Mobility

It's been longer than I thought since I last posted to our blog! Things are going great here, and there should be some photos with this posting, but it's all I can do to just write something right now. I'm way behind on getting pictures sent out and you all deserve more, but they're coming! We're super busy these days with school, work and keeping up with Zoey!

She started crawling forward this last week -- hooray! Two days after turning 8 months old. She has been pushing herself backwards, and getting herself into situations she couldn't get out of (like under the bookshelf), for quite some time now, but the forward movement has just begun. She's quite mobile now, rolling around, crawling, pushing herself to sitting up, quite enjoying herself. It has been a lot of fun to watch her expand her boundaries.

Eating solid foods has been a hoot -- Zoey very much likes to eat and hasn't yet found anything she doesn't like. We've been carefully adding new foods, one at a time. Jason had a whole lotta allergies as a child, so we're taking things slow, feeding one food for several days in a row and watching for any reactions. So far, so good! She has tried apples, pears, carrots, pumpkin, yams (loved these!), bananas, sweet potatoes and peas. We've got a few jars of these baby foods, but for the most part, we've just been steaming the fresh veggies and pureeing them or running them through a little food mill. The girl likes to eat!

She's got a few new toys that she's been spending her waking time with these days. One of our wonderful neighbors is letting us borrow her doorway jumper, and once she got the hang of what she was supposed to be doing in it, she has really had a blast jumping around. One day she had a little blowout in her diaper while in the jumper, and boy was that fun to clean up! One of our other good friends has brought over a saucer that Zoey can sit in the middle of and swivel around, with all kinds of fun musical sounds and counting and ABCs. We've also been watching our Baby Einstein First Sounds DVD that Grandma Donna & Grandpa Joe sent us for Christmas, and working on "mama" and "dada". We've also started using some signs with her, mostly the signs for "milk" and "sleep" and "eat" right now.

Have I mentioned what an amazing neighborhood we have moved into? Zoey has lots of little friends here, 6 or 7 babies born in 2008 and all but one of them are girls. We have a mom's group that meets once a month, and have had lots of excuses to get together over the holidays these past weeks. We've begun a monthly project, where several households get together at one or two houses and tackle a big project. Last weekend we removed 31 arborvitaes from a hedge at the neighbors across the street. What would have probably taken them weekends upon weekends to do themselves, the group wrapped up in less than 3 hours together. Next month it's our turn, and we will be putting in a couple of raised garden beds -- very exciting!!

OK, it has taken about 4 hours for me to get this much written, and it's close to our bedtime. As we approach the making of history with the inauguration of Barack Obama this week, we're holding much hope for the healing of the country, the economy, our environment, and the future. Happy 2009!