HAPPY FATHER'S (yester)DAY!!!

I am afraid I am perpetually behind on just about everything these days, but better late than never....Happy Father's Day! First, a big shout out to my most fantastic Dad. Daddy, I love you!

We had a really nice Father's Day. It was laid back and we just hung out and grilled pizza (white bean, italian sausage and rapini...yumm). Finn surprised his dad with a photo collage and some of his first finger paint artwork:



There was also some napping involved. Ignore the blatant advertisement of Old Mil. They do not sponsor this blog.

Finn worked on his crawling a lot. He is working so hard lately, but still no forward momentum. He tries to bear crawl:

He tries to cross crawl:

And then, he falls down:

Lily is doing much better. Still a little favoring of the leg, but it is not very noticeable. We think it likely she just sprained it having too much fun. She is on her pain meds for another 5 days and I hope they aren't masking anything. I can't wait until we can walk her again. She doesn't understand why she is on house arrest and she guilts us every time we put on our shoes. She gets so excited thinking we are suiting up to take her for a walk and then she looks at us so sadly with those big brown labrador eyes when we leave without her. So we have been showering her with love and affection and ridiculously giant bones:

We met with our lender for the house today and got our bank commitment letter! Yippee. I am waiting on a call from our closing agent to hopefully get the last minute items taken care of. Sean leaves for NY tomorrow and when he gets back, we are buying a house! Crazy!

Well, I will leave with another very Happy Dad's Day to all those amazing fathers I know and a very Merry Summer Solstice to all!

Finally Fabulous Friday

Oh, the difference a day makes. We had a really nice day today (made even more so in contrast to yesterday) and it passed quickly. Sean made it home today and we had our homemade pizza night, which we do every Friday. We try to create something new each week. This week it was chicken fajita pizza with tri-colored peppers, cheddar cheese, tomatillo salsa, and cilantro on a masa/chili powder crust. It was very good!

Finn has also become interested in the kitchen. He has a grand time getting out the bread pans and tupperware from the cupboard and banging things around. It is nice because it allows me a few minutes to get his lunch ready.

A Thoroughly Thorny Thursday

Man, it has been a tough day! I don't know why, but everything seems to have gone wrong. First, Lily woke up with a bum leg. She wouldn't put any weight on her left hind leg and she almost fell down the stairs as I was trying to take her outside this morning. We were out in Northwood last night and she ran and ran and swam and swam, so she obviously did something. Of course, we were up at 5 am so I had to wait forever for the vet to open so I could talk to them and that just left me tons of time to worry. Plus, Sean is out of town and he has been working nights so I had to try to wait for a decent time until I could call him.

Then, I realized that I had several messages from our realtor from the night before. Just when I think we are smooth sailing on the house, more craziness comes up. Apparently there was a bunch of confusion regarding what needed to be repaired on the chimney and how it was to be done. Originally, Sean and I were going to take care of the chimney, but then we traded the chimney repair with the sellers and so they were supposed to do it. Well, I guess what needed to be done was lost in translation somewhere. Luckily, our realtor caught it, but I have spent much of the day making phone calls trying to figure out the problem and come up with a solution. And many of the phone calls have landed on answering machines so I am still waiting to resolve it all. I realize this is a completely vague paragraph, but I could seriously write a novel if I were to catch you up on the specifics. I am sure it will all get worked out, but I just don't need this kind of stress.

I came up with what I thought was a simple and cute gift from Finn to Sean for Father's Day. I have been trying to get it prepared and in an effort to distract myself for a bit today, I decided to pack Finn up and head to the store to order some photos for the project. I get us all the way there only to find that I didn't properly load the photos on my USB and I can't order them. A frustrating and pointless trip.

We took Lily to the vet. Good times to get a baby and a lame dog loaded in the car in the rain to go the vet. The vet said that Lily's knee is definitely swollen, but she can't tell if it is just a sprain or a minor tear or a full tear. If it is a sprain or minor tear, it is likely to heal itself. If it is a full tear, then we are looking at surgery! Pray for the former! So, she is on orders for no exercise for the next two weeks and they put her on pain meds for 10 days. I gave her the first one after dinner and she promptly vomited everything! Poor thing. She is going to be a complete pill without her daily walks too. I feel so bad for her.

I was proud of myself having successfully gotten Finn to bed tonight and I was looking forward to decompressing a bit. He woke up once at the half hour mark, which is common, and I got him back to sleep. He woke up again at a half hour and I was rocking him back down. It looked like he was going to go back down, but then our lovely new neighbors decided to throw a bookshelf off of their porch causing a big bang as it broke into pieces. So, Finn woke right up and would not go back to sleep at all. He is now happily taking all of his books off the shelf and "reading" them to me with no signs of sleepiness whatsoever. Who knows when he will get to bed, which means who knows when I will get to bed....

Ah, I swear I will post about puppies and rainbows next time.

UP-si-daisy

Finn just pulled up from sitting to standing on his own! We were sitting on the floor and playing and folding laundry. I turned the laundry basket upside down because he likes to bang on the bottom. I had put some blocks on top and he was playing happily while I folded clothes. Next thing I know he is standing up! He did it two more times. He has to be in the perfect position to be able to do it, but he can pull himself up. STRONG BOY!

Birthdays, Baby Steps, and Babysitting

We had a busy weekend and already our week seems to be packed. Thus I haven't been very good about blog posts, but I will attempt to catch you up.

