Easter Egg Hunt in Texas

When we woke up this morning, Lulu had found a sack of empty Easter eggs my mother had lying around and she had hidden them all over the house.  So, when my Dad came home from work that afternoon, we had to have an Easter egg hunt.  Best of all, she had hidden "treasures" inside some of them, so after all the eggs had been collected, we had to sort through the treasures and see what everyone found.

Theo at 7 months.

Theo turned 7 months old!  I can't believe over half a year has flown by so fast...They say "the days are long but the years are short" and man, are they right!

Let's see...what's our "Baby Bruder" up to nowadays?  Probably the biggest change is that he's no longer sleeping from 10pm until about 6am without waking up any more.  He's been waking up sometime around 3-4am to nurse before Walter brings him to bed for me to nurse him again at 6am.  I think that's probably because he's grown a LOT bigger and needs the extra milk to keep from feeling hungry?  As long as we don't fall too asleep and remember to put him back in the cradle, I don't really mind the early morning wake-up.  Those nights that we're really tired and forget though?  Ugh.  Theo treats my proximity like an all-you-can-eat milk bar and I'm constantly nursing him from 3am-whenever I wake up.  Not fun.



And he is bigger!  His weight is about 19 and a half pounds now.  I've tried measuring him and I think he's between 26.5 and 27 inches?  It's really, really hard to tell right now!  So, I think he's catching up to his sister after his premature start.  He's definitely heavier than she was and he's almost as long/tall.

He's sitting up much better over the past month or so.  He still can't sit himself up yet, but if we help him get started, he's getting pretty good at sitting on his own...until he's not and suddenly crashes over!  So, we have to be careful where we put him so that he doesn't crash over and bonk his head on something hard.  He can roll over from his tummy onto his back but he doesn't seem to be that interested in rolling from his back onto his tummy at the moment.  I did notice recently that he's sometimes moving his feet like he wants to crawl when he's on his tummy, so I think our days of having him stay put are numbered...  If he could figure out how to gain some traction between his knees and feet and the ground, then I think it's all over!



And he's discovered his feet.  He loves his feet--it's really hard to change his diaper now because when we put him on the changing table, he instantly grabs his feet.

He loves his mama.  He's going through a bit of stranger anxiety at the moment (fun, fun!), so he definitely looks for the familiar people in his life.  His face lights up when he sees his sister and she can always make him smile.  And giggle.  We have to chaperone them though because as he gets bigger, she wants to play more actively with him, but he's too heavy for her to really lift.  So there's lots of playing together on the floor under adult supervision.



He's still not really napping.  He will take 20-30 minute cat naps in my arms, but he wakes up as soon as I try to put him down in his crib.  So, once he wakes up, he claims my attention for most of the day.  If I want to get anything done (like this blog post, breakfast, or showering for example), it has to be done between Walter and Lulu leaving the house for school at 7:30am and Theo's waking up (usually around 9am).  I can put him down for 15-20 minutes on his playmat on the floor and he will happily entertain himself for a while, but when he's done, he's DONE.  And letting him entertain himself is most successful in the morning, after he's awake and before his noontime catnap.  All of which is to say, once Walter comes home, Theo gets plenty of Daddy-Time because I need a break!



We haven't started him on solid food just yet.  He grabs at our plates when we hold him in our laps, but he doesn't seem to be that interested in what's actually *on* our plates.  I have given him a couple of spoonfuls of my (plain, whole milk) yogurt and he is not a fan!  His face(s) were hilarious!  I am not particularly anxious to get him started on solid foods just yet, to be perfectly honest.  I would rather start those once we're back from our trip.  The hassle of dealing with baby food in hotel rooms and wondering exactly the ingredients are in commercial baby food in a foreign country?  Ugh.  Been there, done that (with Lulu back in 2010).  And he seems to be more than satisfied with the amount of milk he's been getting.



Speaking of our trip, in preparation for our departure, Theo has had an early MMR vaccine.  The CDC recommends that infants traveling internationally who are older than 6 months get an MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine at least one month prior to travel.  Unfortunately, it doesn't count towards his regular vaccination schedule, so the poor little guy will end up with an extra dose of MMR.  But, better safe than sorry when it comes to measles, especially with all the outbreaks (including here in California!).  The increasing immigration from Africa and the Middle East into Europe makes this a reasonable precaution, too, I think.  I did not get him vaccinated with his MMR during his 6 month check-up though.  I made an additional appointment for him to come back and get his MMR and his second/booster flu shot separately.

So, that's our little guy at 7 months old.  Can't wait to see what the next month brings...

Theo and Nanny

Theo got to spend some one-on-one time with his great-grandmother this morning.  I think this is the start of a beautiful friendship, don't you?

Second Trimester Awards

Lulu received a Principal's Honor Roll awards this trimester for the grades on her report card.  Theo and I were there to clap and applaud loudly in her honor.  She was excited to see us as her class filed into the multipurpose room.





