Good Ol Home Videos

But this time we aren't watching them on a VCR.

These are videos we've taken in the past month.

Posting for family enjoyment:

My sister sent this card congratulating me on surviving my first year of motherhood.

Josiah trying out his walker he got for his birthday.

As you can see he's gotten much better at it.

Starting to use the spoon.

Josiah 1st Birthday

For Josiah's first birthday (which was a month ago!), we had few friends over for cake and ice cream.  We live across the street from one of the 10,000+ lakes in MN.  Lake Josephine has a park with a swimming beach, playground, boat launch, fishing dock and numerous picnic tables. The weather was absolutely beautiful that day.  I know everyone enjoyed being outside.  

A local fancy grocery store offers free birthday cakes for your baby's first birthday so we took them up on the offer.  I had never been in the store before I went to order the cake but I did buy a few other things there to ease my guilt!  This store is carpeted and does not have your typical layout of a grocery store, I literally walked all over before I found the milk tucked away in the back corner.  Here is the cake they made for Josiah, it was delicious.  

I had the options of chocolate, white or marble cake, chocolate or white icing, balloon or flower decorations and what I wanted the cake to say.  This picture was taken after I started slicing!

I made a special gluten, dairy and egg free chocolate brownie for Josiah to chow down and boy did he!  I thought the brownies were pretty good but I didn't have any takers on them at the party, which meant more for me later!  We did give Josiah a few smaller pieces a couple of days later but he may have been burned out from the big one he ate.  I gave him that big of a piece for picture taking purposes but he probably ended up eating 3/4 of it, the rest fell through the cracks of the table.

Mike tried lighting the candle but it too windy for the little flame to hold.

Here is his nice brownie face and taking a break to chew on the fork, still no teeth at this time!

After downing the brownie, he need to laugh it off.  He loves the swing, even more so when his daddy is pushing him!  These baby swings are wonderful, I'm so glad the parks have them.  At first when he'd swing he had to hold on but now that he's used to it he'll flail his arms and kick his legs. 

His bud Joshua decided to join in on the fun.  Joshua is Josiah's polar opposite, lots of dark hair!

When we got home that evening we opened his presents.  The theme of the presents was blocks.  Three of his toys had different shaped blocks with holes to put them in , he loved them.  One of the block toys was a walker that he could push around.  There will be video of that later on!

It was a great 1st birthday with friends and sunshine!

Crawling...And Climbing?

Hello everyone! This is the very first post by the 'Mike' in 'The Mike and Lacy Show'. Lacy graciously allowed me to pitch in and provide an update, so here goes!

Since our last post, Josiah has continued to hone and develop his new found crawling skills. The video below was taken a week ago, about two weeks into his little 'experiment'. As you can see, he's made marked improvements in both speed and agility. The only downside is that he now gets into things he shouldn't about twice as often as he used to! (Yes, those are Christmas lights Josiah is trying to get a hold of. Don't tell anyone we still have them up ;)

Thus far, Josiah has approached crawling with the utmost prudence and care. And who can blame him? Bumbling around on your hands and knees probably feels pretty weird the first time you try it. But oddly enough, the same cannot be said for his attempts to go vertical. We don't know if he wants to be closer to where Mom and Dad are or if he just wants a new challenge, but he's definitely ready to go up. Lace had suspected that he was 'trying' to pull himself up over the last couple of days, but neither of us had actually seen him do it. Today he decided to show us (over and over again) what he's been working on:

Needless to say, we dropped his crib bed down to the lowest setting immediately after recording this!

Caution! What you see below may cause laughter.

Crawling

Josiah is 10 months old and on the verge of taking off!  As you can see below he is trying out this thing called crawling.  He's not consistent about crawling yet and prefers the side-winder army sprawl, but if he wants something, he goes after it!

He's been doing really well trying new fruits and veggies, he's not too crazy about chunky stuff and he likes his food warm.  I think avocados are his favorite so far.

At the beginning of Jan. we discovered that he was allergic to milk after we gave him a spoonful of yogurt.  Then we had him tested for other allergies and he is pretty much allergic to everything.  He highest levels were for milk and wheat, but gluten, soy, egg white and nuts were positive also.  He's had some eczema and minor skin rashes off and on, but we thought that was mostly due to the dry winter weather.  It turns out it was all allergies from the food I was eating.  So guess who gets to go on a everything free diet for a few months!  I was and still am planning on breast feeding him until he turns one.  It's frustrating though that one of the reasons to breast feed was to decrease his chances of having food allergies!  Either way I don't regret having chosen to nurse him.

This past Fri was our 4th wedding anniversary.  Since I'm on a limited diet, we went to Fogo De Chao.  It's a Brazilian steakhouse where they bring around a variety of meats on big skewers and shave off pieces for you.   It was unbelievably delicious and all you can eat.  They also offer a salad bar for you to get your veggies in but we only went once and didn't fill our plate.  It's expensive but well worth the money.  They are located in a lot of big cities, so look one up next time you have something to celebrate!

Well that's a little bit of what's been going on with us.  

The child-proofing begins

Josiah's started playing roly-poly on his bedroom floor.  He no longer just flops around on his blanket.  He rolls until he can't go any more.  Just a little while ago he bonked his head into the bottom of his little rocking chair.  It left a red mark but it's already gone.  So now there is a blanket in front of the chair.

Next thing I know he'll be crawling!!

6 Months

Josiah turned 6 months this past Tues.  Wed. he had his check up and shots. We also started him on rice cereal that night. Below are two videos of his first tasting. I'll warn you ahead of time the first one is about 3 minutes long and the second is about 4 minutes. I didn't edit them because one, I'm not really sure how and two, I know our families want to see it all. If you are not family, don't feel obligated to watch the whole thing.  He makes some pretty good faces in the first video, so you don't miss much not watching the second one.

More cuteness...