free standing

madelyn is getting really good at 'free standing'. she does best when she is holding something else in her hand(s) because it tricks her into thinking that what she is holding is keeping her upright. here she is this morning standing next to her highchair and playing with the straps. she would drop them and reach out and pick them up again. she must have stood like this for close to 3 minutes!

and then later in the day she would let go of the coffee table, look at me, and then take a step to the couch. she was so excited each time she went back and forth that i tried to get a video of her. unfortunately, she fell down at the end of this clip, but you can see how excited she was about her last successful pass. (note that the 'walking' was possible because she is holding her little dog.)




i took some pictures yesterday with my phone at playgroup and just uploaded them today. dylan (who just turned one this week) was trying to kiss madelyn. he was trying to balance on her which is why they both ended up on the ground 'making out'. let's just say that there was a lot of saliva involved! what will her father think?

matt finally comes home tomorrow and maddie and i can't wait to pick him up! love.

catch-up

sorry for not posting in a while, maddie is feeling so much better, but i, on the other hand, have been drained the past few days with a migraine today. not to mention that i am going in a hundred different directions and just haven't had the time to sit down and collect my thoughts. but tonight i am making the time - enjoy the update.

this picture is from today while i was resting on the couch and maddie was climbing all over me. she has been biting her bottom lip so much that she has a chaffed spot about the size of a dime on the right side of her chin and a smaller spot on the other side. it looks painful (she even scratched it today so that it bled a little), but she doesn't even seem to notice it. even when i wipe off her face after meals - nothing. so i guess that is good.

she continues to enjoy playing peek-a-boo. she has gotten better at hiding herself. in this picture she was hiding behind an end table in the living room. she just kept going up and down 'hiding' from me. you can see how much she was enjoying herself. also note the drool on her shirt from her molars coming in (i can feel one on the upper right about to cut through) although this is only half the size that it normally is because i had just changed her shirt.

yesterday her teeth were hurting her and she was being a little clingy as a result. i was trying to get some work done so i would put her back down on the floor. well, maddie wasn't going to have that and she would cry (fake cry) a little and put her forehead on the floor - her first temper tantrum. i say it was her 'first' because if she is as strong willed as her father and i are, there will be many more to come.

i love this picture of her from sunday morning before church because that is how she is most of the time - hair disheveled and a big, excited grin on her face. matt and i get so much joy from watching her enjoy each day.

lastly, maddie is taking more and more steps on her own each day as she grows more confident in her balance. we play the 'free standing' game every day and count "1-2-3-ta-da!" and then she will occasionally take a few steps towards us from her 'free stand'. maddie enjoys this game as much as we do (okay we probably get a little more excited about it than she does). its so cute because she whisper 'talks' the entire time and gets ready to balance with each count. i am hoping to get some video soon, but it is still too new to distract her right now.

okay. i have got to rest up. more later. love.

new games

madelyn and i had some fun today playing a new game. i crawl around the house and she follows me. i would crawl around the couch and down the hall to her room, etc. and she would crawl after me laughing. sometimes she would sit up to see where i was and then would start laughing when she saw me and take off again. i can't wait for her to play this new game with her daddy!

here is a video of our second new game of the day - dropping a beach ball on her belly. for some reason this was hysterical to her and i filmed it because she was snorting when she laughed.



her new trick of the day is that she can get herself back down after she pulls up on something. it takes her a few tries, but she doesn't need me to help her down any more and she doesn't fall to hit her face. i am so proud of her for being such a 'big girl'!



she also started making repetitive "b" sounds last night. i wonder what word she will say next...

just to give you an idea for what a wiggle worm she is, today she sat down from standing and when she came right back up she had somehow gotten her arm out of her sleeve in less than two seconds! and then she sat back down to play again.

on the foods front tomorrow we start tofu as a finger food. the egg yolks have gone over great - she gobbled up her oatmeal/millet porridge this morning when i mixed in the hard boiled yolk and avocado (sounds disgusting, right?). it was almost a full cup worth of food!

i can't wait to see what new things she will have for me tomorrow! love.

catching up

i have been super busy with mom's visit and work and that is why there has not been much blogging over the past few days. mom got home safely last night and even got to see some more snow falling on her way to the airport.

