Top Chef?

So sometimes it's hard to keep Emilia both entertained and contained while I'm getting dinner ready. Most of the time I try to do any cooking I need to do while she's asleep. Today however she was wide awake and I was desperate to have her doing something. As you can see by the pictures I think we have a budding competitor on "Top Chef" in a few years!

super saturday

Of course, every day is a super day with my "puchis." She loved getting to spend the entire day with her Papa - catching up on all of those cuddles and hugs she missed during the week. We ran some errands and got Emilia some new summer jammies so she won't have to sleep in a onesie undershirt. Of course, what's she sleeping in right now - a onesie undershirt! But only because I didn´t get a chance to wash the new jammies yet. We also had lunch outside at Dean and Deluca where someone got to have her favorite lunch - sweet potato puree mixed with apple puree - yummy!

The weather has started to turn warm here and just like her Papa, Emilia perspires. By the end of the day her hair at the back of her neck and around her ears was matted to the side of her head. I practically had to hose her off!

Marcus & I were just talking about how quickly she's growing and how sad it is this special time goes so quickly. I have to catch myself every day and remind myself to just enjoy this moment and to soak it all in because it's gone in an instant. Then we started really getting maudlin thinking about how Marcus will one day have to dance with her at her wedding and how he hopes she doesn't have too many "novios"..... BOO HOO!!! We quickly snapped out of it though!

8 Already?!

Months that is! Where oh where does the time go? It's so hard to believe that our little girl is already 8 months old. She's grown and changed so much in such a short time it's absolutely breathtaking. It's fascinating to watch as we learn more and more about her personality. I can see clearly that we are going to have our hands full!

Emilia celebrated her birthday by having a picnic lunch on the front lawn with Mama and Chola...

After lunch we went to My Gym for their free play hour. There she answered the age-old question "what to do when you want to lick the plastic ball and suck your thumb at the same time...

The Busy Life of a Socialite

No wonder the poor girl has collapsed in to bed this evening before 8 p.m. - she's had a very busy couple of days! Yesterday she went to her friend Kate's house for our weekly playgroup meeting. Today she not only went to her Music Together class (which she loves) but she had lunch with her friend Aston and then went to a birthday party for twin 1-year-old girls, Brooks & Laura. She did surprisingly well at the birthday party especially in light of the fact that her afternoon nap consisted of the 15 minute car ride to the party. I thought for sure that we would have to leave almost upon arriving, but she held out for a while, promptly falling asleep the minute that little head of hers hit the carseat for the ride home.

Here's the clown at playgroup on Wednesday...

And here's the silly girl with some of her new friends from the birthday party she went to today (she's the only one smiling)...

Rolling!

It's been a gray couple of days here - threatening to rain, but with no appreciable rain in sight. Emi and I have been running a lot of errands and getting things done around the house. We have also resumed our morning walk/run, this time with our neighbor Caitlin and her little girl Kyrie. Kyrie and Emilia are in playgroup together as well as seeing each other often at My Gym. They are "good" friends. The girls have fallen asleep in their strollers the past two mornings but unfortunately Emi has woken up the second we get to our front door, refusing to go back down for a morning nap, which means her naps have been about 30 minutes long. That makes for one cranky girl!

Here's the "beauty queen of Charlotte" wearing one of the sporty t-shirts her Grandpa sent her...

On a roll!

Well, it's finally happened - Emilia has successfully rolled from her tummy to her back to her tummy - and not just once but several times! When we go in to her room to pick her up either after naps or in the mornings we have found her lying face down. It's a little disconcerting at first, but clearly she can do it without any problem. So proud of my big girl who continues to grow at lightening speed. I'll post the video as soon as I figure out how to do so successfully.

In addition to rolling, Emilia has started trying out real "solid" food. Her friend Morgan introduced her to a tasty new snack - freeze-dried organic fruits. Here she is eating a little bit of apple today after lunch. Despite what it look like in the picture, I swear she really liked it.

And this is a face we have been seeing a lot of recently as Emi continues to work on that second tooth on the bottom...

Spring Fling

It's been another couple of beautiful days here in CLT - weather hovering around 80 degrees, no humidity, very few of those pesky cankerworms thanks to the city spraying the trees, and a slight breeze. It was so nice that we had a picnic lunch outside (sweet potatoes and butternut squash) and blew a few bubbles before meeting up with friends Morgan and Kyrie at the My Gym free play time. Fortunately she's down for the count right now after a rough night last night - she was up until 9 p.m.!!! Took a few (okay, quite a few) pictures of Emilia outside yesterday and she began her spring rockin' the searsucker (she's got quite a lot of searsucker outfits!). I think these are meant to be capri pants but they are more like long pants on her - her height is definitely not in her legs at this point!

It was a beautiful day here today. Emilia greatly enjoyed her playgroup date at her friend Maisie's house. She, along with all the babies, got a little sun as we moms struggled to put up the tailgating tent.

bloggin' ain't easy...

... or at least it isn't as easy as it looks or as I thought it was going to be. Perhaps I simply don't have the mental power to figure it out. My brain may be fried after one too many singings of "The Itsy Bitsy Spider." Who knows. One of these days I'll get this thing figured out.

In the meantime, and on to more pressing issues... big events in Emilia's life. She has been invited to join yet another litle playgroup - one of 4 girls in the neighborhood. This will start on Thursday, which is already a busy day for us since that's when she goes to her Music Together class. Also, she had lentils and rice for the first time today for dinner. She wasn't wild about it until I mixed in some of her favorite sweet potatoes and after I strained the lentils and rice - thus giving it the look of runny poo. It didn't look appetizing at all but she gobbled it all up so I guess it couldn't have been that bad.

I went to EarthFare this afternoon to get her groceries - it's the local almost-all-organic grocery store here in Charlotte and the prices there are much better than for the same organic produce at the Harris Teeter. I was looking at the jars of baby food (even though I make all of her food currently, it is convenient to have a couple of jars on hand for any "emergencies." In any case I was shocked to see one of the ingredients listed on one of the jars of "chicken dinner" as "mechanically separated organic chicken"!!!!!! YUCK!!!!! My memory of the movie "Supersize Me" may be fuzzy, but doesn't that mean they've stripped the meat from the spinal column of the animal and that there may be nerve tissue mixed in with the meat? IN ORGANIC BABY FOOD THAT WE'RE PAYING A PREMIUM FOR?!?! HA! I guess it really is essential to read the labels on everything.....

Oh and by the way this picture is from a couple of days ago... I'm just playing around trying to figure out how to post pictures....

Well, we have finally figured out how to burn the short videos we take of Emi onto DVDs... and to think it only took us 7months and 3 hours. We're so technologically savvy it's scary.

Tried to offer Emilia green peas with brown rice because I noticed in the store that there was a jar food of the same. To no avail.... she was not having any of it. I actually had to resort to fixing her something else for dinner. The something else.... broccoli.... yuck! She ate that up though with reckless abandon. We offered her Cheerios as well and while none of them have actually made their way in to her mouth her "pincer grasp" is very well developed as she can pick up each individual Cheerio between thumb and forefinger... a huge developmental milestone. Just think of all the mental and physical processes that have to occur in harmony in order to pick up a little Cheerio....amazing.

I am tinkering with the idea of starting this blog. Mainly because I think it might make it a bit easier to keep everyone updated on Emilia's "antics" or what's going on with her. It might save me having to type the same information repeatedly in several emails. Or it might not... we'll see. For the meantime, I'm going to try this out.