April Fun and Progress

Caleb

Caleb is now seven months old, and what a good last month he's had developmentally! For the last week or so he has slept anywhere from seven to nine hours straight every night (except once when he woke up at 2:00 am and cried for an hour). This is especially nice for me since I am fighting a cold . . . again. Though it hasn't been the miracle worker I hoped for, I think it has prevented me from getting any more sickly.

In his first month of eating solids, he has improved so that he's actually consuming quite a bit of what I feed him now. This month we have focused on vegetables (except for avocado, which was his first food and is actually a fruit): peas, carrots, sweet potato, green beans, squash, zuchini, broccoli, and red and green bell pepper. He's also had rice cereal, and he liked Gerber's cereal better than my homemade stuff, but I did home prepare the avocado, peas, zuchini, broccoli, and bell peppers. The avocado I just mashed up, but everything else I steamed, then blended, and then froze the extra in ice cube trays. It makes me feel very domestic. A good website about feeding babies I came across is called wholesomebabyfood.com. I haven't followed everything religiously, but I think it has good information and good ideas for baby food "recipes." This month, we are introducing Caleb to fruits. There is no real reason for waiting until he was seven months old, except that our theory is that we'll expose him to lots of vegetables before doing fruit. Why a whole month? Just because Patrick decided it was a good idea. I thought it was silly, but I realized since then that it is fun to look forward to a simple way to celebrate the smaller milestones. I think we'll start with apple sauce and then a pear.

Also, Caleb has learned to sit up. At his last doctor's appointment, the doctor asked if he was sitting up and we said, "Well, no. He doesn't really like it. He would rather stand." It's funny because our perception of what he thought seems to have limited our child's growth. The doctor recommended we help him sit up a little every day and once I started doing that, he picked up on it so fast! Let that be a lesson to us.

The Parents

As far as schools go, Patrick has heard back from more than half of the schools now. He was waitlisted at two of the ones he was most interested in and hasn't yet heard back from the third, so he's now looking at the three that interest him most who have accepted him: William & Mary, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and University of Illinois. The first offered a pretty good financial package and has showed a lot of interest in him. They have also been very professional in getting notices and other information to us quickly and often. And a big plus for me is that it's in historic America, so I anticipate that there will be lots of things to see and do. Madison, of course, is closest to our families which is a draw for both of us. Patrick hasn't heard what they are offering financially yet, but it comes with in-state tuition, so that's nice. They have also been really good about responding to emails Patrick has sent, though their standard notifications via the postal service or emails (including notice of acceptance to their school) are ridiculously slow and irregular. And Illinois is nice because they have offered a good financial package, are the highest of the three in rankings, are not far from family, and might be closest to our friends who are going to Michigan.

While we are waiting for the next stage of our lives, we are not sitting around twiddling our thumbs. No, we are making the most of our summer. Okay, we don't get to hike the Grand Canyon as planned, but we still have a trip planned to Arizona to visit my brother, my niece, her mom, as well as my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. And before that, we are headed to . . . DISNEYLAND! That's right, Disneyland. This took heavy deliberation and debate, but we have decided to go for it. We are going with our friends Dan and Michelle and their little girl. We hope this means we can all get the most out of the roller coaster experience by taking turns watching the kids while we go on rides. We also calculate that this will save each family money in some respects. This is the first vacation we've taken so far (besides single night camping trips) that didn't involve family. And while we love our families, there's something to be said for a different kind of vacation every once in a while. Don't worry: I'm sure there will be lots of pictures to follow.