Nearing the Five Month Mark

Wow. Five months already. Unbelievable. Time is flying. It's so weird to think back to a year ago when I was pregnant, the horrible nasty heat that made me so nauseous, the worries that everything was OK inside there, and just the excitement of having a baby on the way. It seems 100 times more amazing now that we have that little baby around here. He's getting so big already, he's squawking, laughing, and eating bananas. Weird weird weird. Here is an assortment of recent pictures:

The Fourth of July onesie from Grandma Hemberger. He started the day with matching stars and stripes socks, but it was a bit warm in the sun. We went to the annual Brown family picnic on Diamond Lake.


We had a bit of a photo shoot this morning. He looks so different in this shot.


My mom took this awesome picture of Fredrik this week. She always manages to catch his smiles.


Ooooo...black and white. Fancy.


joe and Tiff visited us on Friday and she took this nice family shot. Nice parsley in the teeth, Katy. We had just been snacking on some tabouli.


Fredrik's new friend Tiff.

First Food!

I love making baby food.
Fredrik's Doctor gave us the go-ahead to start solids. We decided that he was ready when he howled every time we ate and if he was on our lap he would grab our food and make for his mouth. He's been acting anxious about eating for at least a month already so we decided we had had enough of this waiting business. He;s only getting a tiny bit of food each time, and not even every day, so there's not a substantial amount of calories coming his way, it's more about just tasting.
So, here are some photos of the monumental first food. We boiled some carrots grown here on the August Earth farm. He loved them, we actually limited his intake to about a teaspoon. Sadly, he later had a little crankiness that seemed to me like indigestion so we ceased the carrot feeding. Now, about 4 days later (my memory is bad so I don't remember when he had the carrots exactly) we have tried banana. He wasn't quite as sure about it, but he was a happy and content boy all evening.
Right now I am waiting for some peas to boil. We have a surplus growing outside so I thought I better get some in the freezer. Wow, labor intensive, but delicious. Picking, washing, shelling, another rinse, cooking (it takes 20 minutes!) and then a quick puree in the food mill (Thanks Betsy!) and they are ready for the ice cube tray. It looks like I am going to get 14 full ice cube-sized portions of peas tonight. Not bad considering he eats a tiny spoonful. I hope to make enough baby food this summer to last through the winter. It's super fun!

Teething=Exhausted Brain-Dead Parent

Teething has officially begun. I've gotten some advice on some great remedies, I just need to go get them at a store. One would think that I would do this immediately, but wow, the minutes and hours and days and weeks are going so fast that I am finding it hard to get ANYTHING done. Having a baby is super great and awesome. Having tons of work outside and inside and a farm to pack up and move at the same time is crazy and impossible. I have constructed a large calendar list sort of deal that is propped on our piano with a weekly schedule of tasks and chores. The bulk of these things are to take place before Peter starts school in a month-both for the well-being of me here at home and Peter who needs to focus on lawyering sorts of things at that time. So, to end this tangent I will get back to the fact that I need another 20 minutes in my day to go get some teething remedies tomorrow. Maybe.

In other news, bedtime has been going well the past two nights. The three nights before that were horrid. One night it took him 2 hours of extreme fussiness to settle down. I partially blame the teeth. What has worked the last couple of nights is calmly bringing him to bed after he nurses around 8:00 and letting him finish falling asleep on his own in our bed with a snuggley toy. Success. (We are co-sleeping and we prefer it. He sleeps 250% better as do we.)

Blogger doesn't want me to publish a picture so I'll try again later.

Summertime