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!!

More baby proofing needed!

Over the summer while at the beach Josh figured out how to climb a few stairs.  The stairs were a bit smaller than normal size and since he has been home he has shown little interest in going up stairs.

On Sunday we were in the basement watching the Redskins game when Josh started playing with Jeter (or attacking Jeter).  Jeter wisely tried to escape up the stairs.  To our surprise, Josh went right after her.  Until this point Josh had never climbed more than 3 steps at a time but here he went all the way to the top.  We were very impressed by how smooth he did it.  Margaret took a video of it (shown below).  I guess I have some more baby proofing to do...

9 Month Checkup

Today was Josh's nine month checkup.  He now weighs 20 lbs, 6 oz which puts him in the 60th percentile for weight.  He is 29.25" long, which is the 80th percentile for height. Overall the appointment went great and Josh is doing very well :-)  He got a flu shot though, and has been a bit fussy this weekend. The hardest part of the appointment was having to schedule Josh's 1 year checkup...our baby is growing up!!!

Julian put together a 9 month video of Josh, so enjoy :-)

40 Weeks

Josh was born on his due date (what I thought his due date was, not the doctor :-) ), meaning he had 40 long weeks of growing inside of me before he was born. I made note of when he would be "40 weeks" old, and that was Oct. 15. In Josh's first 40 weeks he had to grow and develop from a ball of cells to a baby that can breathe and function (somewhat) on his own. In his second 40 weeks, he had to learn how to eat, sleep, move and comfort himself. I'm not sure which 40 weeks he developed more, but he certainly has learned and grown a lot in just a small amount of time!!

I'm also finding myself very impressed with my ability to grow a baby (from scratch!). My body went through a lot of changes to grow and support Josh for 40 weeks inside of me, and also went through a lot of changes to support him outside. It took about 7-8 months for me to lose the weight that I gained in pregnancy, and about that long for me to feel like myself again. My body is certainly not the same as it was before pregnancy, but I'm very proud of how well it was able to adapt to growing and sustaining life :-) Nature is a pretty cool thing!

Here are some pictures from our journey :-)

14 weeks!

39+ weeks!

Day 1 :-)

40 weeks on the outside

Love him <3

He has learned so much!!