Designing Women

Ugh. Sorry. Another long lapse between posts. But here's a quick catchup and plenty of Gracie goodness to brighten your day as she does ours.

One of the things we finally did was play interior designer and hang up the crib bumpers that Gracie's Yaya Kathy made into curtains. Yaya did a fabulous job and we did an OK job finding some Ikea curtain rods and tying up the curtains. Grace's pink and green room is more complete than ever, with a crib that is also now down to its lowest setting since someone started showing signs of pulling herself up on the sides.

Grace has gotten pretty good at sleeping through the night. There are occasional flukes where she wakes herself up at 1 or 2am (usually on weekend nights since I guess we don't wear her out nearly as much as daycare), but generally to bed between 7:00 and 7:30 and sleeps until 5:30 to 6:30 (lately more on the 5:30 side unfortunately). She's taken to sleeping with her tush in the air, as we captured on the baby monitor.

And speaking of daycare, she's enjoying it a lot. Seeing as a cold front FINALLY (FINALLY!) moved in today and the endless, humid, crappy Austin summer seems to be over, then we suspect she'll get even more time out of doors there too, which she seems to enjoy. Look at her rockin' in the uber stroller with her pals.

And a couple times recently the teachers at daycare have put her in a swing outside and she enjoyed that. So we've been hitting the park on walks to try it out there and she REALLY likes the swing. Which is definitely the nail in the coffin for the mini-swing we have in the house -- only legit, outside swings from now on.

She's starting to eat "real food" twice a day now -- usually rice cereal and then some fruit and/or veggies between bottles. She'll either be really into it and smily (like here where she left herself a sweet potato goatee), or get into what we call "hulk" mode and will get angry with each passing bite since her hunger is not being satisfied quickly enough. "More food! Feed me!"

And as we head toward cooler temps, our usual hookups from friends who have kids just enough older to give us ALL their used clothes have been kicking in some nice threads. Check out the crazy ski bunny parka-onesie Grace inherited. Not exactly a Texas winter necessity but perhaps a trip home to KC will get us to pull it out.

Crawling is just around the corner. Since she's over 20 pounds already, she's got a tough task to move all that weight around. But she's getting closer and closer and just today moved forward across the floor in a pseudo-Army crawl. In one attempt she even started saying "dada" sort of. Listen close. She's officially (to our eager ears) said "mama" and "dada" now ("mama" at about 6 mos. and "dada" at 7 -- dammit! I lose).

Finally, fall apparently means it's raining babies! We've had 2 new arrivals in the past week (one documented here), 2 more imminent, 2 more around the start of 2011. Very exciting stuff and we hope all your good vibes join ours as we send them out to these lucky parents and parents-to-be.