Trains

This is what Grant does when Leah gets out her train tracks:





I think all boys are born loving trains ;)

Eight months old!

Our buddy is eight months old! I weighed him yesterday (wearing just a diaper, a shirt, and some socks) at 24 pounds!! Guess it's time to get out the bigger carseat!

Grant is rolling all over the place. He can get wherever he wants by rolling and turning. So we'll see if he ever feels motivated enough to crawl!

He still has just the two teeth on the bottom, and is still very picky when it comes to solid foods.

Back at seven months, we discovered that he could kinda sit up for several seconds if we balanced him just right. Now he has figured out how to take care of the balancing on his own and can sit by himself for several minutes!

Here's some cute pictures of our big boy!



And I have been having fun taking pictures of Leah and Grant together the past few days. It is so fun to watch them interact and to catch all the different combinations of expressions. Anyway, here are some of my favorites :)
(Click on the pictures to see them bigger...)







(P.S. Hoku, you inspired me to try a french braid... but it didn't really turn out. You did a great job with Malia!)

Grant's Dance, Revisited

Grant has been working on some new moves!

I hope his Exersaucer survives whatever he comes up with next. :)

Grant's Dance

Yesterday, Grant started doing this little dance in his new Exersaucer that he got for Christmas. Whenever I would smile at him, he would get really happy and do this:

This just makes me smile every time :)

Holidays

We all had a really nice Thanksgiving and Christmas, and were so fortunate to spend both with family. We had lots of fun (of course), ate lots of good food (double of course), made cookies, decorated, saw lights, watched old Christmas movies, played games, exchanged gifts, saw old friends, and took lots of pictures :) They were pretty much the perfect vacations... I even had time to relax! I wish we could do it again. Thanks to everyone for making it such a great time!

But, due to a fussy baby and a sick (again... with the same thing, poor girl) girl, I will get straight to some pictures.

This one's just 'cause she's cute :)

Leah decorated this tree herself... multiple times. You can see her favorite spot to hang the ornaments, on the bottom-right of the tree :)

Making sugar cookies!

Grant turned seven months old!

Playing with half of the Brewer cousins (with more to come!).

Naptime is cuter without a crib!

Grant loves all things string-ish. Be it strings, ribbons, zipper pulls, cords, or necklaces, he will find it and grab on tight! And usually try to eat it, too!

And this one's just 'cause he's cute :)

Santa

We went to a little "winter celebration" the other day, and Santa was there. I tried to bring Leah to get a picture with him, and this is what happened:

Her face really shows how she felt about the whole experience :)

Later, while we were still there, Leah wanted to go back and see Santa again, but she was just as shy of him as the first time. She just wanted another candy cane!

Three years old!

Leah had a lot of fun on her birthday! Her Grandma Caine and Uncle Jeremy came to help her celebrate her special day! It was really cute -- she just seemed so happy and excited about everything the entire day. Here are some pictures:

Leah really loved all of her birthday balloons!

We went to Ballard Locks to watch the boats go through and check out the fish ladder (we might have seen one fish), and they had these fun wave sculpture things that Leah liked.

On the way to the park later, we stopped by the Fremont Troll. Leah wanted to climb to the top of the "scary monster", but it wasn't that easy to get her up even halfway, so this is as far as we got :)

Leah was so happy to open presents! She tried to share them all, too, and insisted that some of them were ours, even after she opened them.

Ever since her Daddy's birthday in October, Leah has insisted that she wanted a "blue chocolate cake" for her own birthday. We think she was referring to the blue box that the chocolate cake mix came in, but I thought it would be fun to frost it with blue frosting anyway. This was the first year that she blew out all of the candles herself!

We also had french fries for dinner (at Leah's request). Don't worry, we made hamburgers too, but Leah only had one bite of hers... oh well! It was her birthday, after all!

Yesterday was Leah's three-year appointment, and she weighs about 33 pounds and is about 37 inches tall. She is very healthy! She was sad at the end, when she had to get two shots ("the doctor gave me two owies"), but overall she was very excited to have her own doctor's appointment! (She came with me to Grant's six-month appointment last week, and has wanted to go back for herself ever since.)

Through the eyes of Leah

Leah is three years old!!! I will post pictures and stories from her special day later, but first I wanted to show off her photography skillz (the 'z' means I'm serious ;) ). She got a cute little digital camera for her birthday and wasted no time in filling up the memory with over 100 photos. It is so fun to see what she thinks she needs to take a picture of! Here are a few of them:

As you can see, she was excited to take pictures of every one of her new crayons. Her poor Uncle Jeremy was her favorite subject though, and he was so patient with her flashing his face over and over. I just transferred all the photos off of the camera, so we will need to work on holding the camera still and not getting so close to people's faces... Stay tuned for more fun photos, through the eyes of Leah!

6 months

Six-month birthday

Right before Thanksgiving, Grant turned six months old! He celebrated by cutting his first two teeth, and we celebrated by giving him "solids" (rice cereal) for the first time!

Grant likes his solids!

At his checkup yesterday, he weighed 20 lbs 8 oz, and measured 28 inches long. That's around the 90th percentile I think. So still big! He also didn't even cry during his shots! Just kinda yelped a little during the last one. He is just an awesome little guy! :)

And I just can't get enough of watching the bond and love between these two. It is the sweetest thing!

Leah likes to make Grant smile when he's sad.

He really likes it!

