Squish is Six Months Old!

Happy 6 Months, Squishy!

Y'all, please don't hate. I have FOUR kids. Count 'em! FOUR! This, apparently, lends itself to having Z-E-R-O free time nor any ability to manage time in general. Please note today is technically January 9th. Squish was officially 6 months old on December 13th. He will be 7 months in FOUR DAYS, PEOPLE. Four. Time is madness!

Speaking of time... please take note of the horrible photo quality! It's an iPhone pic, guys. I didn't even have the time to take a REAL LIFE OFFICIAL HALF-YEAR PHOTO OF MY BABE! Let's just say our trip to Great Wolf Lodge the second week of December, paired with hosting a Christmas party, the little guy's 6-month well visit, my nephew's wedding, meeting with caterers (plus several dozen other tasks for a little gathering I'm throwing this Sunday), photography sessions, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year's Eve, not to mention homeschool back in session from our holiday break... WHEW, Y'ALL! I mean, I know this is typically a busy time of the year, but WHOA! I'm surprised I've remembered to breathe this past month! So hopefully all of the aforementioned crazy will eventually excuse the "poor 4th child" syndrome my little Squish is apparently destined to develop, my extraordinary efforts notwithstanding.

Our sweet little continues to be a ridiculously awesome babe! And he's getting SO big! At his 6-month well visit, which technically was 12/18/2017, he was a big ol' 17 lbs. 7 oz. (though he has since topped the 18 lbs. mark). Just take a look at those legs above! And that belly hanging over the waistband of his pants! I cannot even!

This boy is still not a huge fan of tummy time, but he'll hang out for a few seconds before he rolls over onto his back. He has yet to roll from back to tummy (again, because of that love of tummy time LOL!), and he isn't sitting up independently yet, either. Ask me if I care! Hahaha! With this fella being our final, I can't help but NOT be in any hurry whatsoever with his developmental milestones. Just what you wanna hear from a parent/homeschool teacher! Hahaha!

He has started eating stage 1 baby foods, and is a big fan of pears, butternut squash, applesauce, and sweet potatoes. Basically anything that ISN'T green beans. Bless. He's also had some rice cereal, which he also enjoys. Boy likes to eat, y'all!

He's probably the most hilarious baby we've ever had. Seriously he keeps us laughing all.the.time! He's just so chill and thinks pretty much everything is funny. Balancing a paci on his forehead is one of his many impressive skills. See?

THIS FACE. This is the one that I cannot get enough of! When he gets really excited and can barely contain himself?! This is what you get! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

((My apologies for the iPhone pics today, guys!))

I seriously promise to do better for his 7 month pictures ((in 4 days)). <--- gah="" p="">

Another Update

I took Chase to his 6-month pediatrician appointment today and his doctor was very pleased with how great Chase is doing! He said Chase was the happiest patient he'd seen all day, and also asked what I'd been feeding him since he's so adorably chunky! Too fun!

So here are his latest stats:

• Weight: 16 lbs., 9 oz. (24th percentile)
• Height: 26.5 inches (42nd percentile)

Yay, Chase!!!

He got his 4-month vaccinations today (one orally and THREE shots!) and won't need to have his 6-month vaccines until his next appointment when he's 9 months old. Did that make sense? Whatever. All I know is that this was the LAST BIG HURDLE (as far as I know -- I'm sure hubs will correct me) Chase needed to complete before we could "officially" release him from the bubble!!!!! He's still technically "behind schedule" on his vaccines but it's not enough to warrant keeping him (and ME! and LO!) locked up any longer!

WOOT!!!!!!

So, if my math is correct... we saw Chase's cardiologist last week and his pediatrician today. He's not due back at the cardiologist until JULY 2nd (TWO months!!) and he's not due back at the pediatrician until he's 9 months old (July) so...

NO DOCTOR'S APPOINTMENTS UNTIL JULY -- TWO WHOLE MONTHS FROM NOW!!!

It's the little things! And I'm SOOOOOOOO happy my sweet boy is doing so well! Praise God!!!

Some Updates

Just a quick update to let you know that Chase had a cardiology appointment last Friday. He weighed in at about 16 1/2 pounds and about 26.5 inches. He's getting soooooooo big! His o2 saturation was 89, which was awesome! His blood pressures were nice and low and his pulses were good, too. He had an echo and everything there looked good, too! In fact, Dr. Horne was very pleased with how well Chase is doing, he dropped a med and told us to come back in TWO MONTHS!

