This is how we eat our food

Alexander is entertaining, and can get very distracted, while he eats.  Sometimes he is completely focused on the spoon and when he is getting his next bite...and sometimes it's all we can do to keep his attention, since everything around the high chair is very exciting and must be looked at now.  Bet you can't guess which category Alexander fell into for this feeding:

Haha, oh the cuteness :)  Later in this feeding he decided to be a bit more food-focused:

And speaking of food...if you have to make a cake or cupcakes in the next few weeks, make it a mummy!

These mini loaf pan mummys (shown in their tasty chocolate coffins :) ) are easy - just put frosting in a bag and make short, mummy-wrapping-ish lines.  Lots of them.  I used a jagged cake decorating tip, but if your mummy lines are more smooth than jagged, I bet people will still eat them.  It's almost Halloween, after all - I'm pretty sure there is some rule that you need to eat extra sugar at this time of year.

Adventures of late

Hello again friends!  In the last month or two we have had lots of adventures:

We went apple-picking!  Fun times, and then we made bottled apple pie filling from them, so tasty times too. 

Alexander wasn't so sure about the blackberry-picking part of the outing.

He does like reading books though!  Um, excuse my finger in the corner of this picture; I obviously will not have a successful photography career :)

Alexander loves his Daddy play time.

As well as matching Daddy - stripes!

And listening to him play the guitar - Alexander gets mesmerized by it!

Eating fists - and anything else that is around - is also a favorite.

For the Labor Day weekend we took a long car ride down to Georgia to see our good friends Nicole and Jeff and their new addition Scott.

And...crashed our car when we were almost there.  Sadness!  Luckily our car just had cosmetic damage (though enough that the insurance company wouldn't fix it) and we were all okay; Alexander didn't even know anything had happened.  A Braves baseball game made us feel better.

And the World of Coca-cola was pretty fun.

Alexander especially liked hanging out there with his new friend Scott :)

That night Alexander decided to steal a taste of a frosted orange shake from The Varsity, a famous Atlanta restaurant. 

Okay well he didn't actually get a taste, but he sure wanted to!  He has an eagle eye for food that we are not sharing with him.  And we usually get a garbled talking-to about that.

All that fun stuff tired him out, though :)

A rental car got us back home, and after our beloved (not) activity of car searching we found a new car - well, new to us.  So everything worked out after all.

Alexander is eating more and more types of foods, and he loves them. Well, most of them - he refuses to eat peas (even though he had those for his first food and ate them fine then...apparently that feed-them-vegetables-first-so-they-will-eat-them advice is not infallible).  Last night he tried chicken and loved it.  He also especially likes any kind of fruit, sweet potatoes, and rice cereal.

Here he is eating strawberries from a mesh feeder.  It was a very serious job.

And on another day, getting strawberry juice all over himself!  And loving it.  Also, check out his two bottom teeth in this picture!  They came in at the end of August.  Pretty much they are the cutest teeth ever, not that we are biased.  And they are on the cutest face ever, so that helps :)

 Being so cute is tiring though :)  Alexander has been rolling around a lot in the past week, all over the rug and all over the bed or playpen, wherever he is sleeping.  It's rather adorable.

Tired of all these pictures?  Good, since this is almost done.

Alexander is obsessed lately with shadows.  They are the coolest thing ever.

 A couple days ago, he noticed the shadow of the spoon on his high chair tray, and he was more interested in the shadow than in eating the food on the spoon.  And that is saying something!

I never knew laughing could be so cute :)

Alexander first smiled shortly before he turned 2 months old.  Of course, this was the cutest thing Morgan or I had ever seen.

A few months later, he had occasional little giggles.  They were very sporadic and short, and sometimes we couldn't tell if he was making happy giggle sounds or on-the-verge-of-getting-upset sounds...but the times we could tell, we thought those giggles were the cutest ever.

But laughing totally takes the cake.  Last week Alexander laughed, really laughed for more than a second or two!  And it really is the cutest thing possible :)  Hearing a baby laugh is the best - they can't hide their emotions (and don't even try), so when a baby is laughing for a while you know they are really happy.  Which makes you even happier and willing to do silly things, like make weird sounds while shaking your head back and forth so your hair falls all over your face, so that they laugh even more.  It's a great cycle :)

Jumping boy!

We got this jumper used for $20.  I thought Alexander would probably like it, but nope, he loves it!  He was not sure how to work it at first, so his legs just dangled there for the most part :) but now he bounces himself up and down the whole time he is in there.  It's pretty cute!

Food!

So Alexander has been dying to eat regular food.  For months, he has noticed when we eat, but over the past month he has watched us eat more and more intently.  He will stop playing with toys to stare at us eat, which I think is funny, but he has been getting more and more stressed that he doesn't get anything.  It seemed like he was definitely ready to try some food, but since he is just over 5 months I wasn't sure yet.

Two nights ago, though, we decided to give him food after he was upset and crying about not getting food.  I wasn't ready with home-prepared food for him this early but I did have a can of salt-free sweet peas, so those got mashed up and strained and watered down.  The end result looked kind of gross, actually.  But Alexander certainly didn't mind! :)

He did impressively well at keeping the food in his mouth and swallowing it - he hardly got messy at all!  Now I just need to decide what to try next after the peas...suggestions?

In other news, Xander had been sleeping in his bouncer chair every night up until a week ago.  He just had a hard time sleeping more than a couple hours in his pack and play, so I had been putting him down for naps there, but nighttime just wasn't working there.  Plus when he spits out his pacifier, a few times per night, he was way closer for me to put it back in :)  Last Friday he fell asleep in my arms and I decided to just try putting him in the pack and play for the night...and he slept there all night!  Well he woke up once needing the pacifier reapplied, but then he fell back asleep there.  And he has slept there every night since, no problemo!  We are very impressed by how well he took to it...well, it only took 5 months, but he is doing well there now... :)

Basically our little boy is growing up, and while that makes me happy and he is so fun right now, it also makes me sad since he is so different from when he was younger!  I guess that's how things go, but I just wish I could have him both ways.  I mean, you just can't compare this

to this.  Both stages are too cute for words :)

Red, white, and blue in photos

So here are the promised pictures of us in our Independence Day finery. Enjoy!

Happy (late) Independence Day!

Excuse the lack of blogging, Alexander has been sick with a cold this whole week and then he got me sick :( Good thing I love him!

Independence Day was, as usual, a good chance to think about the ideals this country was founded with and all the many sacrifices that have been made for us. It has taken so much thought and effort to give us the freedoms we have. I appreciate those greatly, though I do not think of it as often as I should. The mandatory American Heritage class at BYU is generally complained about for being hard, but learning about the founding of this country should require a little effort for us, right? It was one of my favorite classes and I should read more books on this topic. Any recommendations?

I wanted to show you how Alexander and I dressed up in patriotic colors/clothing- though Alexander's participation in this was not of his choice, I'm sure he will appreciate it when he gets older :) Sadly, though, I can't get pictures of him to upload from my iPhone, as I am blogging from the road (I feel so technologically connected and cool!) on our way to Cleveland for the weekend. I will work to rectify this situation- check back soon for pictures of cuteness :)