7 Months 3 Weeks 3 Days

Wow! 1 week from today, Christopher will be 8 months old! Time is flying by SO fast!

Two weeks ago, I spent two nights at my mom's house with the 5 dogs (+ Brinkley) while she and my aunt went to a funeral in Georgia. Boy, was that fun and interesting! Please remind me to never have more than 2 dogs at a time...especially indoor dogs! Pretty much every nap Christopher took was cut short because of dogs barking! Grrr!

Last week, Christopher and I spent a night at my dad's in Knoxville. My sister, brother-in-law and 2 nieces were down from Pennsylvania for a few days. Since the last time I saw them was 3 years ago, and because they haven't seen Christopher yet, I decided to make a quick trip over there. It was really nice getting to see them all again. I just wish we didn't live so far apart. The girls are growing up SO FAST! Courtney will be 11 in October and Kaitlyn will be 8 in October. Courtney's now involved in modeling and has head shots and everything! I remember when she was a baby and now she's modeling??? Before I know it, Christopher's going to be that old!

While we were gone, Christopher said his first word...Mama! Actually, it's more like ma ma ma ma ma ma. He doesn't use it in context yet. Shad's not pleased since he's been trying to get Christopher to say Dada for a long time now! He he!

This past weekend, Shad noticed that 2 more of Christopher's bottom teeth had popped through for a total of 4 bottom teeth. I noticed today that 2 TOP teeth are starting to come through, too! That's going to be a total of SIX teeth by the time he's 8 months old!!! All of these are coming in without any change in behaviour, so I don't think they're bothering him too much (THANK GOODNESS!!!). So far, he's not really biting me much. I hope that stays the same while all these teeth are coming in!

Football season starts in less than 1 month (specifically 25 days 0 hours and 15 minutes)! You can bet that I'm going to be there since I missed all but 1 game last year! PawPaw and Grandma Patti are going to babysit Christopher for me. It's going to be quite interesting to see how things go since it's a 3 hour drive over there and a 3 hour drive home. PLUS, the game doesn't start until 5:30 EST, so we'll be getting home pretty late. THEN, we have to get up early for church the next morning. Uff da! Unfortunately, future games for me will probably depend on how things go at the first one. The plus side of a late game, though, is that we get to tailgate, which we didn't get to do at all last year. That's always lots of fun, too!

No crawling yet. That's not to say he's not mobile, though! He pretty much gets to wherever he wants by rolling and scooting! Shad seems to think it won't be long before Christopher's crawling, but I can't really tell. He's gotten on all fours once or twice, but that's been over the last month or so. He hasn't really progressed in that area. He IS able to pull himself into a standing position when he holds our hands. He won't try it when holding on to anything else, though...just our hands. Watch him start walking before he crawls! One day last week, I walked into his room to get him after a nap and he was sitting up waiting for me. That was the first time that happened, but he hasn't done it since then.

As far as solids go...since my last entry, I've introduced him to Peas, Turkey and now Beef tonight. He LOVED them all! He seems to really like pretty much anything I've given to him, so don't really know what, if anything, are his favorites. I assume we'll determine that over time.

Speaking of eating...it's time for him to eat now, so better end here. I'll try to update as more milestone's start happening.

7 months 1 week 2 days

In the last week, I've introduced Oatmeal and Pears. He accepted the oatmeal, but it wasn't his favorite food. However, he LOVED the pears, of course! Last night for dinner, I mixed rice cereal with pears and he loved that. Today for lunch, I mixed rice cereal with some sweet potatoes. He doesn't really like sweet potatoes by themselves, but he really liked them mixed with cereal. I think we'll try that again for dinner tonight...if Shad will ever get home from work.

For the past 2 weeks now, he's been working a lot of overtime. It sucks not being able to see him much and not knowing when he'll get home for dinner, but the bigger paychecks are nice! Starting in August, he's going to have to work some Saturdays, too. Apparently, working more than 40 hours a week on Monday through Friday just isn't cutting it!

