Annelise is 9 months old

Here are some of Annelise's accomplishments for month nine.

- She now has four teeth coming in on the top! Still only two on the bottom, but that means we almost have six teeth now! She is figuring out how to use them too. When I give her puffs to munch on she has started biting off pieces instead of putting the whole thing in her mouth. She has also figured out how to bite people, and it doesn't feel good!

- She is eating meat now. At first I bought some of the meals like chicken and veggies, beef and veggies, chicken noodle, etc. I tried to give her one and it was awful! She was gagging like crazy and rubbing it all over her face, lol. So, we're sticking to the simple foods for now. She will eat the meats that are by themselves like chicken in chicken gravy. So, I usually give her a little meat with her veggies and she doesn't mind it at all.

- She is standing up! Pretty much all month she has been pulling up and letting go; she just gets better at it everyday. As of a few days ago she has started standing up in the middle of the floor with nothing to hold on to! It's pretty exciting to watch. She can't take a step yet, but she is definitely working on it.

- Bath time! Annelise is now taking big girl baths! We don't use the baby tub anymore. We just fill up the regular tub and go to town. She loves bath time now because I let her hang out a little longer to play with her bath toys.

- She really have any new words yet, but I can tell she is trying. The other day we worked on the word baby. She was saying babababa over and over. Then, clear as day, I heard her say BA_BY. It was very purposeful so I know I didn't miss hear her. But, she hasn't said it again yet.

Thats about it for now. Sorry no pictures. It's late and I don't feel like downloading from the camera right now. I'll try to get some up soon!

Annelise's Christmas Stocking

Here is Annelise's Christmas stocking! It is all cross stitched and I started working on it right after she was born, so its been about 8 months now. It feels great to be done!

Here is all three of our stockings together. I can't wait for Christmas this year so I can hang them up!

Annie and Sammy's Play Date

Annelise's play date with Samuel Hightower. What a cutie! :-)

Play Date!

Here is a picture of Annie and her friends. We had a play date on Wednesday. On the left is Ian Schleicher, middle right is Nathan Johnson and on the right is Caleb Lueckemeyer. Nathan is so sweet with all the babies. He runs around making sure everyone has plenty of toys to play with. So cute!

Annelise is 8 months

Today Annelise is 8 months old! She had a great 8th month too. She has mastered the skill of pulling up. Any time she can grab onto something now she is going to stand up. This morning I went to get her out of bed and she was standing up in her crib. Also, I have witnessed her standing on her own three times now! She usually pulls up on something and then lets go when she gets her balance. I haven't seen it last more than about 10 seconds. I think she will be walking before we know it. By request on Annelise's 7th month post, here is a picture of her play arena in the living room. You can also see how she is pulling up on the couch. :-)


So, Annelise is no longer interested in sitting in her Baby Einstien excersaucer. I think it is to confining for her now that she knows she has full reign of the house. Instead she enjoys climbing underneath it, lol.


Annelise is also showing signs of jealousy when we are eating and she is not. Here is a picture of her begging for Hannah's ice cream, lol. She now eats 3 meals a day; cereal for breakfast and a fruit and veggie for lunch and dinner.

Here is a picture of Annelise in Florida. I'll get on and post pictures of her swimming later, but she is in her cute leopard print swim suit here. She decided to climb into this basket herself and make it her boat, lol.

Other than all that I have to say that she is getting more and more interactive each day. It's so much fun to listen to her talk and scream and laugh. She is sitting on the floor by me right now talking to her baby doll, lol. Being a mommy is so much fun! :-)

Annelise is 7 months

Now, I know that I haven't been a very good blogger lately, so I've decided to make a blogging goal for myself to try and help me keep up with it. At a minimum I will post once a month on Annie's month birthday to give an update on what she is doing. That would be the 27th so I'm a day late this month, but I posted about St. Thomas yesterday and two blogs in one day is a little much for me, lol.

So, as of yesterday Annie is 7 months old! Boy how time flies. She is really cruising these days. She is now a very good crawler so we've had to do all the baby proofing. We put up baby gates for the kitchen. That has been very nice for me because when I am cooking she will crawl around on the floor and stay contained. If it weren't for the gates she would be off exploring the house. We also made sure to cover all the plugs and moved all the fire place stuff to the garage. You think you have everything covered, but she still finds things to get into. She managed to find my phone charger that was tucked behind the night stand and tried to stick it in her mouth! That sure was a wakeup call. I don't take my eyes off her for a second.

Annie is also starting to figure out how to pull herself up to stand. I've turned our living room into a save little play cove. We have a sectional couch and I pulled the ottoman out so it makes a U shape around the area rug. It has been a lot of fun for us; we fill it up with toys and play all day. She also has a safe area to practice pulling up. The couches are nice and soft so it’s not too bad when she doesn't make it up. I've seen her make it all the way to her feet about three times now and she gets so excited that she forgets that she can't balance and will just let go of the couch, lol. I'm sure she will have it down in the blink of an eye.

