6 month Professional Pictures

Melissa Sue Photography Rocks!! This photographer has been a neighbor and friend of Dan's for a long time and we are SO grateful for her talents! She's awesome! Check out this little preview of McKenna's 6 month professional photo shoot.

We, as McKenna's parents, OF COURSE think she is a stunning baby! We can't help but stare at her ALL day EVERY day! It's oh so nice when pictures of this quality can capture her beauty. :)

Is it bad that I'm already having guilt about not being able to document our second, third... children as much as we document her. Everyone tells me that's just the way it goes. *shrugs shoulders*

6 months old!

It's so bitter sweet to see McKenna grow. It's a good thing she's strong and healthy, but so sad that it happens WAY too fast! McKenna turned 6 months on the 19th. Here are her stats:

Height- 25.7 in, 75 percentile (.7 in increase)

Weight- 14.2 lb, 25th percentile (1 lb increase)

Head Circ.-16.9 in, 60th percentile (.5 in increase)

I'm realizing I love each stage of her life for different reasons. Over the past month I've really noticed more of her personality coming out.

• She will smile and charm perfect strangers.

Sorry for the poor quality. But that smile is just so cute!

• Still loves to play with her toes.

• She can pass objects from hand to hand.
• She can babble "ma, ma, ma" and "ba, ba, ba." I might have even heard her say "o-ba-ma" at one point. I never thought my daughter would be a democrat. ;)
• She still can't roll from back to front, but she can SIT UP! The doctor says sitting up trumps rolling over since it takes a lot more coordination to sit up. So he's not worried.
  
  
• Solid foods are going well. So far she loves carrots but doesn't care too much for sweet potatoes and green beans. We'll keep trying other foods one at a time of course. It's a fun little experiment to see how many bites it will take for her to come around and enjoy it, or press her lips together in protest. She also tried and liked both cheerios and animal crackers.
• One of my favorite things about McKenna at this stage is that when I pick her up from the babysitter after work, she CLINGS to me and is SO excited to see me!
• She is very aware of her mommy and daddy's voices. I love to see her drop everything she's doing when she hears her dad's voice as he comes home from work. She'll look around and around until she finds him.

Other exciting news for McKenna this past week is that we got a SWING! An older couple in our ward was nice enough to give us theirs since they didn't need it anymore.
And just because, here's a FUNNY video of McKenna "dancing." Apparently she really likes rap music :) We still have no idea why Dan has Eminem on his Ipod...

Easter fun!

Yes, we did celebrate Easter this year. And yes, I know I'm slow posting about it. Oh well.
Here's the dye...

The happy dye-ers (my mom, sister, brother, and Dan of course). McKenna missed all the egg dying fun because she was already in bed by this point. Better luck next year kid.
Can you see the family resemblence?
"Hoppy Easter" *snort* :)

Easter Sunday McKenna woke up with a runny nose. So it was a little difficult to get her smiling in her beautiful Easter dress from Grandma Kelly! Thank you! These beautiful flowers are all around our church building. I'm NOT any kind of photographer... So enjoy.
Better
Nice! Check out those baby blues!

Here's handsome daddy!

And now Mommy's turn. I wish we got a shot of us all together. But we were pushing our luck with what we got with McKenna being so hungry, tired and congested. There's always next year.

We loved celebrating the Resurrection of our Savior and Redeemer this Easter season!

Sewing Project #2

From here on out I probably won't number my sewing projects. :) But here you go. I made these!!
They were pretty darn hard for someone with as little sewing experience as I have. However, once again, I had a wonderful teacher! Thanks Sibber! I totally want to make another pair soon so I don't forget everything I want to do differently or better for next time.

Here's McKenna modeling her new kicks!

McKenna dear, I love you so.

Your happy smiling face,
Is such a joy to look at.

It makes home a lovely place!

I can't help but sing this to her constantly because it's so true!

I really think videos are the best way to capture McBaby's cuteness. Pictures sometimes just don't do her justice.

She's found her TOES!

She loves to play with mirrors and look at herself!

She hasn't quite figured out how to pull things off her face when her mean parents put it there. So she makes the best of it and just "talks" to the baby in the mirror covering her face. :)

She's also become quite the "talker!"

I'm also happy to report rice cereal is still going quite well! She's a plain kind of girl. She'll gobble it all up when it's just mixed with water. We'll start some veggies when she's 6 mon.

Her sleeping habits have improved- a little... Last week she randomly slept from 9:30pm-8:00am! She hasn't done it again since. But it shows me she CAN do it!

Easter fun to follow in the next post.

5 months old!

Yup- She's getting cuter every month, week, day, hour, minute... you get the picture! In the past month, she hasn't acquired too many new "skills" per se, but here are few new things going on in her life, in no particular order.

1.) She's got some new toys!

A Jenny Jump-up- It's still a little too big for her, don't you think? She basically just chews on the top of the seat. Plus, her legs aren't quite strong enough to "jump." We'll try again later.

An Exersaucer- We got this for a pretty decent price at a garage sale, cleaned it up, waited for her to grow into it, and voi-la! She likes it pretty well. I think she gets frustrated when she can't put everything in her mouth since she can't pull it close enough. Funny girl!
2.) She's getting lots stronger!
With McKenna getting bigger and stronger physically, so are her "tantrums." Allow me to explain. I wouldn't say she's a super fussy baby, but when she does fuss, she's serious! She's beginning to arch her back a lot when frustrated. Therefore, I no longer feel safe leaving her in an infant seat without buckling her in. She also needs the tray on her Bumbo seat or she could wiggle right out of that too. She also started pulling on her shirt when she fusses.

"Enjoy" these two videos showing McKenna's stronger fussiness.

Shirt pulling

Back arching

3.) Lip smacking!

McKenna went through a little phase where she was learning some new tricks with her mouth. One of them was smacking her lips. Every time I tried to get this on video she would stop as soon as she saw the camera. But here's a cute video of her playing with daddy and smacking her lips at this toy.

4.) Solids!

I have recently realized with McKenna growing bigger, she can eat a lot more from a bottle than I'm able to pump. So, I thought it was time to introduce rice cereal to her so the babysitters can feed her half breast milk, half cereal for her meal with them. For her first try, she seemed to know just what to do. She opened right up and swallowed most of it.

Sorry 'bout the shot of the table; we had to place the camera off to the side so she wouldn't be distracted.

5.) Sleep!

With all of this other great news, I'm sad to say McKenna has NOT been the best sleeper lately. For a while, she was only waking up once a night (asleep by 9:30pm, eat between 2-3am, awake for the day between 7:30-8am). I was THRILLED with this schedule! Then, somehow, it all changed. She has been waking up around 1 or sometimes 12:30. Because I KNEW she could go longer between feedings, I'd send Dan up to rock her back to sleep. I'd feed her about an hour later when she woke up again. I thought, maybe this is a growth spurt or something. But now we're going on two weeks of her waking up multiple times in the night. How long can a growth spurt last? What else could be the reason? Any ideas out there?

Anyway-

Here's just a cute picture of our girl during one of her naps. I found her sleeping like this for at least 30 minutes, and she wasn't even teething. Cute thing!

New Nephew!

My (Laura) sister Emily had a baby boy on Monday! Congratulations!

Dylan Michael Smith

Born March 16, 2009 at 2:01pm

8 lbs 3 oz

20.5 inches long.

Dad (Justin), Kaitlyn (L), Kari(R), and Dylan

Grandpa Thompson and Baby Dylan

Mommy (Emily) already holding Kaitlyn on her lap after her C-section. Kaitlyn just has to kiss him all the time!