recently, we've been playing at the park a lot. He enjoys the baby swings, and I am kept busy trying to keep him from eating dead leaves and grass.

some miscellaneous pictures of our cutie:

Christmas

As you can see above, Jamie was very excited for Christmas.

And we were excited to be in Kirksville and not be traveling anymore! We only had one day in between getting back from France and leaving for Kirksville.

While we were home, we spent most of our time hanging out with our families. It was so good to see everyone, and it was the first time that most of my siblings had met Jamie. He also got to meet some of his cousins, and it was so fun to watch them play together (or really, watch them crawl over each other). Unfortunately, towards the end of our trip, Jamie got really sick. He had pink eye in both eyes and a terrible cough and runny nose. When we took him to the doctor, she said it looked like he was starting to get an ear infection, so she started him on both antibiotics and antibiotic eye drops. The antibiotics wreaked havoc on his digestive system, so we had to start giving him probiotics too. Trying to get him to take ANY of these things was an absolute nightmare. In any case, we didn't get to spend much time visiting friends because of his illness, which was a bummer, but overall we had a wonderful time and were so glad to see our families!

And now for the pictures...

Christmas day!

Visiting with friends

Cousins!



and some cute shots of our little man :)

France

In December, the three of us went to France! We spent about half our time in Paris and half in Dampierre, where Thomas's family has a house. It is the cutest little French village. I LOVE walking around it; I always expect people to pop out of the windows and start singing "Bonjour" from Beauty and the Beast. Anyway. We mainly went so that Jamie could meet his French relatives (and vice versa). Thomas's cousin Vincent has a baby a few months younger than Jamie, so it was pretty much all about the babies!

Jamie and Adam meeting for the first time

cousins & second cousins

Papy with his 2 great-grandsons

Here we are with Thomas's aunt and uncle...

...and with his grandparents.

We didn't do much sight-seeing since we weren't there very long and wanted to spend most of our time just with family. But Thomas & I and Vincent & Juliette (and the babies, of course) did make one day trip to Orleans, where we had never been (though it is no real surprise that I had never been there). We went to the cathedral and walked around the city. It was very cold but we bundled up the babies and had a lot of fun.

We also were able to go out by ourselves a couple of times while Thomas's grandparents watched Jamie (how ridiculous is it that it's easier for us to go on a date in France than in Knoxville??). Here we are in Montmartre, with all of Paris behind us.

More pictures of the babies...

of course, Jamie tried to roll over on Adam

Just a note about our flights. Jamie was a fabulous traveler, far better than I anticipated on such long flights. He got plenty fussy at times, but really only when he was tired. It is so hard to get a baby to take a nap in a busy airport. Anyway, we had the worst luck on the way there. Our first flight, from Knoxville to Chicago, was delayed by about an hour for no good reason...and we only had an hour layover before the next flight. After arriving in Chicago and literally running through the airport (while pushing a stroller AND pulling a suitcase, I might add), we missed our flight to Paris by about 5 minutes. That five minutes ended up costing us about 12 hours worth of further delays and missed flights. On the plus side, Jamie has an unexpected extra stamp in his passport from the several hours we spent in Manchester.

We thought we were going to have an equally ridiculous time of it getting home because the entire airport was closed when we got there, no flights in or out because of a few inches of a snow, but we ended up only being a little bit delayed and still made our connecting flight to Knoxville. We were extremely lucky; Thomas's dad got stuck in London for like 4 extra DAYS because Heathrow completely shut down over 4 inches of snow. If there is anything this trip taught me, it is that, for some reason, Europe isn't really equipped to handle snow.

Other than the nonsense with our flights and all the neige, it was a wonderful trip!

Jamie at Charles de Gaulle

Thanksgiving

I am afraid I have been woefully negligent of updating this blog in the past few months. I am slowly but surely going to get it up-to-date, but that means the next few posts will be a little old.

For some reason, I never posted anything from our trip to a corn maze in early November. We had a lot of fun, but the most memorable part of the trip was definitely when we got back to the car afterwards and Thomas reached into his pocket to pull out the car keys. . .and they WEREN'T THERE. That's right, they were lost somewhere in the maze. It's hard to think of a worse place to lose your keys. We were EXTREMELY lucky because we found them unbelievably quickly. Next time we will be a little more careful! It's really hard to get a good picture of all three of us when there's no one else to take it. We did not succeed that day, but I thought this picture was funny because of Jamie's little eyes peeking over the bottom edge.

Unfortunately, UT only gets Thursday and Friday off for Thanksgiving break, so we couldn't go home, but since Truman gets the whole week, Thomas's parents came for a visit the weekend before. It was nice to see them, and they were thrilled to get to play with Jamie. They also spoiled us rotten by taking us out to eat and taking us grocery shopping for our Thanksgiving dinner ingredients.
I have always helped out a lot with Thanksgiving dinner at home, but I had never before made the entire meal by myself. It's a lot of work! It was even more work than normal because I was making a dairy-free Thanksgiving. When Jamie was a couple months old, I realized that every time I ate a lot of dairy, he would get extremely fussy when he nursed. So I stopped eating dairy in August. It didn't make a huge difference for most of the meal, but I had to make homemade non-dairy cream of mushroom soup for the green bean casserole, which was definitely a lot more work than opening a can! I also learned from my pumpkin pies that soy milk is way better for baking than rice milk. Anyway, we had a really nice meal with enough food to feed us for the entire 4 day weekend, and we got to use some of the really nice dishes we got for our wedding for the first time.


And we were able to get a picture of all 3 of us with the camera's timer. Too bad Jamie wouldn't look at the camera no matter how many times we tried.

After Thanksgiving is over, it is officially Christmastime! Jamie got to see Santa at a craft fair we went to. I didn't know how he'd react--or if he'd react at all...he often looks quite stoic in public--but he turned and looked at Santa and tried to grab his beard. It was super cute.

We put up our Christmas tree the day after Thanksgiving. It's a good thing Jamie wasn't crawling yet then, or I'm pretty sure he would have tried to climb it and eat all the ornaments. Can't wait to see what he does with it next year....