For a baby who spent the first 6 months of his life *screaming* if a drop of water so much as touched him, someone seems to have had a change of heart.

Playing on a friend’s swingset

I love the idea of all those photo a day for a year challenges. I know there is little chance I would be able to do it for a year but I am going to try and do a picture a day for each day of summer.

We went to a summer solstice carnival put on by our parent link carnival last night. They had all sorts of games and prizes for the kids. There was an amazing face painter there, this picture is Mary seeing what she had on her face:

Oh dear, I’m late!! We had a bit of a rough week but better late than never right?

Still no happy update on your mood. You’re a grouch… it’s just life though.

You finally started crawling!! That was exciting. All this time I thought you would get happier once you could crawl… turns out now you can just follow me and cry.

You are also getting into a lot more trouble. You love the tv, any sort of cord, and getting stuck under kitchen chairs. One night I was tucking in your brother and Mary started calling “mom!! mom!!! Come quick! Alex, don’t move, don’t get down! MOM!!!”
I came running out to find you standing at the couch! Mary was very thrilled that she saw you pull up for the first time. Since then you have become rather good at pulling yourself up and that has added a whole new realm of trouble. You love nothing more than being the center of attention. If someone is holding you and you have a bunch of people smiling at you you are a happy little clam. If I hear “oh, he doesn’t look grouchy to me!” or “your mom says you scream a lot, that can’t be true!” one more time I might snap!

I sure love you little man…. but seriously, I kind of love sleep too. I think you might like it if you would just try.

We are over halfway there now. 7 down, 5 to go. On your first birthday Alex there is going to be a BIG party. Not so much a birthday party as a ‘WE SURVIVED YOUR FIRST YEAR AND YOU’RE STILL ALIVE’ party.

You started sitting independently this month, Mary and Luke love sitting and playing with you and bring you lots of toys. You still haven’t quite mastered crawling which really surprises me because you have been up on all fours and rocking for weeks! You do a funny rolling army crawl to get to where you want to go. It’s not very effective yet but we’re not complaining.

One fabulous thing that happened this month is you decided to like the bath!! We put you in the bath ring in the big tub with your siblings and you had a blast!!!

We took you on your first family vacation this month… ha. Learned some valuable lessons!You’re still not very interested in solid food, except in your baby safe feeder of course.

Your brother passed on another lovely cold this month. You stopped nursing entirely for almost 36 hours. We did manage to coax a couple ounces of pedialyte into you but that was it.

You are very anti-bottle for the most part though. I tried to go to a local homeschool for an evening but you wouldn’t touch the milk I pumped for you when daddy offered it to you in a bottle. Stinker.

I love you my little bug!

This is a pretty accurate picture of the last week around here. Sick kids… absolutely no reading… and a little bit of knitting (when I finally manage to get Alex to sleep on my chest).

I’m loving knitting with this yarn, although whatever possessed me to start to knit a sweater for me in fingering weight yarn I’ll never know. What was I thinking? Perhaps it will be done for Christmas?

Whatever this bug my poor little ones have is pretty nasty. I managed to kick it pretty fast in the older ones with lots of echinacea with goldenseal, herbal biotics, and some emergenC. Alex on the other hand isn’t old enough for those things so he wasn’t so lucky. We spend the day in emergency yesterday when he started turning blue when he was coughing. I was finally allowed to bring him home but he is hardly nursing and having a very hard time breathing so I’m not sure if we’ll be able to stay out. Sick babies are not fun.

He looks cute. It’s an act. Don’t buy it.

My husband started a new job recently, he is working for himself now and had to purchase a truck. We decided to go to a nearby big city to do this and figured we might as well spend a couple extra days and take the kids to a huge, super fun mall.

There is a giant indoor water park, indoor theme park, and tons of shopping there. It would have been the perfect vacation had a certain baby not been even more miserable than normal while we were there (apparently that is possible, who knew?). I kept him in the beco most of the time which helped. I think I lost 6lbs packing that boy!

They all had a blast in the wave pool. I had a blast reading my book.

Maybe there is hope for Alex liking the water after all! It didn’t last long but he did have some fun.

The mall has a fabulous thing where certain times of the day families can go to the park and ride rides or go to the water park for only $20, it was great.

We did have a pretty good time, I definitely had a lot of fun shopping!! However, we won’t be attempting a trip like that until Alex is MUCH older.