There were several awards given out--perfect attendance, outstanding citizenship, principal's honor roll and the "teacher's choice" awards for those students whose grades don't merit awards but whose efforts do.  Lulu's friend, Maggie, from Girl Scouts got a teacher's choice award for her improvements this trimester in reading.  Her mother mentioned that she was thinking of holding Maggie back to repeat first grade again so that she would be on more solid footing as she got older.  I told her that I thought it was a brave decision and one that more parents should consider, especially in elementary school before the stakes get super high.

teacher's choice kids are on the right (if you couldn't tell!), vice principal on the far left

This trimester, Lulu is reading at reading level J (on an alphabet scale from A-Z).  The end-of-the-year target for first grade is I-K, so she's doing really well.  I can attest to that myself.  We went to the library on Saturday afternoon and checked out four chapter books (all in English, the language she isn't being taught as much in school) and she had them all read by Sunday at lunchtime.  She can read 87 words per minute (the end of the year goal is 60 words per minute, to give you some perspective) and she can recognize 89 of the 89 high frequency words that she's been taught so far.  She also received a "4" or "exceeds standards" on her word analysis, vocabulary, and fluency.

Given we are expecting her to read in English, Spanish, and German, I think she's doing pretty darn well!  Her reading skills in German lag behind her literacy in Spanish and English.  It's the diphthongs (ie, ei, au, etc) that throw her off when she's reading.  Heck, they throw me off when I'm reading!  Hopefully, her German literacy will improve as she's exposed to more written German later this spring.  I leave the untertitel on when she watches  German television, but she's listening to the audio and not really reading the untertitel (unlike me who's relying on the untertitel to understand what's going on!).

Mathwise, she's doing well, too.  She can count by 2s, 5s, and 10s to 120.  She can orally count and write from 1-120 and recognizes the numbers 1-120 out of sequence.  She can compare two numbers and tell you which is greater/less than or equal to from 1-120.  Finally, she can tell "facts to ten" (i.e., 1+9, 2+8, etc) 23 out of 50.  I'm not sure exactly what this last one means (I know it has to do with Common Core mathematics and learning the relationships between numbers and not just memorizing addition/subtraction tables though).

Theo at Six Months

Theo is officially six months old now!

Here are his measurements:

He is now 26.75 inches tall (50th percentile), weighs 18 pounds and 3.4 ounces (62nd percentile) and his head is 17 inches around (36th percentile).  He is heavier and a little shorter than his older sister was at this age (which seems to be a continuing theme of these monthly stat posts!).





 More importantly, he is starting to figure out how to sit on his own, but not reliably so.  He does pretty well if he's supported, for example, if I put him down in between my feet so that my legs are within easy reach for holding onto.  If left on his own, he may either suddenly slump over to one side or fall flat on his face (he hasn't figured out how to put his hands out to keep from falling on his face yet).



He still farts like an old man.  I mean, room-clearing, eye-watering smells.  Horrible stuff.  We suspect that the antibiotics that he got while in the NICU seriously killed off all his gut bacteria so we are trying to add that back in with probiotics as best we can.  It's difficult because he's breastfed, so there's not really many opportunities to give him a bottle with some probiotics mixed in at the moment.  Once he starts solid foods, we can stir in probiotics into his cereal and veggies, no problem.

photo by Lulu

The farts are kinda funny though--he let one rip the other evening and I made an exaggerated "Ewwww!' face at him and called him a "stinky butt."  He just laughed and giggled like it was the funniest thing he'd ever done.  I think we're in trouble with this one....?

party in my crib, yo.

The giggles are coming fast and furious now.  In the past, he would giggle, but it was more of an imitation of our own laughing than really being his own.  Now, he's spontaneously giggling at things he finds funny.  And it always gives him hiccups.  Seriously.  Without fail, he gets a case of the hiccups when he giggles.



He's still sleeping through the night pretty well in the cradle at the foot of our bed.  He will occasionally wake up around 2:30am and be hungry, but most of the time he will sleep straight through from about 10pm until Walter wakes him up at 6am.  I nurse him and then he falls back asleep again in our bed until about 9:30-10am.  I can't complain!  We also recently bought him a crib at IKEA in the hopes that he would sleep more during the day if he had his own place.  So far, no real luck with that one.  He does seem to like hanging out in it though which gives me hope.  We bought a crib model that can turn into a toddler bed, hoping that by the time he outgrows it, Lulu may be ready for a new bed of her own.

at his 6 month check-up

His feet are pretty large, but I can't say exactly how big they are because we haven't really put him in shoes.  The 6-12month socks are pretty tight on him though and the 12-18month socks seem to be fitting him better and better.  I suspect that he will probably have pretty big feet, just like his sister.

grumpy after his shots

Selfie

I have created a monster

taking a photo of her strudel

Little Leprechaun.

Princess Tea Party

Lulu was invited to a playdate with her friend Scotland during the school break this week.  They decorated strawberries and clementine pieces with chocolate and had a princess tea party.  Pretty fun stuff!

Old Man Pants...