Thanksgiving

Once again, we went to Aunt Polly and Uncle Bill's house for a wonderful Thanksgiving feast, Emme's first. Well, technically Emme had a lovely chicken and sweet potato with plum and banana feast by Earth's Best. She'll have to wait until next year to have the real deal (although her Daddy was trying to sneak her all sorts of stuff).

Resting after eating.

Not only did Aunt Polly make us all our dinner, she also gave Hannah all sorts of things to keep her busy including big coloring pages. While Hannah really enjoyed it, I think Mikki and I did the most coloring...

Mikki and Emme. As usual, Mikki is so great with Emme. Apparently in school, Mikki had an electronic baby (set to easy) as a project and she thought the ebaby was much harder than Emme. I would beg to differ, but either way she is such a help to me.

Hannah and Great Nana eating their plum pudding, dessert #1.

After a couple hours of relaxing, playing, watching movies, etc. we are onto the dessert feast part of our day. Some of us have leftover sandwiches for dinner before the pie meal while others opt for pies as their dinner.

Emme demonstrating the only thing she loves to do right now. Stand up. She can practice all day long. While she can easily crawl these days, you rarely see her crawling because she's too busy trying to stand up.

We have so much for which to be thankful!!

Snack time

Hannah was helping Emme with her snacks today and just cracking her up. So sweet!

Leaves!

After a few weekends of raking leaves, Joe has built a huge pile of leaves next to our garage (the site of our Summer vegetable garden).

Hannah showing us the pile! She was constantly jumping on the pile while he was raking so it is a very compacted pile of leaves.

She's about to fall in. She just loves, loves, loves jumping in those leaves.

Where'd she go?

Still playing in those leaves...

Silly girl.

Ski and Snowboard Show

Last Saturday, we went to the ski and snowboard show at the Bayside expo center in Boston with the Rees'. It got us all very excited for skiing/snowboarding this winter!

Along with entering dozens of drawings for free lift tickets, etc. and actually winning 1 lift ticket, there were freebies and some fun things for the kids to do. Here's an olympian, Doug ??, helping Hannah in the obstacle course.
Posing for a picture with a bear.

Hannah, Cai, and Amelie hanging out playing a video game. Neither of them knew what they were doing.

Hannah listening to a band play.

And last but not least, Emme completely zonked out with all the excitement.

It was a fun day and let's hope we win a free ski trip!

Emme - 8 months

Some months there is more to report on Miss Emme than others and this month seems to be one of them. The really big ones.

2 teeth! Her bottom 2 teeth both came in last weekend. 1 Saturday and 1 Sunday. Very efficient. Unfortunately for Joe, I had just had foot surgery so couldn't walk and he had to deal with a somewhat cranky baby who would only take 30 min cat naps all day.

Standing. While she can't get up to the ottoman without help, she can stand with no help from Mommy or Daddy. And likes to try to stand up using our legs often looking like she is practicing downward dog in yoga.

Mobility! Still not crawling forwards (backwards always works though), but she has managed her own way of getting around quite well and can get fairly far this way. She starts on her bum, goes down to crawling position on all fours lunges ahead, and then sits back up and starts over.

Babbling with consonants. While she still prefers her rasberry sounds quite often, she has started to say ba, da, and ma sounds.

Finally taking a liking for solids! She has actually started eating 3 meals a day of solids. She is very into feeding herself and for that reason likes finger foods best so I try to make most things finger foods (bits of carrots, ground meat, tofu, pureed chicken, sweet potato,..). And even when she's having baby food, she insists on feeding herself with the spoon (a very messy endeavor). As far as pureed baby foods go, fruits are her favorite.

Practicing her pincer grasp with her absolute favorite...cheerios.

Sleeping through the night! Hooray!!! At Emme's last check up, her doctor said that once she was well (she was a bit under the weather at the time and continued to have a cough at night for weeks) and eating more solids, we could wean her from the 4a nursing. The 2 conditions being met and my foot still painful to walk on, we decided there was no time like the present to try. It took 1 night of letting her cry (and really just a complaining cry, nothing heartwrenching) for 45 min. and she was done with it. Now she wakes around 530-6a and hopefully as she eats even more solids, this will get a bit later.

Such a wonderful age...and especially sweet for us because this is the age Hannah was when we first met her. We're now coming into more familiar territory.

And here is Miss Hannah showing off her favorite new talent....the headstand (she uses anything to help with support: the couch, ottoman, a wall).

Discovery Museum with Nana

Nana came for a visit for a few days and we went to the Discovery Museum in Acton. It is a children's museum in an old victorian home.

Trying to get the "bubble" around her. Every time she came close, she would pop it.

Emme enjoying the museum. If you look in the mirror behind her, you can see she's standing and pretty proud of herself.

Nana and Emme. Emme is just starting to experience separation anxiety and while she just adores her Nana and is full of smiles for her while in Mommy's arms, it isn't always the same when Nana is holding her.

Nana and her girls.

Hannah being silly.

It was such a nice day that Hannah even got to play outside on the pirate playground.

Playing with Nana on Bessie the dinosaur.