oh and can i just say "yeah chargers!"? it was a happy sunday at our house when we saw that the chargers had won! we had spent the day outlet shopping and matt did everything he could to avoid the score until he could get home and watch it the dvr copy of the game. he even made me turn maddie's chargers bib backwards so that no one would be tempted into commenting on the game at lunch.

here is video of madelyn using her non-walking toy for walking yesterday. it just kept sliding away and she kept right up with it. now i can just move her to one side of my office and let her 'walk' to the other side over and over and over - you get the idea. at least she is slower at this than crawling.




she is also trying really hard to 'walk' and cruise along the furniture. she was trying to get from the laundry basket to the coffee table but couldn't quite reach. instead she settled to reach for the other side of the laundry basket and found herself stuck with both feet in the air. i started laughing and she started crying because she was stuck. which just made me laugh more because she was so cute.

now for food news. yesterday we started brown rice and oatmeal porridge. she will finally eat the rice porridge! i think that the oatmeal either helped the rice grind finer or just evened out the overall texture. she has also taken to peas, but today we tried green beans and she hated them! she was choking on them, making awful faces and finally spit them up. i guess that we will just have to try them again in a few weeks. tomorrow we move on to carrots.


you might have noticed that in the posts from january 1 through january 9 maddie was wearing puffy painted onesies. these were lovingly made at my baby shower in florida this past summer. the fit her perfectly now and she really liked to feel the texture of the paint on each of them. thanks to everyone who helped make them for her!

that's all for tonight. love.

packers saturday

so on the day when everyone is glued to their t.v.s around here, i decide to host a pampered chef party. i wasn't thinking about the playoffs and i should have been - oh well. we even went to church tonight instead of tomorrow morning. i was seriously worried that we would be the only people in wisconsin not watching the packers game, but surprisingly there was a fairly decent turnout - not great, but decent.

we spent the whole morning cleaning up the house, then the party went from around 12:30 to 4:00 and after that we were at church by 5:00. not a lot accomplished today, but we did get a lot of fun maddie pictures for your viewing enjoyment. love.

maddie riding on her new toy lion from grandma and big pop. we tried to have her walk with it first, but she didn't like when it moved. when we sat her on it she was accidentally rolling herself backwards.

here she is standing in her crib for the first time. well the first time she was able to stand herself up in her crib anyway.

just hanging around with daddy.

my little volleyball baby.

standing in her church dress from grandma and big pop. she is getting to be such a big girl!

madelyn and grandma

on a side note, the pampered chef party was a gluten-free one because a few of the kids in the neighborhood have allergies and i wanted to know more about cooking snacks for them when i hosted playgroup. i have a whole new level of respect for anyone who has to prepare meals around allergies. one of the mom's even got a little teary-eyed talking about it - granted she is pregnant with baby #2 - because her daughter is 16 months and has some severe allergies.

play yard standing

tonight madelyn stood herself up in her play yard. i was probably a little too excited about it (i scared matt). i was getting dinner ready and looked up and she was standing. while we were eating at the table (right next to the play yard) she fell down - well she tripped on her lilly doll - and we got to watch her get herself back up again. she just worked her hands up the side and over the top. and she was pretty quick about it too! she was pretty proud of herself and could even walk end to end - back and forth. what was a little concerning is that she is already trying to get her legs up and over too. i can just hear her little brain thinking - "i am so out of here"!

i like this picture of her smiling because you can see most of her teeth. (you will need to click on it to really see them well.) it is crazy to see all those teeth in her mouth! i almost don't recognize her - she just looks so different.

maddie got her first paper cut today. the only reason i noticed was because she bled on the product catalog she was turning pages in under my desk. i couldn't figure out how she could have started bleeding because she didn't cry at all. and then i found the paper cut on her finger. boy is she tough. i have seen grown men make a fuss over a paper cut and here my six month old doesn't even make a peep.

she is also starting to get more daring when standing by letting go with at least one hand and trying to move between objects by reaching. luckily she doesn't cry every time she falls. i'm telling you, she is one tough kid. i think that she has to be tough in order to keep up with her active lifestyle!

oh, one more random maddie story from today. she crawled out of her nursery and into the guest bedroom out of pure curiosity - not to follow me. we had better get the baby gate on the stairs this weekend (or sooner).

