The Gemma Fan Club

Everyday after school I go home, feed Gemma, and bring her back to school so I can get a bit more work done. There is always an entourage of kids waiting to play with her (no jokes, on Friday there eight kids in there all trying to play with her, carry her, walk with her, etc.) I am grateful for the help, they manage to keep her occupied for an hour or so and I can get a lot done. PLus Chris get an hour of alone time after his day of daddy-ing.



p.s. Brenda, good thing we kept that outfit. It is so cute, and fits her perfect now!

Are napkins a food group?

Into everything... I was standing two feet away from her, and I thought I had my eye on her as she was rummaging around the shelf in the kitchen. Well, I looked away for as second and when I looked back she had a handful of tissue with a huge bite out of it! It was hilarious to see the ripped off tissue coming from out of her mouth, and I would have liked to take a picture but I thought it was more important to get it out of her mouth before she swallowed any (or any more than she already had).

Ha, so funny I wrote that because looking back at our pictures, Chris DOES have pictures of her eating tissue! Hee hee.

Thanks for all the food advice! I appreciate it and have consulted back to it several times already.

Cherish!

What is it like being a mom? It means every day when I hold my baby girl, I pray that I would remember that moment forever.

Food

The solid food thing is going pretty good. It is probably the most complicated part of having a baby so far. (Maybe because I forgot to ask my peeps about what on earth to do, and so its the only part of parenthood I've done almost on my own.) I haven't done a tonne of reading, but one book I've been looking at is the Super Baby Food Book. It is huge and bright purple, and has lots of good information but a tad excessive for our style. She is a huge advocate of making your own everything, cereal and baby food and adding all sorts of funny things to it (healthy extras) like wheat germ, dried liver powder, brewers yeast and all sorts of other funny things that I wouldn't know how to find even if I lived in Canada. She is also a huge advocate of using ONLY organic produce. Other produce has pesticides on it and and pesticides kill living things. And then she goes on, "LET ME REPEAT THAT; PESTICIDES KILL LIVING THINGS". And so on... What has been helpful from it is that it is divided into month by month chapters so you you know what foods to add each month with lots of options and serving ideas. For example, things like shredded cheese. I wouldn't have thought of that, or shredded apple. Or making mashed potatoes into little balls for her to pick up but will mash in her mouth. I also tried cutting the mango into little spears, which she liked. They slide in and she mashes them up with her gums but if she accidently swallows they will just slide down like little noodles. So that's been good. Gemma really enjoys table food and so we are trying to give her what we can from our meals. Her favorite so far has been rotisserie chicken. Not the saucy outside, but little piece of the yummy white breast meat. She at that up. My question to you all is when to introduce wheat, and when to introduce dairy.

p.s. I just read some more of that book, trying to learn about meat, and she says that if we knew what she knew and read the books she read none of us would ever eat meat again. She has like three pages about meat and thats it.:)

Sleeping Beauty

I was doing dishes one night this week and every time I looked over at her, she was in a new position. I left her sitting on the floor, washed a bowl and looked over at her again; she was flat on the floor on her back. Wash another dish, look over, sitting up again. Look over again, standing against a chair. She is getting braver, too, and will crawl to other rooms in the house even if we are not there.

Her sleeping is getting better, only up once or twice at night which is good. Her bedtime is about 10:30, then she sleeps till 9:30 which is great for Chris, bad for me, but we'll try and negotiate that a bit this week. Speaking of sleeping, check these nap time photos out.

Monkey See, Monkey Do

This was taken our last day as Uncle Nate was sneaking us into RUH to try and catch the first glimpse at Baby Hickey. (Unfortunately she hadn't been born yet!) Maria made her entrance to the world as we waited in the airport. Congratulations Tom and Erin!

YA YA YA YA YA

Gemma spends a lot of time of her time saying these words really loud. Maybe she is going to be a preacher like her daddy! Sometimes she changes it up and it goes BA BA BA BA BA WA WA GA GA. She usually does it standing up at the footstool, waving one arm.

We've done pretty good in the falling department, none for a few days, until last night. Then she did a double; she fell backwards on her head but hit her chin first on the way down. Yikes!

No!

What a hard lesson to teach: No. Everytime we say it she looks up and grins, like its a game. I feel like to her, trying to figure out what is 'no' and what isn't is like those goofy party games, you know where you tell your name and what you're bringing to the it person and they tell you if you can or can't. (Does anyone know what I'm talking about??? The it person makes up some sort of rule before the game starts, for example, you must bring something that starts with the second letter of your name, so I could say 'My name is Nevada and I'm bringing bagels, and the it person would say I couldn't come, but if I said My name is Nevada and I am bringing eggs' I would be allowed... anyway, I digress) I guess the difference is we are more consistent; our rules don't change too often, but I feel like to her it is a very complicated system. What are some things on your NO list? We have (so far) remote controls and keys and most recently paper.

What is it with eating paper???? I am constantly squeezing her little cheeks to get paper out. I even found a sticker in there two days ago. I hate taking it away from her because she loves ot crumple it and tear it and shake it around, but as soon as you turn away, into the mouth it goes.

Baby Helmet

Number of days back in Taiwan: 4
Number of times Gemma has fallen backwards on her head on the hardwood: 3

These stats are from yesterday, which was also the first day she didn't fall backwards. Other injuries since we've been back? Well, she was standing at the coffee table, and saw something on the floor she wanted, so she bent forward and smoked her head on the edge. Ouch! The next one is sort of our fault. I was going to give her a bath the first night, and had her all undressed but alas, no hot water. So I set her down in her empty bathtub to play while I went to check out the water situation. She was playing happily but then decided to try and stand up. The tub tipped and now she has a bruise on her chin. Being a baby is very dangerous! I feel so bad for her, but yet don't want to limit her. Doh. I was relaying all this to our casheir and she told me about a thing she has for her baby. Should we go for it?

back at it!

Back in sunny green Taiwan! My committment this year is to blog more, so hold me to it.

Gemma was a great traveler, which was a huge relief for us. The worst flights are those little ones from askatoon to Calgary and then Calgary to Vancouver; the planes are so teeny there is no room for anything. She didn't fuss at all, slept most of the time. The few hours she was up we walked around the plane, met some other kids, and flirted with the stewardesses. We (mommy and Gemma) are both strugglig with jet lag this weekend, which sucks. You are so tired you can hardly function, but can't sleep. Yesterday we were up at 3am and had a big nap from 11-3, then today we were up from 4-5:30 then back to bed till 7:30. So not too bad. She actually just dozed off now so we'll see if I can convince my own body to rest.

She is getting TONNES of attention. We went swimming in the river yesterday and quite a crowd watching us. In the evening we went to a restaurant for dinner for Chris' birthday and the waitress tickled her eveyrtime she walked by. I think there are pictures of this and I will ty to post them soon.

Tomorrow is the first day back, so we are going to be working on our routine. These are the habits we need to break:
1) nursing her to sleep
2) crying when mommy leaves
3) sleeping the whole night in her own bed

We'll let you know how the first day goes!