Yay, Chase!

I'm so pleased/blessed/grateful/amazed at how wonderfully my little boy is doing. God truly has His hand on Chase! There's no other explanation for how well he's done! He is such a sweet, laid-back little guy and I love him to pieces!

He's just about worked his way through starting veggies and will be moving to fruits this week. I can't wait to see how he likes the applesauce I made for him! He's now completely on formula as I officially gave up breastfeeding one week ago today. It was a HARD decision and took me weeks to make myself accept the fact that it was going to end. Basically my body decided it was done. My supply, which was already low to begin with, finally started a downward decline to where it was really more of a struggle for Chase. I'd nurse him on one side and literally less than a minute or two later, needed to switch him to the other side. After another minute or two there, he was done and would need a bottle. It just wasn't fair to make him suffer with 2 or 3 minutes of nursing, then screaming his head off because he was still hungry (obviously), and he'd been taking more formula than breastmilk on a daily basis for months now. So as difficult as it was, last Sunday night was my final time nursing him. :(

Chase is spending more time on his tummy these days. He used to hate it and start screaming almost immediately, but now he'll hang out for several minutes before getting upset. He did roll over once from his tummy to his back, and when he's on his back he'll roll onto one side, but hasn't rolled from back to tummy yet. He still needs support when sitting up and is obviously not anywhere near crawling yet. If I had it my way, I'd keep him like this forever! But I am working with him, trying to get him up to speed on his milestones.

We had an organization called BabyNet send someone over a few weeks ago to do an assessment on Chase to see if he's behind in any areas of development for his age. We were very pleased to hear he's on track with everything, with the exception of his gross and fine motor skills (this didn't surprise us). So we're going to have someone come out once or twice a month to work with Chase and show hubs and I how to do exercises with him to help him get on track.

While it seems he's been contemplating popping out a tooth for the past month or so, there's no visible sign of his first tooth... yet. LO got her first tooth when she was 6 1/2 months old, so I'm sure it's just around the corner for Chase. I love his little gummy smile but I can't wait to see those little teeth start to show up. My boy's getting so big!

We have an appointment tomorrow for Chase to get his 4-month vaccines (yes, we're about 2 months behind schedule). I'm not looking forward to it, but I know he'll do fine. And I'm VERY excited because we've been waiting on his immunizations in order to finally be able to "release" him from bubble-life completely! I can't wait! We'll always take precautions with him but I feel like that will be able to ease up somewhat once he's got another round of vaccines out of the way. I'll be ecstatic once he's finally completely caught up and on schedule with his immunizations in July! Yay!!

There's not too much to report on LO. She's a typical almost 3-year-old and has been driving hubs and I C*R*A*Z*Y!!! She doesn't listen and she has temper tantrums All. The. Time. I guess this is rather typical for her age... yay.

Let me leave you with a cute video of the kiddos. LO loves Ice Age, and if you haven't seen it, there's a part in the movie where a tiger (Diego) plays peek-a-boo with a baby. It's cute and hilarious! I've attached a clip for you so you'll know what I'm referring to (you only need to watch the first few seconds of this clip to get the point).



Well, LO loves to play "where's the baby" with Chase. And what's even cuter, is that Chase totally loves it, too! Here's a clip of the two of them from the other night:

Take Three!

Turns out my burnt carrot fiasco the other day wasn't necessarily a bad thing! I read yesterday that carrots have a high level of nitrates in them and that it's better to wait to introduce them until after age 7 months. So, I decided to do squash instead.

I bought two huge butternut squash, about 2 pounds each. This time I only cooked one of them! I sliced 'em in half and baked them in 1-2 inches of water for almost an hour. After they cooled, I tossed 'em in my lovely new Cuisinart blender and whirled them with some breastmilk until they were the perfect consistency for a stage 1 baby food. I still chose to put them through my strainer, then put the purée into my ice cube trays. It worked out beautifully! I ended up with 2 trays of squash plus a little to put in the fridge to let Chase try for dinner last night.
The clean-up was such a breeze!


