15 Months Old

15 months, I can't even believe it.

Here is what Noah is up to at 15 months old:

-I'm guessing he's about 22lbs, but don't actually know.

-He is about 34 inches tall.

-He is in size 4 diapers during the day and night.

-He wears size 4 shoes.

-He nurses on demand, still about 10 times a day, but less if we're out somewhere with people he enjoys. He'll get too busy to ask for it. and I end up having to initiate it myself so that my supply doesn't get messed up.

-He still enjoys a balance of feeding himself and being fed when he eats solids. He eats mostly grown up food, but sometimes still has purees.

-He has 12 teeth. 8 of them are fully in (and have been since 8 months), 4 of them are molars that are partially broken through, but not fully.  He is currently cutting 6 teeth.  His 4 first year molars, which have been erupting for the past 2 months, and his upper canines. Poor baby.

-He has one nap a day, usually about an hour long.

-He sleeps 11-11.5 hours at night, getting up to nurse once. Bedtime is between 8 and 8:30pm most nights.

-He signs to nurse (the sign for milk), for water (waves his hand up and down), and to eat (sticks his finger in his mouth). Those are the only signs I'm consistent with, otherwise I'm sure he'd sign more.

-He has had a verbal explosion this month. He says 18 words now! They are: Mama, Dada, uh oh, more, this, that, cat, night night, hot, up, yes, woof woof ("what does a dog say?"), baa ("what does a sheep say?"), moo ("what does a cow say?"), car, ball, shoes, cracker. He mostly sticks with the beginning sounds in words; he's not much for the ending sounds.

-His verbal comprehension is unreal. I am always amazed that he seems to understand almost everything I say to him, follows multi-step directions, and nods or shakes his head appropriately when I ask him questions.

-He still loves to clean my house. He vacuums, dustbusts, swiffers, and dusts my tables... I wish he was a little more thorough though ;)

-This past month Noah has gotten more opinionated when it comes to running errands. He's no longer content in the cart, or stroller, or sling. Now he has his own ideas about what he wants to be doing (ie. walking around the store on his own pulling things off of shelves). He used to just come along with me wherever and was so well behaved and quiet the whole time. I miss that.

-Noah can open doors, closets, the dishwasher, the fridge, the stove, the sliding door... there's pretty much nothing that is off limits to him.  According to him, anyway.

-He loves our cat Emmie (Lexie won't let him near her). He pets him, kisses him, hugs him... it almost makes cleaning up the cat hair worth it.

-He is a very affectionate little boy, with lots of hugs and kisses for Mommy. He's now getting better about giving Daddy a hug and kiss every night at bedtime.

-He just had his 12th illness this past week - a mild cold that lasted about 4 days. It wasn't a big deal, but I have no idea where it came from. I had it too, obviously.

I've been working on this off and on all day. It's 10pm now. I'm just going to post it. I don't have anything eloquent to say.

I love my kid!

The End.

Cats, Weekends, and a Baby Octopus

Lexie is doing so well at home now. She's back to her normal self with hardly any meowing (just the small amount of meowing she used to do). It's actually weird to have her walk around quietly after dealing with her being in heat for 4 weeks.

I let her out last night when I got home from work, thinking that Emmie would be over his hissing issues. Apparently he is not. He hissed like crazy at her, and even tried to swat at her head. I guess Lexie doesn't smell like herself to him yet. It makes me so sad for her that he's acting like this, because Lexie still loves him and now she's afraid of him. Also, I hate that we have to keep Lexie locked in when we're not home because we're worried about what Emmie will do. I'm actually afraid that Emmie's behaviour will stress Lexie out to the point that she starts peeing again.

Speaking of pee, last night when I got home from work Lexie kept sniffing this one spot on the couch. I went and smelled it and discovered another spot of old dried pee. How thrilled was I. I had a friend coming over for tea in 10 minutes, so I couldn't do anything about it. So all during the visit with my friend, all I could think about was how Emmie is being so mean to Lexie, and how many other old pee spots I'm going to find before they're all cleaned up. That makes for a less than enjoyable visit! But the pee thing is a big deal, not just because I have to clean up all the spots (which is quite a process), but because if you don't get rid of the smell, the cats are much more likely to keep peeing in the same spot over and over again.

The problem is that there's no way for us to find all the spots on our own. We can't see them, and we certainly can't go around our entire house on our hands and knees sniffing every inch of everything. We have a big house! So we just have to watch our cats all the time to see where they start sniffing, and then smell that spot ourselves. It'll be a long time before I feel confident that nobody is going to pee anywhere inappropriate.

