Eleven & Twelve Months Old

Eleven Months Old

Twelve Months Old

Fiona started to get really confident with walking just as we left for Sweden in the middle of July and she hasn’t sat still since. This made for very interesting flight and train rides where we got to know everyone on board since she would walk up and down the aisles and talk to everyone. She is a very social little person who loves to chat with friends and strangers alike. That is as long as mamma is in the room, if I leave she will simply scream till I return.

She is getting really good at climbing as well and has no fear when it comes to heights. She also has all the confidence in the world which results in a dangerous combination, as her bruises will show. She loves to climb up on the step stools we have and Emmett’s little desk chair. In the yard her favorite thing to do is to climb up the little slide and sit down and slide back down it.

She has become such a little individual since she started walking and it’s a pure joy to watch her go about her business; walking around, picking stuff up in one room and dropping them off in another. Needless to say, the disorder in our house is at an all time high.

One of my favorite things that she does is to sit in a chair or on a step and when she does she instinctively starts to swing her little legs, it’s simply the cutest thing in the world. Other times she comes over to you when you are sitting on the floor and she turns around, backs up and plops herself on your lap, and your heart melts :).

Fiona doesn’t say many words yet (mostly mamma, dada and Emmett) but she can still carry on a whole conversation with people by using her baby language and her expressive eyes and faces she makes. She sounds like a minion when she talks which I find hilarious. She also enjoys singing quite a bit, just like her brother.

Fiona and Emmett are starting to find mutual interests finally and you can even catch them playing together every now and then. They both like the game of chasing and being chased, this game could go on for hours if it was up to them. Both of them enjoy singing and playing the keyboard, and at times they can do it together without too much of a struggle :). It’s such a treat to get to see them interact and to see their relationship evolve.

Current measurements:
Weight: 22 lb 10 oz (10263 grams)
Height: 2′ 6.25″ (76.8 cm)

Ten Months Old – Flo on the Go

Fiona has had the nickname Flo since she was just a month or so. It came from Emmett mispronouncing her name by saying Flona, then it just caught on and a lot of times it feels like that name fits her better than Fiona. So sometimes she is Fiona and sometimes she is Flo :).

This past month her favorite hobby has been to walk around holding a hand or even a finger and working on her balance when standing by herself. She likes to walk along the furniture and crawls after you whenever you leave the room. As long as she is awake she is constantly on the go and this sunday she actually took a few steps all on her own! I can’t wait till she can walk around on her own so I can do other things than hold her hand all day :).

A few of her other favorite activities right now are: clapping, waiving, dancing to 90s hip hop music and eating all sorts of finger foods!!

Current measurements (at 9 1/2 months):
Weight
Height

Nine Months Old – Wild Animal Baby

Our calm little content girl has become a wild animal baby!!! As soon as you started moving around and got more comfortable with crawling and pulling herself up on everything she has gotten quite the attitude. It’s fun to see more of her personality come out and she is definitely not as calm and laid back as we thought she was. Growling and screeching is how she communicates her needs and wants and boy does she have a ton of needs and wants these days :). If something doesn’t go her way she gets super angry and screams. We started calling her our wild animal baby cause she acts more primal now than ever.

She likes to pull herself up everywhere and started to explore her environment very thoroughly. She is not as cautious as Emmett used to be and so she gets into trouble way more often. She is also very stubborn and does not take no for an answer.

When Fiona started eating cereal I was curious to see if she was gonna be a picky eater or a foodie and after trying all sorts of food I can absolutely conclude that she is a foodie with a capital F! She loves food and loves trying everything we eat. She gets super excited when food comes on the table and starts growling and grunting when waiting for food. When she eats she is saying nom-nom-nom all through the meal, it is so hilarious! We have one kid that sees food as an inconvenience and a hindrance to play time and one kid that absolutely lives for food right now. It’s funny to see how different they are already.

Fiona’s hair started getting really long, especially her bangs. It is getting so long that it’s almost getting into her eyes. We might need to give her a trim pretty soon. Also, she finally got her first tooth this month!!

One of her favorite things to do is to drive her little brio cart around. Her whole face lights up when you put her down “behind the wheel”, as you can see in the pictures below.

A Day in the Life of Emmett – 2015

7:30 am – Sunday breakfast, the best part is peeling the egg, not so much eating it 🙂

8:45 am – drawing in his room

9:55 am – being goofy at IKEA

10:55 am – the play area at IKEA is definitely Emmett’s favorite part of the trip!

11:40 am – after being good at IKEA he got to pick out 5 candies at the candy station

1:10 pm – home again and playing with his best friend and neighbor Emiliano

2:25 pm – still going, wrestle time!

3:50 pm – more play outside on this beautiful april day, swinging with mamma and Fiona

5:05 pm – wrestling with pappa and Fiona in bed, definitely their favorite hobby these days

6:30 pm – bath time with duckie

7:45 – bed and story with pappa

I started this tradition of documenting a day in the life of Emmett when he was just a little baby and  I hope that we get to continue the tradition for years to come. We took these pictures on April 12th, a surprisingly warm and sunny spring day. This year was our first in our house and you can tell that playtime with the neighbors is a very important part of his life these days. You can also tell that life has become a bit more hectic with two kids and sticking to a photo an hour is quite hard to do :).

