Fun stuff

I don't have a while lot of time right now (I know, you're shocked!) so I'll make this short and sweet. Teagan is just shy of eight months and crawls everywhere. He pulls himself up on the furniture and has started cruising around it too. He's doing great! He has three teeth, his two bottom middle and his top left incisor. His right one is coming in but hasn't made it all the way through yet. I just noticed the two front middle starting to make an appearance. Teagan loves music and singing, he is off the bottle and now gets his formula in a sippy cup. Apparently if you switch early you don't have to deal with as much attachment difficulties. I have to admit it was easier with him than it was with Noah. We'll see once we switch him to whole milk how that goes before I make a final assessment. Teagan is a talker! And a squealer! He pretty much just loves to make noise. He's very expressive and happy. He loves to be included in all things even if it's just Noah going potty. He loves solid food now, his favorite is carrots. He has about half as much hair as Noah did at this age. He's such a fun little guy!

Noah is such a big boy now! He is so much fun to converse with and he's constantly surprising us with the words he says now. He's so funny!
I was making Teagan some formula the other day and Noah said, "Teagan wants a bottle?"
To which I replied, "No, Teagan wants his cup."
Noah: "No, bottle!"
Me: "He has a cup now, no more bottles. See, the cup has a spout and his bottle had a nipple."
Noah: "Teagan has a bottle."
Me: "No, Teagan has a cup."
Noah: In a patronizing voice dripping with sarcasm, "Ok, momma."

He wants to do everything himself and is getting to be incredibly indepenent. He loves Winnie the Pooh and Thomas. We play trains all day long. For the most part he's a good eater. I'm very much looking forward to the holidays this year, he's at the perfect age to really start enjoying them!

I'm out of time for now but I'll be back again soon! Happy Halloween!

Growing and GROWING

Noah is officially two and a half! It's so crazy to think about that! He has been wearing undies for over a month now and it's so exciting!! He does really well with pee, minimal accidents. Poop is another story entirely! He did really good with it for about three days. Telling me when he had to go before he went in his undies, then he started going in his pants and telling me after. Now we're in a weird spot where he goes in the morning right after he wakes up. So it's in the pull-up at least but the toilet would be more preferable... Tonight he started asking to go by himself, didn't even want me in the bathroom with him. Bitter-sweet moment for me.  :-) We've started looking into preschool and think we may have found a winner but he can't start until January/February. It's a pretty exciting time at our house!

Teagan just turned 6 months on Tuesday, I found him sitting up completely in his crib the other day. And now he's mastered going from laying down to sitting up. It's so cute how he does it, he'll get up on his hands and knees and then up onto his hands and toes, he kind of walks his hands back at that point until gravity takes over and he lands on his bum.  :-) He smiles all the time! He's getting so big! He still doesn't have as much hair as Noah did by this age but he's just so stinkin cute! He definitely looks like he might get a little bit darker hair than Noah has too but only time will tell. He's got some mini dimples going on which just adds to the cuteness. We're trying to transition from bottle to sippy cup right now, I hear the earlier you do it, the easier it is. If anyone has any good transition cup recommendations I'd love to hear them, so far I haven't found any that work.

Is nap time and I've got to get some stuff done today so that's all for now. We love and miss you all.

~Tiph

A few pictures

I know it's not nearly enough but I thought I'd share these few from my phone. I'll try to do a large batch tonight from the computer.

Double time

Oh man! I just read that last post and it made me realize just how important it is to keep track of all this stuff. I had totally forgotten about the screaming phase and it made me laugh to read about all the other fun stuff Noah was doing at that age. What a fun age that was! Noah my little screamer is almost 2.5! I can hardly believe it most days. Noah talks like you wouldn't believe! If you haven't heard him in a while you would be amazed! All day long now he's jabbering away, sometimes what he says doesn't even make sense, I think he just likes to hear himself talking so he makes up words. He's also become quite the parrot, repeating words at random that he hears. We are learning to be very careful about what we say around him, even when we think he isn't listening. He surprises us a lot. He's such a funny little boy and VERY opinionated. If he doesn't want something he will make sure the world knows it. His favorite thing to say right now is "I don't want it!" He yells this a lot. It's so hard not to laugh when he gets on his kicks, I'll have to share a video we have so you understand better.
Noah loves the water. He would play in it almost all day if I let him. We were given a boat back in April and we've gotten it out on the water a few times now and Noah loves to ride in it. He'll randomly come up to me now and say "Go boating?" It's precious. We started swim lessons this past Monday and we've been enjoying doing that together.
We took a trip to Seattle last month and visited the Zoo and Aquarium, both were a hit. It was nice to be able to spend some time with our family over in that area. The cousins had a blast playing together.
It's' getting late and I'm not going to have the time to upload pictures like I thought I would so I'll just give you a rundown on our newest member and have to leave it at that for tonight.
On Sunday March 11, 2012 I got a call from the hospital asking if I wanted to come in and have my baby (I had been scheduled for an induction the next day but they were slow and looking for stuff to do). Of course I said yes, so we dropped Noah off with our good friends, Tasha and Marshall, to wait until Grandma got back from her trip over to Tacoma. We arrived at the hospital around 8am and got all settled in. They started the antibiotic (GBS positive) and hooked me up to the monitors. Of course nothing was going on contraction wise so after a few hours (to give the antibiotics time to do their thing) they started oxytocin (I think that's what it was called, they no longer use pitocin). After a few more hours of a whole lot of nothing/super mild contractions, they broke my water. After that things started to pick up. Also, somewhere along the lines in there I was given an epidural. It was such a different experience than what I had with Noah.
At 7:21pm our little Teagan Ray made his debut, weighing in at 8lbs 7oz and 20.5 inches long. He looked a whole lot like his big brother. The one major difference in the beginning was the chin, so completely different from Noah's. Now I find it hard to see anybody else in him at all, he just looks like Teagan. He was quite the difficult baby in the beginning. Nothing like Noah! He wouldn't sleep unless someone was holding him, he wanted to eat almost constantly and he was generally an unhappy baby. It broke my heart. When Teagan hit about 3 months I went into the ER for some pretty intense pain I was having, only to find out I would need to have my gallbladder removed soon. They put me on some meds that I couldn't take while nursing. I was essentially told to "pump and dump" though the Dr didn't quite use that terminology.  Then less than a week later I went in for surgery and was told to do the same for a day. After that I was never really able to pick it back up. Teagan had gotten used to the bottle and wouldn't latch anymore and my supply was suffering horribly. We made the switch to formula and it's made a major difference.
Our little Teagan is such a happy boy now! He laughs and talks all the time. He's starting to sit up, he can army crawl across the house in record time! He loves to watch his brother play. He has started solid foods, we've done rice cereal, green beans, peas, broccoli and applesauce. He does ok but he doesn't love food like Noah did. They are so very different and I love it! That's all I can do for now. Love to all!