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Not much news on the Molly front. Her diet is expanding and her sleep is decreasing. I will be grateful for the 8-10 hours that she gives me at night, since I know that not everyone gets that. My mother has informed me many times that she never got that until much much later. I think that her memory must be clouded because I'm pretty sure I was perfect. To complain just a little though, she makes me work hard for her sleep. She isn't one of those sweet babies who nurses to sleep. On the worst days/nights there is hitting pinching and scratching involved. I know to look at her you wouldn't think she could deliver much pain, but she must work out or something because she can totally kicks my ass if she wants to.
She had her 6 month check-up a few weeks ago and he pretty much just told us that she's awesome. Honestly, I don't need a professional to tell me that :-)
Molly is now 6 months and so I went and had some pictures taken. These are the highlights, and some low lights too.


JazzHands!

This one is just too funny not to include.

For some reason the whole time she kept giving the camera this strange little crooked smile, not sure why, but regardless I think we have some winners!

The Princess and her Peas

We have now expanded Molly's diet to include peas. They actually went over pretty well at first. I think she enjoys new experiences and then quickly wants to move on because now she seems to be over peas. One thing that seems to help is having Jonny feed her instead of me. He seems to have far more success than I ever do.
Molly enjoying some delicious pea mush.

Just to continue the whole feeding time theme, Molly has become pretty interested in drinking (just water...not the hard stuff yet). I have given her a sippy cup a few times with a tiny bit of water but what she's really interested in are real cups. She's even starting to operate them better than I thought she would be able to. The other day I had a glass of what had been orange juice, when she grabbed it I wasn't too concerned since it was empty, but then I noticed that she had managed to tilt her head back and get those last few drops out of the bottom.
Molly enjoying some fresh O.J.
This isn't a new obsession and I believe that there are plenty of other babies that have this same interest but I thought it was worth mentioning because it cracks me up. Molly has an uncanny ability to find and grab any tag on anything. They have a whole line of baby toys that have "taggies" all over them. We have a taggy toy, but even on the taggy toy, she always goes straight for the real tag. It's pretty funny.

Finding the tag on the tag toy. Awesome!

Finding the tag underneath her blanket.


This is a good one...she maneuvered her way to the base of her mobile in order to get to the tag on it.

Even when I'm rocking her to sleep, she manages to find a tag. She pulled this one out of the seat of the rocker.

In other Molly news, I bought her a new contraption to play with. It's the same one that her buddy Kate Monster has. I had visions of myself doing the dishes and cleaning the kitchen while Molly happily played in it. There are two things that are true about that sentence 1) My life has become pretty dull if this is what excites me and 2) I have become delusional. While Molly does enjoy her toy to some extent, she doesn't enjoy it enough to let me actually get anything done. Oh-well, they're only little once right? time to enjoy it.

Enjoying some Toucan beak. Are Toucans endangered? Should I be encouraging this?

Weigh in

Molly's been up to more of the same: growing and learning. I took her for a weigh in at Jonny's office the other day. We tried laying her on the scale, but it was too awkward and her legs were just dangling off the end so we sat her up instead. That seemed to work, but she's not 100% at sitting so I was poised ready to catch her or throw myself down to break her fall or something dramatic like that. In the end it wasn't necessary. She's about 16 lbs 10 oz (the scale shows tenths of pounds, not ounces).

Sitting up and looking big

Chunking up!

While we were there Molly and I went and checked out the fire pole they have in their office. She was pretty into it. At one point she tasted it, so far there haven't been any ill effects from that...fingers crossed.

Also new and exciting is the neat new toy that Grayson let her borrow. She's really into it and loves to sit, check her look, and go crazy hitting it and rocking out to some her favorite tunes. She's a big fan of "If you're happy and you know it" and "Head, Shoulders, Knees and toes".
As you can see, she takes it pretty seriously!

I've mentioned before that I'm sort of over my dogs...that still stands.

As if I don't have enough laundry. What you don't see in this picture is me flipping Riley off. I know we live in close quarters and I know that there are a limited number of places to lie down, but I have given them about an eighth of the space in my bedroom for their huge beds. Apparently that isn't good enough.

