Walking??

Hana has made unbelievable strides this week in her standing and "walking." She is not content to sit for very long anymore. She wants to pull up and hold on to our fingers while she walks around the room. In fact, she is starting to try letting go of our fingers but does not quite have the balance yet. She has not officially crawled but can maneuver around quite well by pushing forward on her hands and then sitting back in a different position. She doesn't exactly do hands and knees. It's more like hands and one knee and the other leg is bent with foot on the floor. She might end up crawling like that - I hear some kids have unusual crawl positions.

In the meantime, she has stopped rolling from back to tummy. She prefers to whine and whimper until mom or dad helps her back up. :)

First Snowboarding Weekend - More Pics

First Snowboarding Weekend

We took Hana to Tahoe this weekend to break in the new house and get a little taste of the snow. We arrived in the late afternoon on Friday to piles and piles of snow, with more coming down!! None of us slept well the first night, as Hana was getting used to the new environment and waking up a lot. At least that's what I thought all the crying was about. Then on Saturday morning, she fell backwards while sitting, which she does quite often, but this time she was crying quite a bit, which is unusual. Then Pete noticed her mouth was a little bloody so we figured she had bitten her tongue. We let her suck on an ice cube (the Tahoe house has an ice maker that makes perfect-sized cubes that we can hold up to her mouth - yay!) and that seemed to make it better. Later I saw she was bleeding again so I looked in her mouth and was shocked to see that her two front top teeth were coming in! Her poor little gums were all swollen and the teeth were just barely slivers of rice. I could have sworn she was going to get two more bottoms before the tops, as they seem to be sitting right at the surface. Guess I was wrong. So that night we gave her some motrin before bed and her sleep was a little better.

On Saturday she played in the snow a bit (see purple snowsuit pictures). She really wasn't too sure what to make of it. I wouldn't say she was terribly excited about it, but her enthusiasm may have been dampened by the teething pain. I think snow is something she will learn to love when she sees everything she can do with it.

On Sunday we spent the day at Squaw Valley. Pete went snowboarding and Hana and I holed up at the Terrace restaurant. Hana made friends with some other kids there - Marissa, a cute 15-month-old from San Ramon, and Henry from England, who was about 3 and let Hana play with his trains. We ended the day with frozen lasagna, salad, and Oreos and a roaring fire in the wood stove and drove home on Monday morning. Pete dropped me off at the BART, and I went straight to work (yuck). Hana and Pete spent the day unloading the car and recovering from the long drive.

The Busy Social Life of Hana Geckeler

Last weekend Hana had her first "girls' day" at Auntie Debbie's house, where we made caramels dipped in chocolate. Yum. Hana rode on the whale bone in the living room (see pic). She got to taste some fig jam and lick a bar of chocolate. She definitely wanted more of the chocolate.

Food adventures continue. Blueberry oatmeal is a new favorite but it makes a MESS. It's hard to get blueberry puree off of skin!

Mommy Is Tired

Going back to work has not been especially hard, except that I'm tired. All the time. And there is a lot less time in the week to get things done. Today I tried to cook a bunch of food for Hana while watching her and it was a serious juggling act. She was cranky that I wasn't paying 100% attention to her. But for the next few weeks, she will get to feast on asparagus/leek/sweet potato puree and asparagus risotto, so really, what is there to whine about? :) This week she had egg yolks and yogurt for the first time, both of which were hits. In fact, I can't think of any food we've given her that she's outright refused. She'll refuse some of her favorites some of the time, but she's never refused anything consistently. This week on the new food agenda is tofu, although I haven't figured out what to do with it yet to make it taste good for her.

The weather here has been terrible. We had such a loud thunderstorm today the house was shaking and Hana would startle and tremble every time the thunder hit. The good news is that there is probably a lot of snow in Tahoe, which will make for some excellent snowboarding for Pete this season. (Hana and I will be sitting at the new house with our feet by the wood stove.)

OK, time to wash bottles....*sigh.*

Moving, Moving, Moving

In the last week, Hana has increased her mobility by leaps and bounds. It happened so suddenly that this morning I didn't realize that putting her down 3 feet away from an electrical socket was a problem...until I caught her about to lick it. She's not creeping or crawling yet, but she can get from sitting to her hands and knees pretty well and has quite a reach from that position. She also has just started rolling from back to tummy. Today she did a series of continuous rolls that took her off her blanket and onto the hard wood floor, and she was quite proud of herself. I caught one of the rolls on camera, just barely.

Butternut Squash Baby

It's amazing how much damage one ice cube-sized portion of butternut squash can do.