I had another crappy weekend. Last weekend it was Christopher who was sick. This weekend, it was me. I started getting a sore throat on Wednesday evening and it's only progressively gotten worse. Finally, Saturday morning I couldn't stand it anymore and went to the local walk-in clinic. Of all things, I have strep throat!!! Just where that came from, I have no idea!!! I haven't had that since I was a kid...probably 15-20 years ago! To top it off, I've got a mouthful of canker sores that make swallowing/eating that much worse. I started taking an antibiotic on Saturday and was told that I'd start feeling better in 24-48 hours. Sure enough, I woke this morning feeling slightly better. It still hurts to swallow/eat but it's getting a little better. I'm hoping to be completely over this in a couple of days.

I'm going down to stay with the dogs at my mom's while she and my aunt go to a funeral in Georgia. I'll be going down on Wednesday and returning on Friday. I just hope Christopher doesn't catch this strep throat! I guess we can both suffer down there as well as we can up here, but down there we'll have 6 indoor dogs (5 of theirs and 1 of mine) to deal with.

Well, Shad's finally on his way home from work and it looks like we'll be having Subway for dinner. I've got a show on tv that I want to watch and it starts soon, so don't want to be cooking in the middle of it. I'll leave you with a few words from Christopher:

" pvbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbgjxycb cdf b bvb
h tfdzx "

7 months 2 days

Wow! I really need to update this thing more often! I didn't realize that it's almost been a month since I last posted! Sorry!

Let's see...what's been going on...

We had a nice 4th of July. We invited some friends and family over to grill out, watch MTSU's firework show and then shoot off our own. Richard stayed at the house with Christopher while we went to a nearby ballfield for the fireworks. Before all that, though, one of the guys decided to shoot of what he thought was a no-noise firework in our backyard. Unfortunately, it had a VERY loud whistle! We found out really quickly that Christopher didn't like it! Poor baby!

Christopher's now sitting up on his own very well! He's been rolling around like crazy for quite some time, but still not much sign of him crawling anytime soon. Not that I want him to stay immobile forever, but I'm enjoying not having to tag along behind him everywhere to keep him out of trouble!

On Thursday, July 13, we had Christopher's 6 month pictures taken by a friend of Richard's. Yes, I realize that he was 2 days shy of turning 7 months old, but better late than never! We were given 2 cd's FULL of pictures...well over 100 of them! Now, we have to choose what we want printed out! That's gonna be a hard decision as there are a lot of really good pictures! Here are a few of them:







On Friday night, I went to a friend's house for a scrapbooking party. It started at 8:00 pm, so since Christopher's bedtime isn't until 9:30, Shad got his first chance at putting Christopher to bed. Everything went just fine and Christopher went right to sleep! I underestimated him!

On Saturday morning, though, we woke up to a VERY crabby baby! He was fussy both Saturday and Sunday, ran a low-grade fever of 100.2, and didn't want to sleep or eat. I just assumed it was teething. However, we also noticed that he was playing with his left ear, which made us think he might have an ear infection. On Saturday, he also started getting a diaper rash. However, on Sunday, it started spreading to his arms, legs, back and torso. Saturday night into Sunday morning was really bad! He woke up every 1-2 hours between 9:30 and 3:00! After staying awake for about an hour, he finally went back to sleep until 7:00. Shad and I decided to stay home from church, though, since Christopher wasn't wanting to eat and was being so fussy.

Last night was a lot better and he seems to be eating almost normally now today, but I still went ahead and made a doctor's appointment for 2:40 today. Dr. Tammy said that it is not an ear infection...yay! However, she said that he has some nasal congestion. With that and the rash, she thinks it's something viral. He's been a lot better today, so it seems he's getting over it. She said that the rash should go away in 1-3 days. So, Christopher's now had his first illness! Poor baby (and Mommy and Daddy)!

As far as solids go...he has now had rice cereal, sweet potatoes, applesauce, carrots, bananas, squash and peaches. He accepted everything, but seemed to enjoy applesauce, carrots, squash and peaches the most. I think we're going to introduce oatmeal tomorrow.