Raspberry Queen

Since my parents have left town again, I thought I better get back in the swing with the postings. I have to keep them up to date on Molly news.

I'm starting to fear that I have somehow stunted Molly's development by teaching her how to blow raspberries. It's by far her favorite way to communicate with us, and it's the only sound that she's learned that she has continued using consistently. My mom has started calling her the raspberry queen. Here's a video Mere took of Grandma with her little raspberry queen!

There isn't much new since the last post. Molly becomes more and more stable while sitting everyday and she is still obsessed with standing. She isn't too concerned with taking any steps towards crawling, whenever I try to encourage the crawling position she locks her legs and end up in more of a downward dog position. She has however started to use rolling as a method for getting from points a to b. The other day I put her on the ground to play and while I was ignoring her (I never said I was mother of the year!) she rolled about six feet from where she started in only a couple of minutes, I better start paying better attention!

Another new obsession of Molly's are hands. All hands are interesting to her now. She loves to look at them and she loves when I open and close my hands while chanting "open, close, open, close" Now I catch her checking her own hands out. here are a couple pictures of her looking at her hands.

"Hands are freaking amazing"

I think she may have a future as a hand model.

I had mentioned in my last post that I hadn't done a baby book. Well yesterday my mom was showing me her and my grandmother's baby books. They were so fun to look at that I thought I was really robbing her of something by not having one. Anyhow while I was looking at them I said to my mom that I wished that they had books that had a look to them more like my grandmother's (the pictures in her book were really cool). So I set off online looking for the perfect baby book. There were tons of cute ones, but then I came across Terra Tradition's books. The pictures on the pages reminded me of the pages in my grandmother's book, so I couldn't resist. Also, they have a ton of different covers to choose from with really neat cover art, I like it anyhow :-) So now Molly Mac will have a baby book! Yea!

Here are some pictures taken with Mere's fancy camera. It seems to capture her bright eyes really well.

recessive genes in action!

"I was shakin' in my shoes whenever she flashed those baby blues"

"Please! No more pictures! I'm a very important hand model, I have places to be!"

Crib Notes

Well since Dustin has resorted to harassing me on facebook, I better get going on another post! Actually I need the tough love seeing as I'm apparently not doing a baby book, sorry Molly Mac, mommy sucks at that kind of stuff. If I keep this up, I can feel less guilty about the whole baby book thing.

I haven't posted lately, because there really hasn't been much to post about. The only big thing is that Molly has been sleeping in her crib more and more, and she now spend every night there. She seemed to want to sleep on her side which really didn't work out so well in the Amby baby, so I thought I would let her give the crib a try. She is really into sleeping on her side and at night she almost always ends up on her stomach. I'm not thrilled about this especially since she frequently has her face crammed onto the mattress despite my efforts to move her. I know that they say once they can do it themselves, there isn't a whole lot you can do about it and that they are probably past any severe risk, but I would appreciate if she would at least leave a visible air passage. She's been doing really well once she's asleep (before is a whole different story) she usually sleeps for at least 8 consecutive hours followed by another 3. As I mentioned above getting her to sleep is a whole other story. Since we don't have the sweet sweet rocking motion of the Amby baby to lull her off to dreamland, I'm left trying to play the part of sandman. Sometimes its great (she nurses herself to sleep :-) sometimes it takes some effort. Sometimes it ends in tears (mine and hers). Actually she doesn't really cry much as long as I'm rocking her and she even falls asleep pretty well...the trick is getting her to stay asleep. Imagine you've just spent 15 minutes dutifully rocking your peaceful baby to sleep, you gently lay her in her crib, she rolls over pops her head up and starts checking things out as if the past 15 minutes never happened. Not to be set back, you start again, this time it only takes 5 minutes, your feeling victorious, you set her down...same thing. Repeat this about 8 times and you have a fussy baby lying in her crib while mom goes to find some sort of blunt object to poke her eyes out with (mine not hers, I'm not sick) Thankfully this isn't every night, unfortunately they're the ones I remember.