Previous years:

2012

2013

2014

Eight Months Old – Busy Bee

We have now entered a busy bee phase for both baby and mamma, Fiona is now officially crawling and trying to pull herself up on everything. So mamma’s number one job is now to stay close by and be ready with a helping hand when needed. This means that the house is now messier than ever and I have to put her in the walker when I need to cook to limit her curiousness. She is very daring in her investigative ways and if I disappear out of sight she comes looking for me. I’m just now getting used to her not being in the same place i left her when I leave the room and come back.

Fiona has become quite the foodie and enjoys both cereal and baby food meals and also likes to taste our food. So far she pretty much likes everything she tries. She still nurses a bit but definitely seam to be more interested in real food these days.

Fiona’s new favorite hobbies are: walking with mamma or pappa holding her hands, stealing Emmett’s toys, eating pieces of paper and pebbles off the floor, taking baths in the big tub, and swinging.

Her absolute favorite thing is wrestling with pappa and Emmett in the bed. She absolutely goes bonkers and squeals out of joy as she tries to take down big brother and pappa with her slobbery little hands and her gummy bites.

Seven Months Old – Growling Monster Baby

Fiona is on the move! She’s not officially crawling but she is pulling herself around and pulls herself in circles to find the toy she wants (which usually isn’t even a toy but something that she definitely should not be putting in her mouth:)). She also stands on all four and rocks back and forth so I’m thinking she will be crawling pretty soon. Time to hide all of Emmett’s little toys!!!

The growling is still her main method of communication and it’s so hilarious to hear her go on and on. She also says a variety of combinations of sounds like mama, dada, nejnej (no no in swedish), blabla, etc.

Fiona is such a happy girl and Emmett loves to make her laugh and she thinks Emmett the funniest guy on the planet :). Any face or funny sound he makes will make her laugh out loud. You can see a few examples of this in the videos below:

We have had the pleasure of having mormor visit for two and a half weeks. She just went back home a week ago and the house now feels very empty. Both kids got spoiled with mormor’s attention while she was here and now they are both whiny and wants mormor to come back and play with them :). Thankfully morfar is coming to visit in May and Emmett has already started asking when it is time to go pick him up at the airport!

Here are a few pictures from mormor’s visit…

Warm weather and crawl practice on the porch

Here we go!

Swinging in the park on a sunny day

Swinging in the backyard with mormor

Six Months Old – Jump Around

Happy half birthday to our little girl! She has now officially entered her “monster-baby” phase and is enjoying growling and screaming just for the fun of it :). It is simply hilarious! She is laughing and giggling a lot more as well. She likes it when we tickle her and she absolutely goes bonkers when Emmett tries to wrestle with her! For now he just kind of gets close to her and tickle and rough house a bit with her but I foresee a lot more wrestling in their future as they both seem to love this activity.

Emmett also loves kissing and hugging her of course and she gets just as excited for those signs of affection. It makes me so happy and fills my heart with love to see Emmett really care for her and wanna make sure that she is happy and content.

Fiona’s absolute favorite thing to do right now is to sit in the Johnny jump up and bounce her little heart out. She can sit in there for a long time and just be super content bouncing and watching everything going on around the house. She is pretty easy to keep happy right now, I’m a little worried for when she starts moving around tho. Mostly cause I will have to sort through all of Emmett’s toys to hide away all the small choke-hazardous items and I’m sure it won’t be as easy to keep all the unsuitable items out of her reach as it was with Emmett. Any tips from parents who have already gone through this adjustment?

A couple weeks back she started trying some baby cereal and she absolutely loved it and was gobbling it down like no tomorrow… Then she got sick and she didn’t want to eat anything for about a week… And now we’re slowly trying to get back on track with eating but it is going slower than the first time, possibly because she is still feeling a bit of the cold and is stuffed up. I’m hoping she will start enjoying cereal soon again. She has also tried a bit of avocado and banana and has loved that so odds are she is gonna like food a lot. This week we are going to try out some sweet potato and carrots, I’ll let you know how that goes :).

We have all been going through varying degrees of a cold the last 4 weeks and I am really hoping everyone is going to start feeling better soon. Is it so draining to see the kids suffer from coughing attacks and just being in a bad mood because they are out of energy. Add a mom who has had a cold for 4 weeks on top of that and we have a very tired family. Emmett and Fiona seem to be on the mend now tho so we are really hoping for a more healthy spring to come around very soon!!!

Current measurements:
Weight 8278 g (18 lb 4 oz)
Length 65.4 cm (26 inches)

Laughing at pappa

Five Months Old – Sit Training

This little charming girl has developed a lot since the last update. It feels like things are going twice as fast as when Emmett was a little baby and i just can’t believe that she is almost half a year old. It probably feels like time is moving extra fast because this time you have another little human who demands your attention and Fiona is just kinda there for the ride so far.