But sometimes gets overwhelmed :)

Camera

I am convinced that I am the luckiest girl in the world. What other guy gives his wife presents for his birthday?! This year, Matthew gave me a new digital camera! I have been having a lot of fun trying it out, and I have a couple of cute, semi-willing (Grant more than Leah, hence the proportion of pictures in his favor) subjects. We had a few sunny days this past week, so I brought it out on one of our walks. Here are some cute ones!

Pirate

I forgot to put this with the last post...

A few days before Halloween, we were at Fred Meyer when all of a sudden, Leah told me, "He's a pirate! He's a pirate!" Sometimes Leah notices the tiniest things, so maybe she saw some logo on a food package or something.

I looked around, and saw a man walking by, wearing a bandana on his head :)

Happy Halloween! And then some...

We have had a busy week or so. It seems like there was something big every day!

• Last Saturday was our chili cook-off.
• Sunday was Grant's five-month birthday.
• Monday and Tuesday was Matthew's conference in Spokane where he presented his research.
• Wednesday was the first day of the regular season for basketball.
• Thursday was Matt's birthday.
• Friday we carved pumpkins.
• Saturday was the stake Trunk-or-Treat.
• Sunday was Halloween.
• Today is the first day of November!
• Whew!

In case you are wondering how it all went...

• I won no prizes for my chicken chili, although it was yummy (I was up against 40 other chilis... no one could even try them all!).
• Grant is five months old and a big, happy, rolling, nearly-scooting boy.
• Matthew did an awesome job at his conference and even got invited to present at a bigger one in a few months.
• We had pizza to celebrate the first day of regular season basketball, and the pizza turned out good, even though our team didn't :(.
• Matt's birthday was a lot of fun! Leah insisted he wanted a black chocolate cake (we made him a delicious French Silk Pie). She also learned how to sing happy birthday with me.
• Our pumpkins turned out cute, I think (see above). Leah found two ladybugs that came in with the pumpkins. For her, they were much more fun than the pumpkins. For me, the roasted pumpkin seeds were delicious. And Leah still likes to tell me that "Daddy's scary, Mommy's a kitty cat, Leah's a ghost, and Grant's happy!" Can you guess whose pumpkin was whose? :)
• The trunk-or-treat turned out great! Leah dressed up as The Cutest Pirate I've Ever Seen. That's what I decided to call her. She has two cute little picture books about pirates that she really likes, so this was fun for her. It was pouring during the trunk-or-treat, but tons of people still came and Leah had lots of fun and lots of candy!
• Halloween itself wasn't all that exciting, since we had already done all the trick-or-treating the day before. But we still had little trick-or-treaters come knock on our door, which was really cute.
• And today, I can't believe it's already November! We still need to flip the calendars though :)
• Whew, again!

Rolling

Watch him go!

Grant rolled for the first time (accidentally) a few weeks ago. Over the past week, he has figured out how to do it on purpose and is getting better every day! And of course, this is the first time he did it for the camera :)

5 months old

Grant turned five months old today! It sounds so old for him... so much older than four months, for some reason. I weighed him here at home about a week ago (so I guess it's unofficial) at twenty pounds, meaning we are now in the market for a new car seat very soon! He is happy and healthy and more lovable than ever!

He has successfully rolled from tummy to back and back to tummy (the latter one being on purpose), and has been working so hard at mastering both of them. It is so much fun to watch him grow and learn new things. We are excited to see what kinds of solids he likes in a month! He always looks so interested when he sees me eat.

Here's a picture from today of our smiley baby with our sweetheart toddler (preschooler?). Leah is a great big sister and loves to be goofy to make Grant smile. (Is it just me, or does Grant look almost as big as Leah?)

Here is Grant modeling my latest creative attempt. I made him a hat out of some scraps of fleece. It's a little big... and weird... but it will keep his head warm this winter. And I loved the picture.

And just two more pictures that melt my heart! I figured it's a post about Grant, so I'll fill it up :)

Post #100

Wow, this is my one-hundredth post! Anyway...

Contrary to what I have heard so often, boys are just as much fun to "dress up" as girls :)

And here is our little princess:

And here is what she is up to...

She loves playing Candy Land (and follows the rules somewhat closely, more so with prompting, which makes it fun to play with her):

She loves her little brother and showers him with hugs and kisses!

She loves showing off her sunglasses :)

And I don't really have a good picture to go with this (understandably), but she has been having so much fun pretending lately! She goes to the pretend park, the pretend driving range, eats all kinds of pretend foods, and even once pretend-painted my face. Anything and everything can be pretend. Makes it nice for when we don't have exactly what she wants or don't want to give her something. (Example: Leah says, "Can I have some candy please?" We reply, "Here is some yummy pretend candy!" Leah takes it and pretends to eat it, enjoying it very much. She even asked me to help her open her pretend smarties one time!)

Oh, and hide and seek is a favorite right now, too.

A little math...

First, some numbers... Yesterday, Grant had his four-month appointment, and he is still in the nineties percentiles for length (26 in) and weight (18 lbs 1 oz). Leah was the same length at four months, but didn't hit 18 lbs until she was twelve months! Interesting. Anyway, Grant is as healthy as can be!

Now for some arithmetic...

This:

Minus this:

Equals this:

Yessiree, Grantman had his first haircut a week and a half and ago! His hair was getting in his eyes and covering his ears, so we got out the clippers and finally gave him a little boy haircut. I was a little nervous because I thought all his hair was pretty darn cute, but it is even cuter now! His hair even looks a little lighter now.

Leah had her first haircut just after Grant's, too:

Both haircuts together:

One more:

This:

Plus two years...

Equals this:

And some cute tummy time pictures. I don't know how to include them in the "math" topic, but maybe you can measure the increasing angles between Grant and the floor?