As far as words go, she will occasionally say Mama but I'm not sure that she knows what it means. I'm pretty sure she is just mimicking the sound, but it's still pretty exciting :-). Yesterday she said Dada! Same thing there, I don't think she knows but she hears us say it and has figured out how to make the sound. Other than that she is quite a chatty kathy but it’s all in baby talk. Sometimes she will just start screaming too, lol. It isn't upset screaming, it’s just 'I think I want to hear myself' screaming. Anyways, it is very fun and we will sit and have very meaningful conversations, lol.

We now have two teeth! Both her bottom front teeth are in and we can tell that she is going to have a lot more soon because EVERYTHING goes in her mouth and it’s obvious that it bothers her. Cold teethers have been pretty good, and teething tablets are little miracles.

She is also now eating 1st food baby foods. So far we have had squash, peas, carrots, bananas, and green beans. Everything has gone well except for the carrots. They seemed to not settle well with her so well try them again later. Right now we eat our food only at lunch time. Probably in the next month or so we will move to three meals a day. She seems to enjoy it and she likes to grab the spoon and feed it to herself which I think is great progress.

So, I think that is all that has developed in month 7. Check back on July 28th for an update about month 8!

St. Thomas

Now that we have been home from St. Thomas for a month, I'm finally posting some pictures, lol.

St. Thomas was absolutely gorgeous. This picture is our private beach from the beach house we rented. It was so nice and the water was beautiful.

Our beach had a coral reef right there and we did a lot of snokeling right off the beach.

Here is Annie's first experience with the ocean. She seemed to like it.

This is a picture of our beach house from our fishing boat. The house is 5 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms. You can't see it but it has a cottage on the left hand side. The road down to the house was very interesting, lol. Steep, bumpy roads with a drop off on one side. I kept my eyes closed a lot.

Here we are scuba diving. It was so amazing and everyone did great; no nerves, lol. The reefs and fish were beautiful. Jeremy saw a shark, but thankfully I didn't see it.

Here we are on the ferry on the way to St. John's.

This is the beach we stopped at on St. John's. It was rated as one of the top 5 beaches in the world. The snorkeling was also great here.

The iguanas enjoyed swimming in the water off our beach. :-)

Here is the sunset on our last day as we prepared for the trip home. What an amazing vacation!

Scuba Certified!

It's official! I finished all the requirements and I am now scuba certified along with Jeremy, my Dad, Hannah, and Daniel. It was a lot of fun, but for a minute there I didn't think I would make it. When we did our first open water dive the water was so murky you couldn't see something that was 2 feet in front of you, literally. It was a little weird and I started to get pretty anxious. I actually had to come up to the top a few times in the beginning because I was freaking out. Our instructor was great though and he worked with me by myself and I was able to calm down and get through it.

The second day that we did open water dives the water was much better and I didn't freak out. We had to show the instructor that we could demonstrate certain skills underwater. We had to be able to take our mask off, then put it back on and clear it. We had to be able to switch to our buddy's alternate air source. We had to manually inflate our BCD. Also, we had to do a navigation dive and demonstrate that we could control our buoyancy. Now that that is over, I'm ready for the fun stuff!

We leave for St. Thomas in one week and 3 days! I can't wait to do our dive there. It should be beautiful and the visibility in the water is supposed to be amazing. I'll be sure and post some underwater pictures after the trip!

Annelise's New Play Yard

We got a new play yard for Annelise! It is the Joovy Room^2 and it is awesome! It has over 10 square feet for her to play in which is much bigger than any of the pack and plays that you see in the stores. We ordered it from BabiesRUs.com because of the size and the awesome reviews on it. So far we really love it and I think Annelise will have a good time learning to crawl in here without worrying about falling on the hard floor!

Thank you Lauren!

I wanted to say a quick thanks to Lauren for making these amazing cookies and cake balls for me! These were for a boy baby shower with a bath time theme and they turned out so cute! You can check out her blog here (Flour Blossoms) to see all the amazing stuff she does. They were such a hit! Thanks again!

She's getting up there...

It might be hard to tell, but she is up on her hands and standing on her left foot. It looks like she is trying to crawl on her hands and feet rather than her hands and knees, lol.

Annelise is getting mobile!

So, for my first post I thought I would give everyone a quick update with what is going on with Annelise. In case you haven't seen her in a while she is a pro at rolling over. I definitely can't put her down and expect her to stay put anymore. Makes it hard when I have to do dishes or something. The other day I put her on her mat and went to make her bottle and when I came back she was halfway under the couch!

She is also starting to figure out how to crawl. It is a lot of fun to watch. Right now she can push up on her hands then pop up on her knees. She doesn't stay there very long and she isn't sure what to do when she gets there, but I don't think it will be long before she figures it out. This morning she actually popped up on her hands and feet! I am such proud mom. :-)

Today I got her travel crib out and decided I'll try to use it as a play pin. That way I could do a little straightening up and she could play with her toys without rolling away. It worked out great for a while, but I could tell the walls were starting to frustrate her. I'm going to have to do some shopping for a bigger play pin I think.