Gianna's Photos, 10 months

Merry Christmas Eve, everyone! We had planned to take family pictures for Christmas, but unfortunately, Chris has been so busy at work, he couldn't get off for pictures. Instead, we just took some pics of Gianna and are going to take photos all together in January. I even sneaked into some of the pics. Gianna is suspicious of the camera and doesn't last long, but still manages to look cute. This is the goodness our friend, Tiffany at TK Photography snapped in 15 minutes!

All photos taken by TK Photography. Awesome Maraca that totally saved the photoshoot: Come Together Trading

7 Peeks into our Week, Advent Edition (#10)

We're baaaaaack! (Again). I hadn't felt like there was much to post in the last few weeks, and time during Advent is tight to begin with, but it seemed as if we were in this nice comfortable groove.We had a peaceful Thanksgiving (with no Black Friday or Thanksgiving Day shopping, Praised be to God!), got our Christmas present shopping done super early, and I have been cleaning and making balms and lotions to sell. Gianna was doing much of the same, crawling at lightning speed, standing on her own, cruising around using everything she could use as a walker, babbling, but nothing really new. It was glorious.

 Here she is eating on Thanksgiving

 

And babbling with Auntie M (this is literally one of my favorite ever videos...and Gianna LOVES to watch it, too)

And standing and playing

1. And then BAM. On Monday, she did this:

 WALKING!

Here was the progression of that awesome moment.

• 12:44 pm. Sent text out to say Gianna had just taken her first 2 steps. 
• 1 pm. Sent text saying Gianna took 4 steps (and tumbled into my arms and hugged me!). 
• 1:10 pm I got that awesome video! 

She's not like running around the house by any means, and still prefers crawling, because she is like lightening and she has some crazy skills in that department (see below video and laugh). She walks when she wants. She only does it for me and Chris (so at least I have video for proof, right??)/ She is very calculated and judges the distance and either squats to crawl or uses furniture, or takes that leap of faith to walk. I love watching her brain work. Also ironically, we went to the 7:30 am daily Mass at the Chapel that morning and a sweet lector with 6 kids came up after Mass to say how well behaved she was (ahem, thanks freeze dried fruit treats!) and asked if she was walking. I said no and that I was enjoying the calm and sameness of it all right now. Ha. Ha. Ha. Gianna is such a stinker. At least she's taking it slowly and cautiously and not running yet. If that were the case, I would totally miss out on hilarious moments like the one below!

Gianna as a tripod

2. Our Advent: Now that we have a baby, we're trying to really focus on the Liturgical year a little more and plan activities or celebrations to fit. She's obviously still too young, but we're getting there. We have a felt/velcro ring advent calender (made by yours truly that Gianna can tear and play with, a Jesse Tree, and are only have "advent" decorations out until after Christmas. Then we'll swap out the tree ornaments for Christmas and keep them up until the Epiphany-ish. We also did St. Nicholas stockings, which was super fun. Additionally, we're keeping Christmas gifts simple, Gianna got 3 and I made 2 of them. I think from this year on, we'll all get 3 presents for Christmas, to symbolize the 3 gifts from the wise men. More on this later.

3. Sleep hallelujahs. Gianna fights (fought) sleep like the plague. Since birth, basically. It's her temperament, blah blah blah. Persnickety. Well, through a combo of psuedo swaddling (she can get out of the blanket in a second, but she really likes it and it makes her calm and happy and we can even sneak kisses, so win-win), breaking her a little bit of her opinions of what she needs to fall asleep (I mean y'all it was ridiculous...nursing, bouncing, rocking, only upright positions...), having a fun star light that Auntie B gave her, and her favorite Ducky, she's now sleeping through the night almost without fail. Last night was 11 solid hours straight. She will wake up once early on and just need a quick resettling and then it's golden. It feels like a small miracle every morning. Now if I could just get to bed sooner....