While I was relieved that the transition to the crib went so well, I found out the hard way that she is soooo over the Amby baby now. Last Thursday we took a quick overnight trip to Carlsbad, CA to visit some family. I thought she would just nod off in the Amby like she did so many times before...wrong! The Amby baby is soooo two weeks ago so we had a longer night than usual. Regardless, it was still nice to introduce her to some of her family that hasn't met her yet. Unfortunately I'm a bad mother and I really only took a couple pictures. So here's one from the trip along with some other recent shots.

Hanging out with cousin Allison in Carlsbad. My only CA picture :-( at least it's a good one.

Hanging out with cousin Madeline before bedtime.

Hanging out with Granny after a generous helping of gruel.

That winning Molly Mac smile!

Jonny took this video a while back on his cell phone but we just got it on our computer. I think it's pretty cute, but I'm biased.

If you don't eat your meat you can't have any pudding

I decided on a whim that today would be the day that Molly had her first "real food"-rice cereal. I kept wondering if I should or not. When we went to the Dr. last she said that if she seemed interested that it was worth a shot and she's definitely interested. Of course she's interested in everything that we do, not just eating. The other day she went out to eat with my parents and I and at one point during the meal she had her hand in a sweet potato, so I figured that's a sign...right? Well she was definitely in to it, she was grabbing and opening her mouth like crazy. It was as if we had been starving her these past 5 months (not likely since she continues to be in the upper percentiles for weight gain, height and head circumference) and it was just now that we found a way to properly satiate her. I was surprised how well it went since they say that they usually only want a teaspoon or so...she took at least a couple tablespoons and that's taking into account that a ton of it ended up on the floor, on the bumbo, on her, on me. So I guess since it went so well, we'll do this for awhile and then move onto some more exciting foods, I'm thinking butternut squash since Jonny has some that he grew in his garden...hopefully I can find our food mill.

Here's a video we took of her first feeding. In a previous video Jonny was making fun of her gruel (he didn't think it looked that appetizing) and in this one we had progressed to trying (poorly) to quote "Oliver" and "The Wall". Just a warning to all who watch, Jonny (as always) has a rated R mouth, but hey you were already warned once when you signed onto the blog in the first place. Jonny's lack of control over his language is probably going to make for some interesting future blogs.

Trying to do it "by self" Ramsey knows what I'm talking about!

Eagerly awaiting the next delicious bite.

Her captive audience

This is just a bonus pic I took the other day. I thought it was pretty funny.

Working Girl

No, not that kind of working girl. For the past two weeks, Molly and I have been working hard at the beauty school. Since the school was on vacation, I came in to answer the phone with Molly in tow. We've had a pretty good time, she definitely enjoyed the easy access to grandma, grandpa, aunt Meredith, and cousin Jeffrey. They've started calling Molly the "little time sucker" because no matter what important things they needed to be doing, somehow she managed to pry them away from it.

In the past two weeks or so, Molly has been coming up with some new tricks, some good, some annoying. Probably the biggest thing is that she'll now roll over from her back to her belly. She's been reluctant to do it since she pretty much hates being on her belly, but lately the things around her, that she just needs desperately to get to have been more important than her desire to not be on her belly. Unfortunately she's regressed in that she now doesn't want to roll over from her belly to her back. so now once she's on her belly, and has the toy or whatever that she just had to have, she starts to scream for someone to take her off of her belly. It's a pretty fun game. She's also become much more grabby lately and is constantly wanting things that she really shouldn't have and of course if you take these things away from her, its pretty upsetting. I remember reading somewhere that infants at her age have a memory of about 7 seconds...my ass. She remembers and she holds a grudge for at least a minute, or until you do something just so undeniably awesome that she can't help herself from being happy. Well here are some pictures that we took while we were working hard downtown!

playing with Aunt Mere

Playing with my Bee!(her absolute favorite)

Biting off more than she can chew

Taking a break to goof off with Daddy.

Home at last after a long hard day!