10 Months Old!

Parker is now 10 months old and these photo shoots with the bear are increasingly more difficult for me on dive duty and Wendie for her patience with Parker's less than developed attention span. I know that Wendie is counting down the photo shoots we have to do with the bear and the couch (just two more left now). This one above is about as good as it gets for both parties sitting up. :)

Parker is hilarious....and he thinks that nearly everything else is hilarious. He laughs so much!! He is pretty easily entertained. When we have dinner as a family he spends his time trying to get everyone to pay attention to him and he'll keep us laughing however he can. I think we have the class clown on our hands. He's definitely taking after his dad...

Parker is ON THE MOVE! He can't sit still for a minute! Changing his diaper is like an all-out wrestling match. I have yet to perfect the art of changing a diaper while Parker is standing up. Which leads me to my next point....Parker is pulling up on everything and standing. Gone are the days of finding him in the morning peering over the bumper in the crib smiling at me. Now, I find him every morning and after every nap standing up in his crib holding on to the rails and yelling...sometimes happy yells and sometimes not-so-happy yells.

After watching olympic diving, Parker is

practicing is his couch diving technique.

Earlier this month Parker had a fever which would go down with medicine, but always went back up. The fever remained for three days and Parker kept feeling worse and worse. On day three we took him to the nurse practicioner at the pediatrian's office and her diagnosis: Ear infection. For a mom who studied ears for four years you would have thought I should have caught on sooner....oh well! I have to say that his ears didn't seem red to me, but with some antibiotics Parker was back to himself in no time. Thank goodness!

Parker loves my keys...he always has, but this is the only thing that could get him to sit still for a second for the photos.

Here Parker looks as though is is directing
the orchestra in a very spirited song.

Parker has just recently started to have more of a preference for certain foods and if he doesn't like what you give him he will make a terrible face and spit it out.

Parker now has two more teeth coming in to total 10 teeth so far!

He's quite a character. I just asked Chad if he could think of anything about Parker to add for this month. He said that Parker is just plain wild. He said we should auction off the parental rights to him and start the bidding out low knowing what a wild animal he is. :) I think we'll have to pass on auctioning him off for now. We love him lots and lots even if he is crazy.

Who could resist that face?

Sprinkler Fun!

Not too much better than a little stroll through

the sprinklers when it's over 100 degrees outside!

Parker went on an all out strike against naps today which led to this...

Happy birthday to me!

Yesterday was my birthday and now I'm one day closer to the big 3-0! We had a fun day. I had the day off of work so I got to spend lots of time with Parker.

We went to lunch with Wendie and my mom at Olive Garden for our favorite budget lunch of soup, salad, and breadsticks. We did our fair share of eating and boy was it yummy!

Last night we went to dinner with the whole family to Fukuda, a local Japanese restaurant with a tepan grill. That is one of my favorite restaurants and it has been a tradition to go there for my birthday. It was delicious!

Parker had his first experience with chopsticks

He was also fully entertained by the flames, flying food, spinning eggs, and banging tools in the little show the chef put on.

I also had a pre-birthday lunch at Sammy's while Julie was still in town and Julie, Wendie, and I enjoyed a gigantic sundae! Not too much better than that!

My birthday is the start of a new year in my life and gets me thinking about goals and things I can do to improve myself and my family. I have had a lot of things lately that have gotten me thinking about how blessed that I really am, even though on certain occasions it doesn't always feel that way. I have so much to be grateful for! On days when Parker is acting like a wild indian, making big messes, picking, pulling, and pinching everything he can on me, breaking all my jewelry, exhausting me and on and on....I need to remember that I am so blessed to have a son that is healthy and beautiful and we get to have him in our home. He is amazing and has been such a blessing in our lives. On days when I fret about making ends meet and worrying about this bill and the other, I need to remember how lucky we are to have the jobs that we have and the other opportunities for income that have been presented to us so we can make ends meet. As Chad frequently reminds me, "It always works out." There are so many things that I want do to be a better person and hopefully this new year in my life will be just what I need to make some of those things happen. Here's to a new year!

Cousins!

Julie and Clemie came and spent a week with our family. It was so much fun for us to watch Parker and Clemie together and see what they thought of each other and how they interacted. They are so different from each other!

Clemie is so petite in all of her features and Park is a chunky monkey. Clemie tends to be a little more on the serious side and Parker is very easily entertained. Clemie is a night owl and fairly flexible with her schedule. She stayed up until after midnight with us one night while we were playing a game. Parker goes to bed every night around 7pm and there isn't too much deviation from that schedule or you'll have quite an unpleasant baby on your hands. Parker loves his bath and doesn't mind getting his head wet to wash out the soap. Clemie does not like water in her face at all.

Nevertheless, they are both very mobile! Clemie is on the verge of walking and goes everywhere hanging on to what she can and loves to climb the stairs. If you turn your back for a second she is already halfway up. Watching both of them together was completely exhausting, even with two moms! Clemie and Parker have matching dimples. They each have one dimple on their left cheek. So cute.

We took them to Costco and they sat in the basket together. We were the hit of the party over there! It was as if no one had ever seen two babies before with all of the oooo-ing and ahhh-ing.

We had lots of fun with Julie and Clementine in town and look forward to seeing them again soon! I can imagine lots of fun cousin time in the future. Thanks for the visit!



These are just a few other shots of our wild indian from the same day...

(Good shot of that aforementioned dimple)

Buddies!