 It's also nice that it's easy to get her down and she falls asleep on her own, there's no longer this crazy production. I think we really just worked with her at the perfect time, as I honestly don't think she would have been ready any earlier, just judging on how Gianna is....Gianna.

She's also napping better and longer, for 1.5-2.5 hour stretches. Hallllleeeeeluuuuuuuuuuuuujah! Oh the things I can do. Perfect timing, too, for Christmas shopping and Advent. In short, we all feel more peaceful these days :-)

Our house is cold. Thanks to single-pane ancient windows we have to HEAT our house to 66 every night. Whomp whomp. So in case you were worried she's burning up while looking so adorable right here.... ;-)

4. Gianna has 4 teeth! She cut the 3rd one (top) a while ago, but the matching top tooth just came in 2 days ago. Kind of a big week at the Rendall house, right? Gianna is funny in that she "teethes" AFTER her tooth is cut. Because that makes sense.

5. Gianna is not so good with the whole "drinking from a baby/sippy cup" thing. So I got her this kickin' camelback straw/soft mouthpiece get up that I love. She will be able to use it for years. And no lies. I love to sneak drinks from it too.

6. Gianna knows how to duck and crawl/slide under things now. If you'll remember our vacation to Beavers Bend in November, such was (thankfully) not the case. But she often gets stuck...like she did with our old fashioned rocking chair. This cracks me up.

 I wish I had gotten a pic of her stuck in the rocking chair. She could only get her head and shoulders out of the side hole and was like swimming trying to escape.

7. Gianna got sick a few weeks ago and had 102-103 fevers for 2 days while Chris and I just felt nasty overall with funny noses and head coldish symptoms (no fevers) for 3-4 days. We did some serious elderberry syrup (immune booster) and lots of tea. And lots of snuggles with Gianna. It. Was. Awesome. She lay on me and breastfed (basically the best thing to do for a sick baby anyway) pretty much all day. I have never gotten so many snuggles in my life. I think it was just the switch from chilly to warm to freezing weather that really took us by surprise. Here are our facetime snap shots during those couple of days.

LOL. Poor baby.

8. Oh and Gianna is totally 11 months old today! Woohoo! 

And a few other pictures of our last month:

My little lady

Reading with Ducky on the way home for Thanksgiving

The hair is getting sooooooooooo long!

Some photo peeks into our last few weeks (#9)

Well. I said I probably wouldn't keep up with my weekly posts. Prophecy Fulfilled! In all seriousness though, I'm getting back on the band wagon. Here is a quick picture edition of our last few weeks (in which Gianna turned 9 months old!!!)

 

She's currently into kitchen mischief. Opening cabinets, snooping around the fridge, climbing into (yes, into...and onto, for that matter) the dishwasher. 

 

 

Gianna was particularly uppity on this day in October. So, of course, like any good Mom, I took a picture of her.  I'm considering submitting it to "Reasons my Son is Crying" (the dad takes pictures and captions from other families, too). I guess the caption would be: I put her on a pink blanket. She did not like that at all. 

 

Gianna's breastfeeding acrobatics. Who doesn't love a downward facing dog and other invented yoga poses while eating? 

 

Sometimes, all the bibs are dirty. Enter the bandana bib! It works pretty spectacularly, especially with the crumb catcher mechanism. In my adult life, I have experienced this before with scarves. 

 

 

Something about the faces she was making just cracked me up as we were waiting for Chris to answer the phone. Oh yeah. That was when Chris HAD a phone. He lost it almost a month ago and we haven't replaced it. We miss our daily Facetime with Papa. The FaceTime feature on the iPhone is pretty much one of the only reasons I still have an iPhone.

 

 

I play piccolo for Gianna almost every day (some Baroque/Classical music like Telemann, Mozart, and Vivaldi, but also some songs she's familiar with like Do Re Me and Turkey and the Straw). It's so fun to watch her try to figure out where the sound comes out. She loves it and immediately lights up when I play. I opted to let her hold the piccolo versus my flute. The cheaper option by a long shot. 

