Drivel

Inspired by this blog post, I am posting a couple of pics of Casey in her bumbo seat.

She enjoys being in the sitting position, so we picked one of these up to help her sit a bit more independently.

First a picture in her frilly dress.

And an outdoor shot:

I'm not sure the best caption for the outdoor one. "Hey Mom, you forgot a sock!" or "I can see my sock, but I can't reach it." or "Oh, I had too much milk."

Both of these were taken at 14 weeks.

Casey is now three months old!

Her accomplishments:

• Spit bubbles
• Drooling (only a little bit so far)
• Waving her hands in front of her face for amusement (can't yet clasp them together)
• Holding a toy if placed in her hand, but can't grab it yet if dangled in front of her. She can also move the toy to her mouth, but this may be accidental - she may be trying to put her hand in her mouth and there is just a toy in the way, since she also bops herself in the eye with a held toy. She does grasp at things that end up near her hands, so once the hand/eye coordination works itself out, we'll have to be more careful about what we lay near her.
• Burping is much better. And now there is less spit up.
• Sleeping in her own room and in her crib
• Rolling onto her side. She sleeps better this way so even if we put her on her back, she may end up on her side
• Sleeping better at night. She still has the 4/5am feeding, but stays down better during the night
• More stable head/neck, but still does an occasional lurch
• Smiles and coos, but not for the camera. We pull out the camera and she just stares at it.

That's all I can think of at the moment.

As previously mentioned, we had the ash tree in our front yard pruned after two branches broke off. The tree looks naked now.

There isn't as much shade, but since we already had our front windows replaced with dual pane windows, and we will be getting a new AC/heating system in a couple of weeks, I think we will survive summer.

Before pruning (the leafy area on the roof is from a broken branch):

After pruning:

We didn't do a lot of different things over the long weekend, but it still feels like we had a lot going on.

Another branch fell off the tree and onto the house. Again doing no damage to the house. Our next door neighbor was the one who pointed it out to us. Perhaps we would have noticed eventually (why are there tree leaves right outside the window?), but it was nice of her to let us know about it. Once again we called out Aly's Tree Trimming. He gave us a quote for taking care of just the branch and for fixing up the whole tree. We did the latter to avoid any other falling branches. On closer inspection, it was clear it was in need of a pruning. Unlike the back trees, we hadn't done much to this one since we moved in (except have some mistletoe removed). We called Aly on Saturday and he was able to come on Monday to take care of it all. The tree kind of looks bare to me now, but overall it's probably better looking. I have before/after pictures so perhaps I will post them later.

We purchased a dresser for Casey's room.

We moved Casey into her room. Yep, she is now sleeping in her own room, in her crib instead of her bassinet. I wasn't originally planning on moving her this early, but she is a very noisy sleeper. Her leg kicking the side of the bassinet would wake me up. Because we have a monitor in her room, her sleep grunts sometimes still wake me up, but over time, we may adjust the volume down on the monitor or move the monitor (our side of it) further away from our bed - once I get comfortable that I will hear her cries in the night.

The other thing we did was get Casey on a routine. The routine is somewhat scheduled driven, but we take cues from her. It's probably a little more schedule driven right now until she gets used to the routine, but then we will adapt as needed.

I won't go into the details of how we accomplished getting her in her crib, but things are much better. As we get more used to the routine, I think all of us will benefit. Already I think Casey is sleeping better.

The basics of our routine are that she eats, then plays (wake time), then sleeps. The day starts at the same time each day (with adjustments if her middle of the night feeding ends up too close to the start of day). The length of time she is awake for play varies - when she looks to be getting tired, we put her down for a nap. And obviously at night, she eats and just goes back to sleep without any play time. The routine repeats roughly every 3 hours - since that was the feeding schedule she had put herself on before we started the routine (except at night time where we just let her go until she gets hungry). Over time the routine and length of routine will change (like she may go longer between feedings or may drop a nap or feeding).

Lookie what grandma made for Casey:

Since the picture is kind of small, I'll point out that the buttons are ducks!

I will have to make sure she gets a chance to wear it before she outgrows it by going out at night with her and/or bringing her to more of my hockey games. Grandma has another one for her in a different color and larger size for when she gets bigger.