Fiona is definitely more interested in being apart of our family activities now. She tries to sit up as soon as you lean her back on some pillows cause she just wants to check out what we are up to and watch what Emmett is playing with. She now sits with us at the dinner table in her high chair and observes what we are doing. She is very interested in what we are putting in our mouths and very soon we will start trying out some cereal with her.She is such a little chunk and it’s going to be interesting to find out if she is gonna be a foodie like her father or a picky eater like Emmett :).

She is getting more and more vocal and a few weeks ago she started screaming at the top of her lungs as soon as something didn’t go her way. Fortunately that behavior has subsided :). She is also experimenting more with her voice and just recently started saying “bla bla bla” which is the cutest thing ever! She is also laughing more and more and is very ticklish. When we undress her she is usually giggling and smiling on the changing table.

She is still sleeping very good at night. With the exception of one night last week when Andy was traveling to Boston and she decided that she wanted to be awake for a couple hours in the middle of the night, like she noticed that someone was missing and she wanted to figure out were pappa had gone. Besides sleeping very good at night she doesn’t really nap that much during the day. She naps about three times per day and the naps last exactly 30 min each, it’s like she has a built in alarm clock that wakes her up exactly 30 minutes after she falls asleep. It’s very hard to get her back down at that point as she wakes up with a smile on her face ready to play :). But even tho she sleeps so little during the day she is in a good mood 99% of the time and most of the time she is very content with simply watching me and Emmett as we go about our day. I’m sure that is about to change very soon tho once she gets more mobile!

Four Months Old – Santa Baby

Our little baby girl started her fifth month of life with a horrible cold and cough. It started last week on Wednesday morning with a fever and on Thursday we went in to the doctors office because she had gotten an awful barking cough and found out that she had croup. She got some meds and the cough got better pretty quick but she had a few days of bad sleep at night and whiny days. Now she mostly has a cough but seems to be in a better mood at least. It’s so sad to see her unhappy and know that there’s very little you can do to make her feel better.

Besides baby’s first cold the past month has been just as pleasant as the previous ones. Fiona loves to sit in her bouncy chair and watch what Emmett and I are doing. The daily routines are going a lot smoother at home and it feels like we are back on track, at least for now.

Her hand-eye coordination has really excelled and she now puts everything in her mouth. She’s gotten a lot use out of her “Sophie the giraffe” that she got from my brother and sister-in-law for her baptism.

Her legs, although very chubby, have gained a lot of strength and she can support her weight on them without any trouble. She likes to stand on my lap to look at everything going on around her.

Everything seems to be happening way faster this time around. Time is simply racing by and she is growing and learning every day. I’m so glad that I can spend my days with her and Emmett and get to enjoy them to the fullest.

Current measurements:
Weight: 15lb 12oz (7144 grams)
Height: 25 inches (63.5 cm)

This puts her at the same height as Emmett at four months but a little more than a pound heavier than him. She is a chunky little monkey for sure :).

We are really looking forward to the holidays and the time we get to spend with the family. Emmett and I have been baking cookies and decorating the tree to get ready for the festivities. Emmett asks every day if Santa is coming :). We just sent out our Christmas cards in the mail and we had a ton of fun taking the photos this year. Emmett loved posing with his car and Fiona and I tried a few different set ups. Here’s a few of the photos I snapped.

Three Months Old – Hanging with Morfar

This little girl makes me smile so many times every day. Fiona is such a happy girl and you just can’t stop smiling when you are with her. She loves to smile back at you too! I think she is getting close to her first real laugh. She gets really excited when she thinks something is funny and she wiggles her whole body and does a sound that is pretty close to a laugh.

She really enjoys her bouncy chair these days which has freed up my hands so I can now get some stuff done around the house even! She loves sitting in it and observing what is going on around her, and with Emmett around stuff is always going on! She kicks her legs a lot and gets the bouncy chair rocking. She’s very self sufficient :).

Just this week she started grabbing hold of things and of course putting them straight in her mouth. She likes to chew on her soft bunny rattle and bunny security blanket.

We’ve had the pleasure of having morfar stay with us the past three weeks and both kids are loving having him around. Fiona gets to be held a lot and Emmett has someone to work with his tools with.

Morfar even got to experience Fiona’s first halloween! Emmett had picked out costumes for the whole family: Emmett was gonna be Spider-Man, Fiona Superman, Moby Batman, Pappa Hulk, Mamma Black Widow and Morfar Captain America. He has a sticker book with all the Marvel characters so he knew exactly who should be what :). Unfortunately only the kids dressed up but they were super cute!!! Emmett loved the concept of knocking on the neighborhoods’ doors to get candy. Fiona slept through it all in the ergo baby. All in all a wonderful first halloween in our lovely house!

Blue eyed baby girl

Heads-up!

Hanging with morfar

Halloween!!