Sugar and Spice

Every day with Pumpkin is better than the last. She continues to define her personality a little more each day and I have decided that she is going to be a shy but flirty type. She is coy and absolutely adorable. She will flash you that killer smile and then hide her face, peering out only to see if you're looking. Her laugh is soft but full-bodied and her smile will literally take your breath away. Okay, okay, so I'm a little biased and a lot in love with this little girl, but in addition to her budding and beautiful personality, I have some objective accomplishments to report. First, we have continued with eating and she seems to prefer squash to everything else we've tried. This is odd because, although I am not a picky eater by any stretch of the imagination, I despise squash in all of its forms. It is the one food that I simply will not touch. So, our little flirt loves squash. Go figure. In much more important news - she can roll over!!! The doctor told us not to be d

As a follow up, we tried sweet potatoes without rice cereal and it was tolerated. I won't go so far as to say she "liked" it, since (as shown above) more of it ended up on our shirts than in her mouth, but at least it gave me hope I won't be sending her to high school weighing in at 300 pounds with a bottle of formula in her lunchbox. Also, we had our 4 month checkup and shots yesterday. She is in the 90th percentile for height (25 3/4 inches) and "off the charts for weight" at 17 pounds 8 ounces. Once again, the doc used the term "perfectly healthy," or as we like to say "practically perfect in every way" :)

This was it - the day had finally arrived...Pumpkin was going to eat REAL food (or at least as "real" as you can call that disgusting jarred baby food). We were going to wait until the doc said to do it, but Friday night we were sitting at the restaurant where she was all but drooling over my baked potato and the waitress was appalled that I was not yet giving her food. So I tried a couple bites of plain baked potato and it was not a total disaster, so we decided the time had come. I woke up early Saturday morning and almost skipped (if I knew how to skip) through the grocery store picking up plates, spoons, sippy cups (as if), snack packs, baby food, rice cereal - you name it, if it was on the baby food aisle, it was in my shopping cart. I got home and we didn't even finish unpacking the groceries before we had her strapped into a high chair at the table (teaching her good eating habits early is important) with a plate and spoon. We started with plain rice cereal (a

Well, we survived our first out-of-state travels with our little Pumpkin. Although I have fallen asleep at my desk a couple of times today, I am here to say that our little Pumpkin has all the makings of a fine world traveler, though, as you will see, not sure the same can be said for mommy. So the plan was to go to Florida to visit Ganny for the Labor Day weekend. Of course, the night before our trip I got absolutely no sleep. It was a combination of "did I pack absolutely every single thing I may possibly need for Aly because there is a possibility all the stores in the entire state of Florida have closed" panic and "ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod is she going to scream on the flight and anger everyone on the plane" freaking. I should have had more faith in her and gotten more sleep. It would have made the day a LOT easier. We plan to leave the house at 6:30 to make a 10:15 flight out of Baton Rouge (2 hours away). At 6:20 we are walking out the door and I ask Aaron if