I think I'm finally getting the hang of this baby food stuff! It's about time! :)

Posted from my iPhone

More Baby Food Woes

Today I was going to make Chase some carrot baby food. I put the carrots in the steamer basket over a pot of boiling water and popped the lid on top. After 15 minutes, the carrots weren't quite soft enough. I set the timer for another 5 minutes, checked them again and they still weren't soft enough. I let them continue to steam while I played with the kids until...

Uh, oh. What's that smell?

At first I thought a plastic container or lid was caught in the bottom of the dishwasher that was running. You know, that lovely burning/melting aroma? But I checked the dishwasher and all was well. That only left one option:

My carrots.

I checked 'em and sure enough they were finally soft! The problem, however, was that the pot of boiling water had, well, run out of water.

Eeew. That smell. I checked the pot and it was quite possibly the worst kitchen mishap on my record! Here's a shot of the pot after it had been soaking in hot, soapy water for about 20 minutes.


As you might imagine, I tossed the carrots since they were infused with that lovely burnt smell and I didn't think it'd be fair to Chase for his first introduction to carrots to be quite so eeeewy.

Guess it won't hurt to keep him on sweet potatoes for another day. Lord knows I have enough of 'em!

((sigh))

Posted from my iPhone

Kitchen Disaster (again)

Well, it was time for another round of baby food. I started Chase on green beans back on Sunday, April 25th. You know how you're supposed to wait 3-4 days before starting another food to be sure there's no allergy, right? Well, day 4 would've been the day we left for Cincinnati (family vacation!) and I was not about to start a new food while on the road away from home. SO... the poor guy was left with green beans for an entire week! So Monday I went to the store and decided it was sweet potato time. Now, you remember this post where 1 pound of green beans resulted in a HUGE kitchen disaster and a measly 12 cubes of baby food? Well, that was not going to happen to me again, no siree bob! So, without thinking (that's just how I live my life), I bought 8 sweet potatoes.

Eight large sweet potatoes.

I read that the best way to cook them was baking them in the oven, so I cleaned them really good, poked 'em with a fork, wrapped 'em in foil and baked 'em for close to 2 hours. They were all kinds of soft and mushy when I took them out of the oven -- just what I wanted! I let them cool for a bit then got to work.

And work I did! Ohmygoodness! I had NO IDEA how much potato I'd be working with. It was insane. Every time hubs walked by the kitchen, I'd hear him mutter, "Man, that's a lot of sweet potatoes!" As if I didn't already know. Men.

So I'm working away with my blender, trying to show these sweet potatoes who's in charge, and my blender... well, it died. The motor started crying out for help, but when I wouldn't address it, it started smelling like burnt somethin'-or-other. Eeew. I gave up on my blender and borrowed my sister's (she conveniently lives down the street from us).

So two blenders later, I finally was able to finish up this mess of sweet potatoes. See how much fun I had? See how it resulted in the same kitchen disaster as the green beans? This time with two blenders instead of one blender and one massive food processor.

See that square container in the middle of the chaos? Ya, that'd be my NINE CUP tupperware container. Yes, NINE cup. I filled it to the top, to the point that the sweet potatoes squished up against the lid when I attempted to close it. Wow.

I've only got 2 covered ice cube trays, so it's been a continual process of taking the baby food from the frige, filling up the two trays, freezing them, then starting over again. Three days and FOUR trays of sweet potato cubes later, I still have over half a container left to go:

((sigh))

On a related note, yesterday I was at Costco buying formula (I've officially quit nursing... more on that later) and decided to scope out their selection of small appliances. I found (what I hope to be) the mother-load! It's a Cuisinart combination blender AND food processor. The food processor holds 2.5 cups so it's big enough to handle a lot of food but not so big that the food just sits at the bottom under the blade. And the blender is a lovely, heavy glass container (mine was cheapy plastic, not to mention about 10 years old) and the base/motor on this thing looks massive! My favorite thing is that it's shiny. It doesn't take much for me, people.


SO... while my introduction to making my own baby food has been somewhat overwhelming and it's clear I have a lot to learn in order to get into a good groove (buying and making the "right" amount of fresh veggies & fruits, etc.), looking at this face is all the encouragement I need to keep doing what I'm doing:

Have I mentioned how much I love this boy?!