 

In October, we took Gianna to the park for the first time and she LOVES the swings. LOVES them. She's also into climbing onto all the jungle gym areas and sliding. She can slide by herself going backwards on her belly and scootches down until her feet touch the ground.

I haven't posted videos in a while, but our computer makes it really complicated. I will have a video heavy post soon :-)

7 Peeks into our Vacation Week! (#8)

Finally getting around to posting again. I'll make excuses next blogpost, but for now, here's what we were up to last week!

Last week (yeah, so technically I'm a week behind), Chris took the ENTIRE week off from work. It was super glorious. One might even say it was EPIC. Chris was able to get some work done on the house and for deer season that he ordinarily would never ever ever get to do (because he like...comes home and puts Gianna to sleep and mostly of the time does dishes after dinner. Be super jealous, it's really okay.) AND we got to go on vacation! We took a short trip to Beavers Bend again. We liked it so much the first time, we decided it should be our "family vacation" spot. Here are some thoughts:


1. I am so out of shape. Last time we went to Beavers Bend, I was like 1-2 weeks away from giving birth. We hiked the crap out of that place. Lots of miles each day. Now, even while carrying Gianna in the Ergo, I'm 15 lbs lighter than I was in January, and I was super tired and whiny about how carrying her made my shoulders hurt. Yikes, mama. Time to work out again boooooooooooooooo hiiisssssssssssssssss.

 Out early enough that not one single person was in the parking lot

 Just in case we got lost on the nearly non-existent trails....

 Good lookin' brought his walking stick that he carved at home

 

 This picture basically sums up most of my and Gianna's attempts at pictures. 

2. Traveling with Gianna was refreshingly simple. Yeah. Weird, right? We got lucky that she slept okay (she's super persnickety about sleep). The best part was watching her on the porch of the cabin just excited to explore and lighting up with all the new scenery/experiences (like...eating a rock, for example. Yes. She spit it out. Eventually.). Granted, if I had to lug around bottles and formula and all that mess, I may not be singing the same song. Luckily though, I'm a mobile buffet and Gianna can snack on our food as well.

 

3. Experiencing boring things through your child's eyes make them pleasant and exciting. For example, I literally lost my mind trying to get us to go on this little 15 minute train ride around BB. Gianna wouldn't wake up from her first nap (she ONLY does that when I want to 1. get out, 2. go to a playdate I've already RSVPed yes for, or 3. have something else to do), but we narrowly made the second train. Normally, I would think it was the stupidest waste of money in the world. But it was great! Gianna had a blast and we got to be lame excited parents ogling over our daughter's first train ride.

 Those are some Christopher nostrils if I've ever seen them.

 She is REALLY happy to be here. No really, she is.

 Gianna wouldn't look at the camera, so we copied her.

 Gianna let me snuggle her and rest my head on the top of her head. Pretty much a first. It was sooooo excellent. 

 Train was moving and it was hard to get an "action picture" lol

Gianna got a kick out of standing while the train was moving. It was really fun until she started trying to lick the seat in front of us and crawl underneath it.

4. The Friday we left was the beginning of a yearly folk festival. If we had known earlier, we may have planned our trip to stay for the festival, but we at least got to eat fair food. 2 jumbo corn dogs with oodles of mustard, fresh squeezed cherry limeade (well...limes were squeezed...cherries were the HFCS variety with food dyes LOL), and cajun fried pickles. I LOOOOOOOOVVVVVVVEEEEEEEE fair food!!!!

5. I super failed at getting good Halloween pictures of Gianna, so I thought I'd try some new scenery to snap some good ones. My friend, Brooke, saved Halloween and let us borrow her daughters' costume from when they were little. In true Gianna form, however, she wouldn't stay still. Oh well, maybe next year, right??????

 

6. A lot of the trails on the hiking maps actually don't exist anymore...

 There used to be a bridge here.........

7. Fall leaves are sooooooooooooo beautiful!

 Isn't that a creepy mushroom?