i have to go get my mom at the airport tonight. she is going to be here until monday. love.

standing up

maddie was crawling all over my office today from one toy to the next. so i got to filming. i was disappointed because as soon as i turned the camera on she got sort of tied up in her book and stopped crawling around. i almost stopped filming, but then she grabbed on to her toy and stood up to play! and when it started sliding she walked along with it. i was so glad to have caught it on tape. she has pulled herself up several times, but this was the first official 'stand'. enjoy! love.

capturing Christmas

i haven't been feeling all that Christmas-y this year. i think its because we won't be home so there are no decorations, or cookies, or anything resembling Christmas that i can see on a daily basis. i also do almost all my shopping on-line so there hasn't been much shopping either. but what we did do was go out for family portraits today with maddie in her Christmas dress. she looked so grown-up! and i think we actually got a decent family shot this time. i can't wait to get the prints. they also had some 'santa sleeves' and white gloves for matt to wear while maddie held his hands and stood-up - very sweet... we got this very pretty dress and hair bows (with jingle bells) for only $0.86 thanks to a gift certificate we had been hanging on to for the purpose of buying her a Christmas dress. i was really excited for such a bargain! and maddie liked the dress so much when we tried it on at home that i couldn't get her to look up at the camera! luckily, she did better at the portrait studio.

maddie and i did some other shopping today before heading to the mall for pictures including home depot and target. since she is getting to be such a big girl i decided that we would try sitting in the cart by herself and it couldn't have gone better! she did great the whole time we were shopping (and since it was target you know that we were there a while). i was afraid to get kicked out for using my real camera so the picture is from my cell phone.

she is also getting her arms straight out while she does her rocking. before she was just getting up to her elbows, but now she can get all the way up to her hands. she isn't quite crawling, but she has figured out that if she gets all the way up to her hands and rocks back a forth a few times, she can lunge herself forward enough to reach a toy (or her daddy) that is too far away.

she is also ready for some new toys. but i am trying to control myself until the grandparents do their gift giving. it just seems like she is ready to move beyond her rattles and stuffed animals. especially now that she can sit and move more. she has also taken a great interest in standing on her own (she doesn't want to be in her exersaucer, she wants to be outside holding herself up while playing with the toys) so we might look for something that will help her pull herself up to a standing position. every time i go to get her from a nap now she has both hands on the top of her bumper or on the crib bars themselves trying to pull herself up so she is definitely getting ready.

since i didn't take any video today, here is one from yesterday. i was trying to get her doing this soft "singing" with the keys in her mouth, but when the camera went on she realized that she wasn't alone and started to get fussy because it was nap time. oh well. love.

i'm back already

i am back from my trip to chicago and ready to blog again - so get off my back already! i would have gotten on last night, but i came down with a 24 hour cold. i felt fine in the morning but ended up sleeping most of the afternoon and had a 100.7 degree fever last night. but feel much better today.

maddie changed SO MUCH while i was gone! i knew that she changed everyday, but it was unbelievable when i went to pick her up how different she was! she felt heavier and her face looked really different too. plus, she was sitting up better and her dexterity had changed dramatically. she can pick up the smallest objects (like my fleece zipper) with very fluid movements. its difficult to explain, but the difference was very striking to me.

as you can see her daddy is proud of his work with the sweet potatoes! (this was one of the few pictures he took while i was gone.) matt would have posted more, but he was in the final week of writing and giving reviews and just didn't have even one spare minute.

and she finally showed some interest in holding the sippy cup herself. she always tries with a normal cup, but the handles of the sippy cup were of no interest to her. matt said that he just set it on the high chair tray and she picked it up and started drinking!

she did pull herself up while holding on to the laundry basket on sunday night before i left for the week. (the picture is a posed reenactment.) she is so anxious to get moving! we just keep saying that we are going to be in trouble when she really gets mobile...

okay, i just spent three hours on a christmas project and i am going to make matt a turkey dinner tomorrow and work on a million other things that i need to get done in the two weeks before we leave for kansas, so i am going to have to call it a night. i just wanted to make a quick post before bed since i have been m.i.a. and some of you are going through withdrawal. love.