Sophia Watch: Four Months

Our sweet Sophia is four months old!  And definitely growing fast -- some friends of ours saw her the other day for the first time in a few weeks, and kept marveling at how huge she is now.  :)  She has her four-month check-up on Monday, so we'll have height and weight stats then, but she's definitely, definitely a healthy little girl!


See?  Way bigger than Bun-bun now!  And that white onesie here?  Is a Gerber 18-month onesie.  Now, Gerber sizes run crazy small, and I did fold up the sleeves a little bit, but STILL.  I love how well our dear little girl is growing!

This has been a month of continued equilibrium-regaining as a family.  Sophia continues to be a great sleeper at night -- I half-wake her up for a last feeding at 11pm, and she then sleeps soundly until 8am, or even later if her boisterous older brother doesn't wake her up.  ;)  She fights the daytime naps a little, but about half the time she'll just fuss for a few minutes and then soothe herself to sleep; the other half of the time, she'll get louder in her complaints until I come pick her up and soothe her back down.  Joshua is very much the concerned older brother -- whenever he hears her cry, he'll stop playing, look up at me with a worried face, and observe that "Baby Sophia cries!"  He loves coming upstairs with me when I go to check on Sophia or when it's time to put her down for her nap, and he'll run in a tight circle around me singing "Twinkle Twinkle" while I soothe his little sister.  It's the sweetest thing ever, and I think his happy little voice really does help to calm Sophia down!

Sophia has gotten pretty good at self-soothing this month.  She's been sucking on her fingers for a while now, but a couple weeks ago, she decided she's done with her pacifiers and that she vastly prefers her own hand -- specifically, the middle two fingers of her left hand.  When those fingers find their way into her mouth, I know I can safely tiptoe out of the room and let her drift off to sleep.

She's also starting to coo and babble with more regularity, which is so incredibly cute.  One reason I know she's extremely well-fed and not at all starving?  She stops mid-nursing session, pretty much every time, to smile and gurgle at me.  As though she's saying, "dude, this stuff is amazing.  Have you tried it yet??"  :)

And it looks like we've settled on a cutesy nickname for our little girl... Joshua was "J-bear" pretty consistently through his infanthood, so I thought we'd call Sophia "Sophie-bear" or something similar.  But that just doesn't quite roll off the tongue well enough.  Instead, I've found myself calling her "Fifi" while soothing her in her pouty moods -- the ridiculously cute, giant baby pout just calls forth silly nicknames and baby talk, and thus, "Fifi" was born.  :) 

So here are a few more cute shots of our wee Fifi!


How old are you, Sophia?
Four months, yo.


Left hand in her mouth, right hand twirling her hair


Who's she looking at so intensely in that last shot?  It's my second shooter, big brother Joshua!


"Smile, baby Sophia!"


"The model, she has slumped.  I cannot work under these conditions."


My new favorite photo of the two cutest kiddos in the world.
Then, of course, this happened:






I can already see how I'll need to referee playtime between these two...  ;)

Happy four month birthday, little Sophia!

Toddler Christmas shenanigans

I was surfing Pinterest the other day and saw what I thought was an absolutely genius idea -- create a little felt Christmas tree for your toddler to decorate and redecorate, to help keep his curious hands away from the grown-up Christmas decorations.  It's a cute little decoration and toddler distraction device all in one!  What could possibly go wrong?

I was planning a Michaels trip for some Christmas decor already, so I added some felt to my list.  And over Thanksgiving weekend, while watching Star Wars with David while the kids were in bed, I cut out a tree, some ornaments, and some felt presents, to create our very own little Christmas flannelgraph (side note: throwback to Sunday School fun!).


Super cute, right?  All very simply made of felt (with the J, S, and present ribbons hot-glued on).  I couldn't wait for Joshua to wake up and see "his" tree.

And, well, part of my fond vision came true.  Joshua sure loves the felt circles!  It's the latest in a series of things he can gather and sort, so he loves taking them off the tree, stacking them all in a big pile, and either carrying them around the house or FLINGING them violently about...

But the whole distracting-him-from-other-Christmas-decorations thing?  Not so much.


Yep, that's a large stack of felt circles in his hands...  (This snapshot was taken a few days before our Sophia ornament arrived.  And a few minutes before Joshua grabbed the "white cookie" and tried to eat it.)

Thankfully, in the last week or so, I've taught him not to grab at the staircase ornaments or our little tabletop tree.  But he still insisted on non-standard play with the felt ornaments:






What a cute little stinker.  :)

I ended up appealing to Joshua's sense of order and organization in order to entice him to actually put the ornaments on the felt tree.  Once he realized he could sort the ornaments, he went to town playing with the tree:


Star at the top, then the lights, then the circles, then the presents.  One of these days, he'll likely also sort the shapes by color...

The ornaments still spend way more time on the floor or tucked away in random corners than on the felt tree, but Joshua is having a blast playing with the set, so I'm going to call this a mommy win.  ;)  It's a good exercise in picking my battles and letting go of how things are "supposed" to be in the name of allowing Joshua to have some uninhibited fun, too, so it's good for me, right?  It's what I tell myself every time I hear him giggle uproariously as he throws and gathers and throws and gathers and throws and gathers the felt circles...  :)

This year's Christmas ornament

In case you couldn't tell, I really love traditions of all kinds.  :)  And one of my favorites of the little traditions we've created as a family is the annual Christmas ornament.  Each year, we pick or make an ornament that represents one of the milestones of the year.  Now that we're finally living in a home with a staircase, I decided to put them all up together in a pretty little display:


Starting from the top, we have our 2006 bride and groom, 2007 NYU Law ornament, 2008 Fitz-Randolph gates, 2009 stork, 2010 Joshua ornament, 2011 Joshua handprint, and then this year's ornament:


A lovely embroidered ornament commemorating our little Sophia's first Christmas!  As our 2010 Joshua ornament was an Etsy find, I figured it was appropriate to look for another handmade Etsy item for Sophia, and as soon as I saw the embroidered work in this particular Etsy shop, I knew this was going to be this year's ornament!

I love that both of our kiddos have a lovely handmade ornament celebrating the year in which they were born.  And one of these days, if I'm ever on top of my game enough, they'll have ornaments that are actually hand-crafted by *me*.  ;)  But until that day comes, I'm thankful for all the pretties that can be found on Etsy!

And it goes without saying, but I'm going to say it anyway -- we are all so thankful for our dear little Sophia.  2012 is the year David and I became parents to a daughter, and Joshua became a big brother, and this sweet little ornament is a fitting milestone marker for this year!