Baby Food!

So I've decided to be adventurous this time around and make Chase's baby food myself. I figure, I'm a stay-at-home-mom, I don't have any "real" work to do (lol!) so surely I have plenty of time to create baby food from scratch, right?

I had no clue where to begin. I asked a fellow blogger who happens to be very experienced with this subject, and she pointed me to this website for all the information a person could ask for when it comes to making homemade baby food.

I was **this close** to starting Chase out on applesauce, only because I had a huge bag of apples that I wasn't sure LO and I would get through before they started to go bad. But we started LO on green beans when she first began solids. And I've heard the talk that you're supposed to start a baby on vegetables and work your way through veggies before offering fruit. So I resolved out of nothing less than guilt to go with the green bean plan.

I didn't own a food processor. I thought I had always wanted one. They seemed to cool, so capable. So I bought one. I figured the old, plastic blender I had stowed in a cupboard for the past 5+ years wouldn't be capable of preparing baby food.

The massive 8,000-cup food processor I bought was big. It had a lot of parts. It was confusing at times. But I muddled my way through, washed the bad boy and got ready to begin.

I chose to steam my fresh green beans. I bought a pound of 'em for about $2.50. Once they were slightly cooled, it was time to toss 'em into the food processor. I tossed. I processed. My green beans got all chunky and sat at the bottom of the processor while the blade spun madly about 1/2 inch above said green beans. I used my spatula to move things around a bit, put the lid back on and tried again.

To no avail.

My green beans looked awful. They were all chunky and there was nothing "pureed" about them. I was distraught! This wasn't supposed to happen! What am I doing wrong?

Before giving it much though, I pulled the ol' blender out of the cupboard, put my green bean chunks in it and gave it a whirl. Wouldn't ya know I started to see beautifully processed and pureed green beans, that which Gerber would be jealous of?

Finally!

I added some of the liquid from the steaming to get the consistency I wanted and BAM! I ended up with lovely green bean baby food! Yay!

Disregard the fact that my kitchen turned upside-down and was a total nightmare. Honest.


See? It was awful.

Next, I placed the green bean puree into my ice cube tray. How perfect (yet somewhat defeating) that it completely filled ONE ice cube tray. Yes, one pound of green beans equals 12 approximately 1-ounce cubes of baby food. I think I was expecting so much more for all my trouble (and my husband's trouble since I put him in charge of kitchen clean-up!).


I got over it and popped the tray in the freezer (side note: I bought the OXO brand trays that come with a lid so I didn't have to worry about messing with parchment paper or foil, which could leave foil pieces in the food).

Turns out right now, my little guy will only eat about 1/2 to 1 cube at each feeding, so these cubes have gone a long way already! I was going to do a cost-basis analysis to see how this compares to buying baby food (about $1.09 for two 2.5-ounce packs) but honestly the numbers gave me a headache and I decided against it. All I know is I enjoyed this process (more so figuring out what works and what doesn't) and I especially love the fact that I know exactly what went into my son's baby food. And there's a sense of pride in all of that.

So I guess I'll keep on with this! I might jump into squash next (as I have NO IDEA how to make/find peas, unless I buy them frozen), then on to carrots, sweet potatoes and then fruit! Yay!

Chase and His Jumperoo

Chase loves his Jumperoo! Here's a short clip of him playing this morning. His sister loved this thing like crazy when she was a baby, and he's definitely following in her footsteps! It's so cute to watch him jump and play with the toys! I'll rotate his seat around for him occasionally and he'll see all the "new" toys and get so excited to play with them!

I love this boy!!! As LO says, "he's my best boy in the whole world!" :)

Happy Half-Birthday!

Happy Sweet 6-Month Birthday to my sweet baby boy!

Our lives changed forever 6 months ago today. Our precious little miracle was born and we have been so blessed!

Chase is really starting to develop quite the little personality! He's ALWAYS happy and smiling (unless he's tired, hungry or needs to be changed). He is quite possibly the sweetest, kindest, most genuine tiny little person in the world! I thank God every day for bringing this boy into our family. I can't imagine life without him. I pray daily that God will continue to keep His hand on him and help him to grow stronger and stay healthy each and every day.

Here are some recent pics and a little video clip of my precious little Chase. Enjoy!