I haven't had time to make a proper dinner all week! I get home too late after my appointments, and then I always have to deal with some sort of cat issue. I feel bad for my poor husband.

Thank goodness it's the weekend. Justin is out of town at a basketball tournament tonight and tomorrow, but I have no commitments so I should have some time to get things done. I also have to prepare to have our parents over on Sunday for Justin's birthday. The house needs to be cleaned, laundry needs to be done, groceries need to be bought, and food needs to be made. I think I'm just going to make a pot of chilli for lunch on Sunday, but I'll have to get some snack foods too.

Hopefully I can get some more sleep this weekend! The past 3 nights have pretty good. I haven't had the horrible nights I was having, but I'm still probably getting only about 6 hours a night. I'm a 9 hour kind of girl.

The past several days Bambino has been CRAZILY active, and positioned in a way so that I feel every movement and always have limbs poking out of my stomach. It's so wonderfully weird... I'm going to miss this feeling! It feels like I have an 8 legged baby inside of me.

Change of Plans

Alright, plans have changed.

Lexie is driving me insane. Last night I had a friend over for tea and for the entire hour and a half she meowed. Constantly. And not a cute little meow. A loud, screaming, grating meow. And then Justin told me that she peed on a couch.

A couch. The worst thing she could pee on! A bed, I can deal with. I can wash sheets and a comforter. A carpet... well that's even easier to clean than a couch. But how do I wash a couch?!?!
She is actually making me lose my mind. We are keeping her and Emmie locked in the laundry room from now on until Lexie cuts this out. Thankfully (you have no idea how thankful I am for this) I didn't hear her meow once all night. The laundry room is right under our bedroom and I thought for sure she would meow all night like she does outside our bedroom door. But she didn't! That's not to say that she won't tonight, but at least she didn't last night. However, when we let them out this morning she started with the constant meowing again, so eventually Justin just put them back in the laundry room.

I feel bad for Emmie in all of this because he's such a good cat and doesn't deserve to be locked in a small room for 20 out of 24 hours in a day. But I also feel bad separating them. Plus, if Emmie wasn't in the room with Lexie she would probably meow more.

The bottom line is that I cannot handle this anymore. It is stressing me to the max that my cat won't shut up and is still peeing everywhere. So we're going with the earlier, less convenient appointment to get her spayed. Which means we have to take her to the vet tomorrow morning to get her rabies vaccine. And she also needs to spend 3 nights at the vet the week of the 18th, instead of 1 night the week after.

At this point, I'm almost okay with the 3 nights she'll spend at the vet. She is driving me absolutely insane (I was ready to give her away last night, which is crazy for me because I am so in love with my cats), and it'll be nice to be able to finally relax without listening to her incessant meowing and looking for where she most recently peed.

Our First Two Babies

This morning I was lying in bed reading a pregnancy book when I heard jingling from the baby's room. I got up to see what was going on and this is what I found:

Emmie was just chillin out in the bouncy chair.

A few minutes later I heard even more jingling, so I went to investigate again. That's when I found this:

Emmie and Lexie cuddling in there. Look closely, you can see how Emmie's arm is around Lexie.

Apparently they love this chair, and I have to lock them out of that room. Which is too bad because we love walking past it and seeing baby stuff in there.

New Camera

I've been shopping around for a new camera for awhile. I didn't want just a point and shoot camera. The main thing that I wanted was to be able to change aperture settings. This is a rare find in a regular digital camera, so I went with a digital SLR. I got the Canon Rebel XS. It came with an 18-55mm lens, and I bought a 50mm lens as well. The aperture on the 50mm lens goes as low as 1.8, which gives me less depth of field. That sounds bad, but it isn't. It allows me to blur out foregrounds and backgrounds to give more focus on the subject.

Here's adorable Emmie. She was my subject tonight. Tomorrow I'll take some pictures of my new nephew, Elijah James.

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This face is adorable.

Emmie

Back in September, when we were tired of unsuccessfully trying to get pregnant, we decided that maybe getting a kitten would be a good distraction. I was against this for a long time because of several reasons (cat hair, litter boxes, extra expenses, etc.) Then Justin sent me an email saying that one of his co-workers had kittens she was giving away, and that one of them was a cute little girl with an M on her forehead; so we could call her Emmie!!

Somehow this got to me, and by that evening I wanted that cat... RIGHT NOW! We couldn't get it until the next day, but as soon as we went to look at the little cutie we were both in love.

The fact that we found out 3 months later that our little Emmie was really a little boy is beside the point.