Playpen Revisited

Hana has decided she would like to dedicate several minutes a day to practicing her standing. This has become very tiring for mommy and daddy, who have to hold her up. Then I remembered the pack 'n' play! We got it as a shower gift for Hana to sleep in her first few months and we put it away when she got too big. But the time has arrived to bring it out again for standing practice. It's a safe environment where she can fall to her heart's content and not get hurt. The only pain she experiences is a slightly bruised ego when she takes a tumble. Here are two videos of her in the playpen. I didn't get it on camera, but today she actually let go of the side for a few seconds and was standing up without any support whatsoever for a few seconds before she grabbed back on to the side!

Almost 7 Months

Every day Hana is learning new things! She's growing up right before our eyes. She is nearly clapping. I clap a lot and say "Yay!" when she does something and now she has picked up on that. She can't quite make her hands connect, and hasn't figured out how to open them, so it's really just her arms flying open and closed, but it's cute. Tonight she was so close to rolling over from back to tummy. And she is just starting to lift her arms as a sign she wants to be picked up.

The best part - the going to sleep at night. She has come pretty close to being an expert at this, at least for the last 5 or 6 nights in a row. I can put her down still awake and she goes to sleep on her own. Sometimes there is a bit of crying, but it's kind of what we have come to know as her "fake cry." Tonight she is going to sleep alone in the room and we'll sleep in our other bedroom. I'm sure I will hardly sleep, listening for her just in case.

Below is a video of Hana on the swing. It's her new favorite fun thing to do. Her latest favorite food is pickles. We discovered this at Saul's while out to breakfast this morning. It was suggested by our friends we were with to give her a spear, and it was a big hit. She would suck out all the pickle pulp from one end, then Pete would flip it over and she'd go to town on the other end. Go figure.

2010

With the new year comes many new and exciting changes in the life of the Geckeler family. I went back to work this week. I'll be working 3 days a week for the foreseeable future, and Hana will stay home with Pete. So far they've done 2 days together and they went really well. When she's home with dad, she gets to do all kinds of fun things that mom would never think of - like play with the tupperware. When I've gotten home at night, she's happy to see me, but can't stop looking and smiling at dad even when I'm holding her. She's been doing great on the bottle. So great, in fact, that in 2 days she has finished almost all the milk it took me 2 months to pump and store in the freezer. *Sigh* Although I'm pumping at work, I don't think it's going to be enough to keep up with her appetite. There may be some formula in her future.

Hana's sleep is continuing to improve. We had a great start with "cry it out" before Xmas, and she was going down easily and nearly sleeping through the night. Then the holidays hit and we got a little loose with her routine which set things back. We started anew January 1 and after a few rough nights she is going down at night with little or no crying and basically sleeping through until 5:30 or 6:00 am. Yippee!! Starting this weekend Hana will have the bedroom all to herself, as Pete and I are going to start sleeping in our other bedroom. This will help with the brief wakings she has when she hears us come in for the night or get up to go to the bathroom, and it will help us sleep through her incessant leg thrashing. :)

Hana has been a little unsure about solid food. She was initially game for trying anything. Now some days she is very into eating, other days not so much, and sometimes (particularly if she is in a grumpy mood) refuses food altogether - this can result in splashes of carrot on the window. As we did with the bottle, we'll just keep trying and eventually we know she will get the hang of it. This week on the new food agenda are mango, spinach, homemade peas, and oatmeal.

As for new things she is doing, there are really too many to list. She is changing every day. In addition to "dadadada" she is now saying "babababa" and just generally talking up a storm. She can nearly get to her hands and knees from a sitting position. She really likes to stand while we are holding her, and if we prop her up against something she can stand by herself. She knows how to turn the dimmer switch in the dining room down and thinks it's hilarious when that results in the lights going off. When I dry my hair, I show her the hair dryer and she "gets in position" to prepare for the noise it's going to make by putting her hands up in the "startle" pose. Sometimes she lets me know when she is done with her bath by turning her body and grabbing on to me to be pulled out. One thing that hasn't changed - everything still goes right in the mouth!

We will look back fondly on Hana's first Christmas and New Year's, spent with the Sacramento Geckelers and Grandma Wendy and Grandpa Paul. It was Grandpa Paul's first time meeting Hana and she loved playing with him, and also with the golf balls they brought her. She didn't get to spend as much time with poor Grandma Wendy who had a terrible cold while visiting but is hopefully feeling better now and enjoying southern California. With any luck, there will be more visits in 2010!