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!