Wow, I didn't realize it had been THAT long since I posted. Somehow time has gotten away from me. I can't believe its November already. And by the way, today is my big sister's birthday! She is 39 today, which makes me feel old. Even though I'm ten years younger, I realize in ten short years (which always go by faster than you expect) I will be where she's at. Which, really, isn't such a bad place when I think about it. Stay at home mom with three amazing boys? I would be okay with that. But happy birthday to my big sis! Not that she reads this :) Anyway.....we'll do the quick update.
Grain bin: UP! Floor still needs to be put in, but the bin itself is at its full height and makes our farm look a bit more impressive, if I do say so myself. Pictures...to come. Because I don't have them on this computer.
Barns: Walls for one barn are up. Other one in progress. Haven't been out there to take new pictures because we got too much rain on Saturday and the "road" to the barns was way too muddy for the girl who didn't think to put her muck boots on when leaving the house.
Harvest: In progress, but SLOW going (see above mention of the rain) Have about 180 acres of beans left and 200 acres of corn left.
Tooth: IN! And so cute! And once again I have an excuse for a lack of picture...he doesn't like to show anybody his tooth. I only see it by chance now and then when he's either screaming or I get lucky enough to peer in his mouth for 0.7 seconds. No sign of another one coming (yet).
Halloween: Riley was a pumpkin. And the cutest pumpkin I've ever seen, for sure. We didn't go trick or treating. Because, really, how lame would I be, walking house to house with my almost 8 month old baby, who pretty obviously can't have candy..."Hi, trick or treat" "No, he can't have candy, but don't worry, I'll eat it for him". Um...yeah...we'll go next year. Though I cannot wait to go next year!! I saw all these little kids running around on trick or treat night and I got so excited to do that with Riley when he's big enough :) Pictures on the other computer, so yeah...you have to wait on those too. But they're on facebook for those of you who are "friends" with me there!
Solids: Hey, we might actually be making some progress in this area. He's actually (gasp) opening his mouth for the spoon! Its great, on a good day we can actually get through a meal in about 10 minutes instead of the half hour it took previously, consisting of me trying to convince him to open his mouth, him mostly sucking the puree off the spoon, then holding the spoon tightly with his ridiculously-strong-for-a-baby-grip until I can wrestle it away from him, at which point he cries because mommy took away his "toy", until it comes back with more food on it, half of which runs down his chin, underneath his bib and onto his shirt, and he grabs a hold of the spoon again and round and round we go. But now?! Fill spoon, open mouth, food in, close mouth, refill spoon and so on. Its GREAT! :)
Have I mentioned how Riley doesn't sleep? Over the last couple of months, his sleeping habits have been getting progressively worse. So much that we had gotten to the point of, if he was put in his crib, he would be up literally every hour and would take a great deal of convincing to go back to sleep and then stay asleep once moved from our arms to the crib. So most nights he ended up in our bed. And yes, it may not be ideal and I had and have no intention of him sleeping with us long term but you know, when you're getting practically zero sleep and that is the only way the child will sleep-you just gotta do what you gotta do! Anyone who is already a parent is probably reading this going "oh no, you can't let him do that!" And yes, I've heard it (which is why we just stopped telling people about his sleeping issues and pretended all was well, so we didn't get the "oh you have to let him cry, I can't believe you haven't done it yet" speech). So, we finally came to the conclusion on our own that yes, we had to do something about this sleeping situation. And after talking to a number of my friends, who it turns out, all seem to have hit the same sleeping issues we did at about the same age, we determined we would do the scary 'cry it out' thing. So far, its going fairly well. But we've only done it 2 nights. We'll see what happens tonight, but I think in the long run it will work. Night one took 45 min to fall asleep (we checked on him periodically), night 2 was 5 minutes. That's encouraging to me. He still seems to wake up multiple times a night and last night was taking longer to fall back to sleep, but I do think we are making progress. Hopefully this will help the nap situation too. He won't let anybody rock him to sleep anymore. Our daycare provider tries to and he cries the whole time. This is part of why we decided we needed to just go with the cry it out thing because he was basically doing it anyway. So far though...I am liking the idea of gaining almost 2 hrs in the evening to actually accomplish things and/or to just relax, and also the idea of SLEEP, precious SLEEP! :) I'll keep you posted on how it works out!
In a nutshell (ok, a rather large nutshell I guess) that's what's going on with us! I'll try not to disappear on everyone for quite so long next time :)
He sits completely by himself now without tipping over, and if there's something that he can grab onto, he's not content to just sit-oh no, he wants to stand! He can actually pull himself up to standing if he has the right angle to start. Once he's up, he can stand holding onto something or someone all by himself. I'm a little nervous about when he starts to crawl, because for one it means baby-proofing (oh, where to start?!) and for two, I'm afraid he'll just crawl to anything he can and try pulling up on it! We're going to have to keep a lot closer eye on him, that's for sure.