This weekend we had two birthday parties. On Saturday, we went out to the sea coast for a surprise 30th birthday party for a colleague of Sean's. It was a bbq outside and it was so beautiful. Finn had a great time socializing, but we had a very tired little guy afterwards. He slept all the way home. We got home at 7:00pm and then of course Finn wouldn't sleep after that and Sean and I were so tired. So much for party animals. On Sunday, we celebrated our niece, Libby's 5th birthday. It was another gorgeous day and we enjoyed being outside, visiting with family and watching the pinata festivities. Finn was dressed in his hawaiian party garb that Bubbles and Babou sent him (they just returned from a trip to the islands). Don't you just love those chubby legs?
Since he stayed up for the whole party on Saturday, he realized sometimes it is best to nap in the middle of a party:
There were also two other babies at the party and they were all so cute together:

On Monday, Finn and I went to Baby Steps, a seminar program to help new moms navigate the first year. This week the topic was breastfeeding and the moderator was from the La Leche League. They are getting more active in Concord and they are having monthly meetings. I was really excited about this. I tried to contact them when I was struggling with breast feeding, but they weren't meeting regularly. Finn was the oldest baby at the seminar. It was amazing to hear new moms talk about the challenges of breast feeding and to reflect back and realize how far we have come. Those first two months were so tough, I just prayed to get through each day and I couldn't even fathom making it to 7+ months. And now we are still going strong. At the seminar, I was actually in a position to talk about my experiences and offer advice. One girl was battling thrush and I talked in length about my remedies with her. There were also so many women who spoke about nipple pain and worry over whether baby was eating often enough, or too often, etc. I so wish I had been able to talk to women in my same situation at 6 weeks post pardum. It made me realize how important support in breast feeding is. We have really lost it in our society. Breast feeding is not instinct. It is a learned behavior in a social group. Women need to be around breast feeding women. We need to see it and talk about it and experience it to understand it and get it right. I think there are many circumstances in which women need to feed babies formula. There is nothing wrong with formula (it is not poison, but wonderful nutrition) and it is fantastic that there is such an option. But, I also think that there are so many cases where women opt for formula because they find breast feeding too hard initially and there is no support for them. They want to breast feed, but give up because they don't know how to move on from where they are. I was so close to that point so many times. I am excited to begin going to the LLL meetings and to become part of a support group. Okay, I could go on and on about this subject and I am sorry I went off on a bit of a rant already, I shall move on for now...

Also on Monday, I was able to spend some time with my niece and nephew while their mom was at work. This meant that I was the sole adult in charge of a 7-month-old, a 2-year-old, and a 5-year-old. Wow. Let me just say, I don't know where the "sitting" in babysitting came from. There is no sitting whatsoever. And I actually had a very easy time of it. It was only 3 hours and Liam (age 2) napped for 1 1/2 hours of it and I was still completely out of my element. I could barely keep track of what everyone was doing. I realized I am totally ignorant of the abilities of children of different ages. I don't know how to describe it, but I just wasn't sure about their independence level. I am so used to Finn and needing to keep an eye on him all the time, that I panicked every time one of the kids was out of my sight. In retrospect, that wasn't necessary as Libby (age 5) was perfectly capable of doing many things by herself, I just didn't know at what level I needed to be watchful and that was stressful. I think I learned a lot and will do better next time.

Okay, I am also ready to "come out" about our house-buying on the blog. Many of you know the scoop as I have done some venting on Facebook (side note, if you are on, Friend me!), but I have been hesitant to blog about it as we have had so many housing deals fall through and it is that much more disappointing when I have had to tell everyone after getting all excited, that we didn't get the house. But, I really think the 5th time is the charm. We are on schedule to purchase a beautiful antique cape built in 1830. We have had to jump through a bunch of hoops, but it looks like we are on schedule to purchase our first home on the 30th! Keep your fingers crossed and I will post more about it as the process moves forward.

And I will close with some random cute photos:

7 Months!

Wow, wasn't it just yesterday that Finn turned 6 months? I don't know where this past month has gone, but Finn is getting big! A lot of new things this month. First, Finn has a new car seat. You may remember his cute newborn seat:
Well, here he is now:
So, he now has a nice new convertible car seat:

He has also graduated to a nice new jogging stroller. Now I have to get back on the running wagon!
Finn has been trying out foods for the last month too. He has tried sweet potatoes, avocado, bananas, rice, apples, green beans and, just today, peaches. I have made everything, but the apples because I found some locally made 100% apples, applesauce and figured that was easier. Some days he does a little better than others, but mostly Finn is not really keen on anything. But, he is always quick to grab the spoon and seems to want to feed himself so we have decided to start exploring finger foods. He started with Cheerios and I was reading on wholesomebabyfood.com that a good way to begin finger foods is to chop up bananas or avocados and sprinkle with cheerio dust or wheat germ We haven't introduced wheat products yet, but we did the cheerio dust and that seems to work pretty well. He tried bananas that way yesterday and avocado today and he seems to like to try to feed himself. With the cheerios, he actually has a forefinger and thumb pincher grasp about 50% of the time, while the rest of the time he rakes it into his palm. He probably gets about 30% in his mouth and much of the rest falls to the floor. Lily is thrilled about this new development.

Finn also attended his first political rally today. We live just down the way from the State Capitol building and we went to support equality in marriage. We are so excited that the governor signed the bill today and New Hampshire became the 5th state to welcome all couples in marriage. YEAH!

Home Photo Shoot

We had a home photo shoot this morning of Finn in his christening outfit:



Finn is ready to be on the move. He can go from sitting...
To moving forward (but after this he either face plants or falls to his belly, both of which frustrate him immensely):

I forgot to put these photos in my last post. Taken right before leaving for the church:

And I had to throw this one in that we took this morning just for sheer cuteness: