It's been a long time....

It's been a long time and in order to keep Denise from saying that our blog is dead, I'll fill you in on what's going up here in Manch... Matty has been growing before our eyes..He's now 10 months old and is moving all over the place. He started crawling just after new years..Now he's unstoppable...He cruises from room to room and is seems very proud of his accomplishments. In addition he has now figured out how to stand up and hold on to things..This has caused him to get himself into everything on every table surface. Alas the babyproofing has begun to take shape at our house. He especially loves the dishwasher (hopefully this isn't his career aspiration).... He also grew out of his tummy tub and has graduated to a big boy duck tub....He loves the new tub and his bath toys..He plays and splashes and seems to love his bath time... We have been working on trying to get Matty to be a better napper. He has been sleeping better at night but still isn't a great napper...Slowly he has become more agreeable to napping in his crib as seen here. We also enrolled Matty in saturday morning music classes at Nini Bambini. He really loves the music and crawling around with his friends. There are instruments to bang (although he is more interested in chewing or climbing on them)... Finally, Matty asked me to show a picture of his new spongegbob pajamas.....

Post Holiday Post

The holidays are over and we are busy getting back into a routine...and one that included getting Matty back on a sleep schedule! Since Thanksgiving he has been having trouble staying asleep in his crib so we did what lots of new parents do, we brought him in bed with us. He slept, we slept...life was good...but then he started waking up every few hours even while in our bed and not being able to put himself back to sleep, we had a lot of sleepless nights again. Knowing this wasn't fair for him (or us) we started sleep training again last week and after 3 long nights of letting him "cry it out" (we still went in to soothe him every 5-10 minutes) he is a champion sleeper again (knock on wood!). He is actually loving his crib now and we hear him in there playing quite often. The other day, he went down for a nap and fell asleep sitting up and then leaned over his stuffed sheep! So cute...



The holidays were nice, quick but nice. Matty enjoyed his first Hanukkah...we lit the menorah each night and each opened a gift. Matty loved ripping the paper off and often found the paper more fun than his gifts! We celebrated his first Christmas (what a lucky boy celebrating both holidays!) at my parents house and had a great time eating, drinking, opening gifts, playing games and laughing a lot. Again Matty seemed to enjoy ripping the paper off everything!



And of course, we have all been enjoying the snow! We have had our share of it already and I'm sure there is more to come! I think we have had 3 or 4 big storms already! Our friends, The "renos" gave us a sled that we brought Matty out in the other day...it was cold but he seemed to like the sledding!


We can't believe the little guy is almost 9 months old already! I can't believe how fast the time has gone and how quickly he has grown up. He is looking like such a big boy lately! Still no teeth and not quite crawling (he is up on all fours and creeping backwards but not frontwards yet)but has been pulling himself up and so active! He is eating so well too, up to three meals a day and still likes and eats everything we give him! Here's a couple of pictures of him in the middle of some of his new favorite activities: He loves it when Andrew holds him upside down and if you get him near a bookcase, forget it...he pulls everything out!





Finally...we had his portraits done the weekend after Thanksgiving and used some of the shots for our holiday card and gifts for our family. There are 20 shots all together (including the naked tushie with the santa hat in the previous post...that was a joke) and one of these days I'll get around to posting them on here but in the meantime here are a few of my favorites:

Matty Claus

Wishing everyone a Happy Holiday!!!!!

100 and Counting!!!

Wishing my Grandfather Jack a happy 100th birthday today.....

What a milestone......



Grandpa was lucky enough to have Williard Scott on the Today show wish him a happy birthday this morning!!!!!

Early December Update

Yeah...so I'm a slacker...If it wasn't for Denise..None of you would know what's going on in our lives.. Anyway..

The weekend before thanksgiving we headed down to our friends Ingrid and Josh's house for a gourmet "14 course" tasting dinner cooked by Josh. It was great fun and included delights such as dehydrated bacon with caramel sauce, tobacco creams, and caramel popcorn drinks... for a more detailed review of the meal check out this link...http://ri100mi.com/2009/11/24/if-josh-tells-me-to-eat-leaves/

On Wednesday morning we headed down to Long Island for thanskgiving.. Denise and I had the day so we hit the road before the traffic. We made a nice pit stop in Manchester, CT and got to meet our friends Karyn and Stephen's new little guy Justin.

The weekend itself was a whirlwind with lots of family and friends. Matty was a great little boy in the car by himself in the backseat as we had to take two cars.
He met some of his new family members and also got to watch his first thanksgiving parade.

Thanksgiving dinner was a whirlwind of activity and Matty tried his first piece of turkey (he didn't seem too thrilled by the taste based on his face). Otherwise we had a great day... Denise had to leave early friday morning to head back to NH for work. Matty and I spent the day with family and then headed into the city for the big post thanksgiving bash at my sisters. Matty had a lot of fun playing with his cousins...


He even got to have story time from his aunt rachie...


Matty and I drove home saturday afternoon to get home in time to meet Denise coming home from work.. That didn't quite work out due to a lot of traffic on the Mass Pike... Matty was a great passenger though and managed to make it through the four 1/2 hour trip without many tears...

Now we are back to our routines and getting into winter/holiday mode...Just today I brought down the tree,decorations, lights and menorah from our attic..I'm pretty sure Denise will spend this evening decorating the tree...

This coming thursday is my grandfather Jacks 100th birthday.... Be sure to tune into the Today show between 8:30-9:00 to see Willard Scott announce his birthday!!!
We will be heading down to Long Island this weekend once again to celebrate this milestone. Yet again Matty will be meeting some of his relatives for the very first time..

In other news...It was bound to happen eventually but winter is finally here...Matty experienced his first snowstorm (albeit a little one) but he got to hold his first snowball and seemed to be mesmerized by the snow.. perhaps when there is more snow we will try out his sled!!!!!

Here he is in his first winter wonderland...

Happy 7 Month Birthday!

Yes, little Matty turned 7 months last Thursday! So hard to believe and incredible to see him grow over that time! Each day brings more fun, challenges and surprises and even when it's tough, we love every minute of it, especially when he is as smiley as he is!

We took him to his 6 month check up this past Monday (we always seem to be a month off, oh well) and he got his regular shots plus the seasonal flu and H1N1 shot. Just like at 2 and 4 months, he took them like a champ and only cried for a bit. He did pout like I've never seen him do before and we all laughed because he looked so darn cute. I guess the laughing encouraged him and I am seeing the pout more and more often lately!

His check up went great and again Dr Eric said he is doing terrific and we are doing great as parents. Always nice to hear :-). He weighed in at a whopping 18.4 lbs (50th percentile) and 25 inches long (15th percentile! I think the measurement may have been off as he was extremely squirmy when the nurse was trying to measure him) and I forgot his head measurement but also in the 50th percentile. We talked about his eating solids and Dr Eric said we could try him on some different proteins and textures like cottage cheese or smashed chick peas so I think we might get a little more adventurous in the next few weeks with his eating.

Dr Eric also said his development looks great. I was a bit concerned as he has only really rolled over from back to belly a few times (the first being a few weeks ago and both Andrew and I saw him do it, it was a proud parent moment!) But despite not rolling, he sits up on his own great and has for about a month now. He is able to get from sitting to his tummy and almost get up on his hands and knees, although like rolling he doesn't seem to be too interested in making the move to the crawling just yet. We are fine with that since we haven't done any baby proofing of the house and we know its only a matter of time!

On the teething front...there is still none to speak of! I feel like he's been "teething" since about 3 1/2 months. He shoves everything in his mouth, drools like a dog and seems to be in a lot of teething pain, especially at night. He's been waking up screaming a few times a night lately and letting him cry it out isn't really working. We give him teething tabs which are homeopathic tabs that dissolve in his mouth and are like "baby crack"...we think he might be addicted. Everyday we wake up I feel inside his mouth and I'm convinced one of those pearly whites are going to break right through, but not yet!

Speaking of sitting up on his own, whenever we are at the store, we've been putting him in the shopping cart sitting up like a big boy, he loves it and loves all the attention he gets! Last week I was out shopping at Babies R Us and had him in there and all of a sudden I looked down and he was fast asleep! He looked so cute sleeping sitting up, I had to take a picture (or two). I couldn't push him around like that so I picked him up and carried him for a while and then went to the section with all the rocking chairs and sat with him asleep on me for about 20 minutes. He never sleeps like that on me anymore so I enjoyed every minute of it!





Next up is the holidays! We are traveling to Long Island next week to celebrate Thanksgiving with Andrew's family and Matty will finally get to meet some of his relatives he has never met before. Unfortunately I have to come back to NH on Friday as I do work in retail and as long as I do, I will never have the Friday after Thanksgiving off! Andrew and Matty are staying in NY and coming home on Saturday. Its going to be so weird being in the house and not having them here! I suppose I can look forward to a night of uninterrupted sleep but I will miss them! Of course I could always take him to work with me, he already has his own nametag for when he comes to visit at work!

Avocado Face

Wow, 2 blogs in two days...I'm on a roll! Since Matty has been eating solids for well over a month now, I thought I would blog about all the wonderful things that go along with this new milestone! We started him at about 5 1/2 months with just rice cereal, which he was okay with but boy is it bland! We tasted it too, yuck. We waited the recommended 4 days of the cereal and moved onto bananas. He liked these too but I guess I didn't realize that rice cereal + bananas each for 4 days would equal one bound up little boy. Fortunately, it never seemed to bother him and fortunately for me, he finally pooped while I was at work and Andrew was home with him. Andrew was kind enough to email me a picture of it at work though! I'll skip posting the picture here but it was a doozy!. After the bananas we did apples and then pears which seems to be his favorite. We also switched to oatmeal instead of rice cereal and he seems to like it more and has 2 grams of fiber! Next we went to veggies...sweet potatoes, butternut squash, avocado, and peas. We haven't found something he doesn't like yet although the peas didn't seem to agree with him! We only gave them to him once and that night he woke up crying, I went in after 10 minutes (yes, we did the "cry it out" wait ten minutes before going in, its working and all 3 of us are happy and well rested) and put my hand on his chest, it was wet, so I turned the light on and my little monkey was covered in green vomit! Yuck, I know! It was like The Exorcist! A little bit of a scare for all 3 of us but after we got him in dry jammies and calmed him down, he was fine. No fever, no more crying. I don't know if he is allergic or they just didn't agree with him but we didn't try them again the next day. Maybe we will try again in a month or so, I still have 2 ice cube trays full of pureed peas so lets hope he ends up being okay with them! I have been making all his fruits and veggies...so easy and fun to do too. I knew the "magic bullet" would come in handy someday! We are going to increase him to 2 meals a day now as he has been drinking soooo much milk at daycare and I can't keep up with him unless I pumped 5 times a day at work, which just isn't possible. We want to start some new fruits so I think mango and blueberries are on the horizon soon!

The upside to the pea incident is that his sleep suit was also covered in green vomit so he went without it that night and we decided what a great time to wean him off it! We did swaddle him that night with one arm out, then a few nights with both arms out and now he is sleeping in just a sleep sack and doing great! I didn't think it would be that easy but I think we got lucky.

Here is the smiley boy in his high chair waiting for his dinner!