A Round of Applause

For the past few months we have been trying to get Josh to clap his hands.  We would show him how to clap and hold his arms and clap but he wouldn't ever try it on his own.   We thought he could do it if he wanted since he has no trouble "clapping" two toys together to make noise. But he always refused to do it on his own, until this weekend.  Josh started clapping and now we are having lots of fun with it.  It is just a constant reminder of how enjoyable it is to watch him grow up and do new things.

Here is a video I recorded Sunday morning of Josh clapping (he just started doing it on his own)

Just Pictures

Margaret and I are both a bit busy this week so we don't have time for a full post.  Here are some pictures to tide you over

Not sure how he feels about being 10 months old

Not so bad I guess

Looking for a good book to read (or eat)

Here is a video from Halloween when Josh wanted a piece of candy

10 months!

Happy 10 months to our baby boy! There is no checkup until he is 1 year (ahhhh), so we won't have any stats for a while. He certainly is outgrowing his clothes, so we are confident he is still growing :) He has pretty much outgrown all his 9 month clothes and is in 12 month clothes, he can even wear some 18 month clothes, although they are a little big. The biggest developments this past month have been his eating and his playing with toys. He will now eat lots of different foods and different textures. If you are eating something and won't share, he gets very upset. We think we have narrowed down his allergies to soy and peas (both legumes), but haven't fully tested the other legumes yet (oddly enough, peanuts don't seem to cause a reaction). We have been afraid to give him dairy yet, but I think we will try some yogurt or cheese soon. In terms of playing, he is starting to play "games" with some of his toys. He has a set of blocks and he likes to put them up high and then grab them again, or put them into baskets and then look for them. It is very cute to watch his mind developing :-)  He also loves to play a game with a pair of sunglasses he has. Either Julian or I will put on the sunglasses, and he loves to take them off us and then give them back. It has been so fun to get to play with him now :-)

World Traveler!

Josh's passport arrived in the mail today! We will be traveling with my family between Christmas and New Years to Curacao and knew we needed to get Josh a passport for the trip. We decided to wait until he could sit up to get his pictures taken, but then were a little slow figuring out what we needed to do. When the government shutdown happened we (ehem, Julian) had a bit of a freakout over getting his passport in time, since we had been procrastinating on doing it. Julian made an appointment to get it all done at our local post office. Both parents need to appear in person to apply, and we were fortunate that the post office also takes pictures (since we did not have our act together to take one ourselves that meets the requirements). Unfortunately, the night before our appointment...Josh came down with a fever! He was not himself at all, so we were very worried that it would not go well to get his picture taken. Luckily, he rebounded quickly and everything went much smoother than we expected. At the post office, they had me hold Josh up in front of the background and were able to get a shot of him looking at the camera in only 2 tries! It only took about 2 weeks to get the passport back, even without doing a rush order. Seeing his picture on a official USA passport today really hit me, that our baby is ready to travel the world!

Happy Halloween!

We had a great first Halloween with Josh :-). I managed to get him a turtle costume online slightly last minute when our Halloween plans changes, and it worked out really well. The costume was a bit big, but very cute. We needed a costume that would look ok without the hat (because he takes all his hats off). His daycare had a little parade and halloween party, which we stopped by. It was really crowded so we ended up not staying very long. Then we brought Josh home to carve pumpkins and go out trick-or-treating! By far, Josh's favorite thing about Halloween was the candy. Even though he was not allowed to eat any (nor do I think he realized you could eat it), he really wanted to get his hands on the brightly colored plastic packages! Here are some cute pictures from Josh's first halloween :-)

Checking out the pumpkin

Oooo what is that??

CANDY!!

Mmmmm Candy!

Who takes candy from a baby anyway???

I see the candy up there!

Happy Halloween!

More Photos by Emily Rose Portraits

Emily (From Emily Rose Portraits) was in town again this fall and we decided to do another set of family pictures. Josh has grown so much in the past 6 months since our last pictures, we wanted to be sure to have good pictures of him :-) We loved how our last pictures came out (despite having a cranky baby), so we knew we wanted to do more pictures with Emily. Josh is a much better behaved baby than he was for the ~4 month pictures, but unfortunately he was not in a particularly good mood the day of the photos. We think that he didn't like the blue jeans that I bought for him to wear because they were hard to crawl in. Fortunately we changed his clothes half way through, and his mood improved a lot. He also doesn't ever like to sit still making him a more difficult subject. Emily did a great job capturing his personality and excitement :-) Here are a few great pictures from our shoot!

Best buds??

We have been patiently waiting as Josh has been discovering Jeter. When he first noticed her, I think he was more curious and thought perhaps she was just another toy to put in his mouth. But he is now obsessed with getting to grab her fur and chase her around the room. When he sees her, he squeals with excitement and races over to her to grab her (not so gently...). If you watched the video of Josh climbing the steps, you can see his excitement and how motivated he is to catch her! It has been a bit of a problem though, because Jeter is determined to stand her ground as "most important family member", and refuses to move just because Josh is around. Even if we move to another room with him, she follows us, sits near him, and waves her tail around. She waits until she is being grabbed, yells for attention, and waits for us to intervene. She has not yet hurt Josh, although she has gotten close on some particularly bad grabbing episodes and we have needed to separate the two of them. We think that Jeter likes the attention, although I know from personal experience that having your hair pulled by Josh is not fun :-P  It can be pretty difficult to watch Josh when Jeter is around because he is very fast and you can't let go of him for a second or he has a fist full of her hair. Hopefully he will learn how to pat her gently, or at least lose interest in the hair pulling! They are pretty cute together though :)

After forced separation

must...get....Jeter...

Oooo cat!!!

See, I'm gentle!!