Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Brief Biking Moments

Since Sienna isn’t old enough to ride on the back of a bike, we haven’t really gotten to ride our bikes this summer.  There have been a few times that Gary will take Ethan to the store on the back of the bike or something like that.  Here are a few pictures from one day where Gary took Ethan to the playground so Ethan could play while Gary read in preparing for a course. IMG_0986Ethan knows he’s a little cool dude!

IMG_0979Ethan checking to see if the bike is in good working order.  IMG_0980Making sure the breaks work.IMG_0970My 2 cool dudes!IMG_0987A little light reading for the ride.

Solid Food

Some Americans start their babies on vegetables, and some start their babies on fruit.  Many of the books recommend vegetables so the baby will have the sweet tasting foods after trying vegetables.  Hungarians start their babies on fruit, with apple typically being the first one.  This is more due to constipation that can occur when the baby eats only vegetables.

It seems like everyone is so eager to start their children on solid foods.  We are not parents who look forward to that, so we wait as long as possible.  We’ve thought it was so much easier to just nurse.  It’s faster, less messy, and you can do it anywhere (at least over here in Europe).  We chose with Ethan and Sienna to wait until they were 6 months to begin solid foods. IMG_0883We decided to start rice cereal a few days before Sienna turned 6 months so Stephanie could be there and experience this with us.  It took her longer than we expected to get the hang of this food thing. IMG_1016I wanted to start her on butternut squash for her next solid, but you can’t get them in Hungary this time of year.  We were pretty random with Ethan’s next solid (We gave him pears because we had about 65 people at our home for a pot luck and someone left a bunch of pears, so we decided to give those to him.)  With Sienna we knew we were leaving a few days later for Albania, so we just did carrots and thought we would try to take some with us for the first day there.IMG_1069While in Albania we bought bananas and smushed them in a bowl.  Because we could not drink the water, we decided to even buy a jug of bottled water to wash her bowl and spoon each day.

I look forward to being in the States during the time that she should be trying lots of different foods.  I LOVED that with Ethan.  We can only buy the fruits and veggies that are in season here.  I did puree some asparagus and some seasonal fruits this summer so she could have some of them in the winter.

Sunday, September 4, 2011

6 Months

Sienna turned 6 months old a couple of weeks ago.  Wow!  These 6 months have certainly gone by quickly!  And, faster than I remember Ethan’s first six months going.

Sienna weighed 14.6 pounds at her 6 month check-up.  That’s about how much Ethan weighed when he was 3 months old.  She has been in the 75th-80th percentile for height the last couple of months.

She is a great baby.  Outside of the first three months she hasn’t been fussy much except about 6:30 in the evenings.  She is almost like clockwork when it comes to nursing at that time and going to bed (unless people are around which tends to distract her).  She still goes to bed around 7:00 at night and gets up between 7:30 and 8:00 in the morning.  I’m working on pushing her naps to 10:00 and 2:00, but it’s more like 9:30 and 1:30 right now.  Her naps are usually around 2-3 hours each, so that has been nice, but also made it difficult to take Ethan to the playground (like he wants to do everyday).  I definitely wish that I had known more about nap stuff when Ethan was this age. IMG_0664Gary thinks that she smiles more than Ethan did.  I remember him smiling a lot, so I don’t really know.  She seems to enjoy people and being held by whoever will hold her, so I wonder if she will be an extrovert like her brother.IMG_0891We  get a lot of comments about her pretty blue eyes.  I still get comments about Ethan’s blue eyes too.  I think they both still look a lot alike.

She is much more verbal than Ethan was at this age.  And she is loud!  She makes all kinds of screeches at a very high pitch.  Some people think she’s upset because it’s so loud and high pitched, but she often does it when she’s happy.SiennaHer hair is still a strawberry blonde color, but seems to be more blonde in the back and at the roots.  We’ll see what color it ends up.

Before too long many of you reading this will get to meet Sienna in person so won’t need these little descriptions.