Month #7!

Don't worry, I plan to do monthly baby updates only for the first year.....I think.

This month has been a great one.  Elias is all giggles and crawls and just plain cuteness.  We can't get enough of him.  I dressed him up for his 7 month appointment to the doctor (yes, I take him every month to space out his shots.  A bad bout with the shots inspired me to do so :)) and he was so cute.  The doctor commented on him being dressed up, but I can't help dress him up!  He's like a little doll!  He measured 26 inches and weighed a little under 14 pounds.  He's a pretty little guy, being in the 3rd percentile. But, he's healthy and happy and growing so it's all good.  He also didn't make a peep doing his shot, which was miraculous!

Elias has also perfected his "army crawl" and his happily crawling all over the apartment, wreaking havoc in his wake.  He loves to chew on cords, shoes and pull magazines and small books of off the shelves.  It's pretty adorable.  There's nothing that makes me laugh more than seeing him squealing in delight and kicking his little legs and pulling his little body anywhere he wants to go.

I also love the funniness that he has, which mostly comes in the form of squeals at funny moments, but occasionally manifests itself in other ways, as in this picture:

I had my mom on speakerphone so that she could talk to the baby and he held on to the phone for dear life while insisting on holding the pacifier in his mouth in his very creative way.

The biggest highlight of this month-especially for me- have been the pumpkin patches.  I have been looking forward to October ever since Ryan and I visited a couple of pumpkin patches last year.  I think I want to devote a whole post to pumpkin patches so I'll just leave you with this :)

I have been taking great pains to teach him to say "mama" and "dada" (but, admitedly, mostly "mama") and now he says "ummmmmmmmmama" which is good enough for me, although he only says it when he's complaining.  Hey, it's better than nothing.

Elias went to his very first birthday party, which was a lot of fun!  I'm looking forward to celebrating his first birthday, but not looking forward to the planning involved. Planning events tend to make me nervous soooo we'll see. 

 There is also some evidence of a tooth popping up on his bottom gum.  Kind of exciting!  Only part of the tooth is showing so far, but I'm sure there will be more to come. 

I really looove being a new parent and having this happy little guy in my life.Thank you all for sharing in my excitement of new parenthood, I'm sure my little posts are often tedious to read, but they are things I don't want to forget!  I'm looking forward to the 8th month cause I think it'll be just as much fun as the 7th!

Our "Summer Vacation"

I wanted to document this experience because we had a lot of fun and I thought it was kind of funny.  As you all know, we couldn't do much while Ryan was going through chemotherapy.  We certainly couldn't go on a vacation (nor could we afford it....this is where I would normally go into my Obama rant, but I digress...).  We did, however, decide we wanted to take baby to the beach and that we would go and come back the same day.  My cousin Samantha was visiting at my parent's house so we thought we'd invite her to come with us.  Who doesn't want to go to the beach, right?  And...she's the coolest 12-year-old I know.

Soooo we start off. I think it was a Tuesday or a Wednesday, so we weren't expecting any crowds or anything.  We leave from college park moderately early...I think it was around 9:30 or 10:00am.  We decided to go to Rehoboth, Delaware, which is only about 2 hours from College Park.  That means we would get there just in time for lunch.  So far so good.

We plug an address in Rehoboth into our handy dandy GPS and off we went.  To make a really long story short, we didn't get to Rehoboth until 4pm!  The GPS took us on the scenic route, I guess, but it was brutal.  Baby just barely survived being in the carseat that long.

Oh boy.

Sooo we finally get there and it starts raining.  By raining I do not mean a little drizzle.  I mean thunder, lightning, the whole works.  We didn't want to just leave after being in the car for so long, so we waited the rain out and found a parking spot.  It was worth it to see baby meet the ocean.  He really liked it, and we got a really cute video too.

I love how he waits for the waves to come and kicks his little feet in the video.  I haven't figured out how to connected youtube to blogger, so you can see the video here.

We were on the beach for a total of about 10 minutes before it started raining again.  The clouds were dark and ominous:

Not exactly beach weather, haha!

We were trying to decide whether to just go back home or try to wait it out again.  It was pretty late already...about 6pm so if we left we could get home at a decent time.  Ryan wasn't happy about getting no beach time.  He had invisioned a day of sand castles, reading and general relaxation.  In an attempt to give the beach another try, we started looking for a hotel so we could at least enjoy the beach the next day.  Ryan's dad (who is wonderful!) got us a room big enough for all of us in Ocean City, which we discovered was only half an hour away.  It was a great room too, with a great view:

We were really grateful for that great view because that is the way we enjoyed the beach the next day....from the window.  It rained alllllll day.  But we had a great time.  We played cards and ate pizza and Sam and Elias had lots of fun together.  Elias loves Sam.

On the way back home, we decided to stop and have some crabs, to give Sam the full Maryland experience.  It was a bit messy, but she liked it.  And, as you can probably guess, I ate chicken : )

On our way back home I realized that we had just had our first family summer vacation.  On accident.  It hadn't turned out at all like we had planned, but we still had a whole lotta fun.

Half a year has gone by......

It's time for Elias' 6 month post! Hopefully it will be more successful than the last time : )
He's seven months old now and I feel like he has already changed so much, but I'll have to save it for another post.
I often like to get him toys so that I can remember his birth-days and might or might not have bought him two this time, but at different parts of the month.  He started to get a little bit more mobile at 6 months and I was dying to buy him one of those foam mat things, so I did.  Promptly after doing so we made a box out of it and put him in it, like so:

He liked it : )  It's really useful now that he's learning to sit too because I can just sit him on it and if he falls over it doesn't hurt very much and tears are avoided.

Baby came to the hospital on Daddy's last day of chemotherapy and was very good as Grandmommy and I went walking around georgetown.  He loves being outside.

Elias also continues to be an eater, which is great because he is still pretty tiny.  He's outgrown all of his newborn clothes, but there are still some 3 month clothes that fit him.  Let's just say that we and all who have contributed to his wardrobe have got their money's worth.

My mom made him rice and beans (must dominicanize him....he can't forget his heritage!) and he looved them.  And he looked adorable:

It's been a great six months....I can't believe how fast half a year has flown by!

End of Chemo and more!

Ryan's chemotherapy ended about two weeks ago and can I just say, I am the happiest girl EVER.  The fourth round wasn't that great, but hey, it was better than the 3rd (which was the WORST), and just knowing that the treatment is over is a relief.  He got his cat scan and x-rays done and the doctor said that his lymph node is back down to normal size, which is great news!
I kind of feel, though, that there is a bit of uncertainty as to what is going to happen next, but we'll see over the next couple of months.  For now though I think it's safe to say that he's cancer free and that kinda makes me want to throw a party.

Here's a picture of Ryan on his last day of chemotherapy with his nurse, Joy.  We were pretty happy on his last day (although it seemed to last forever).  So happy in fact that I made cupcakes for his fellow patients, which was very brave of me but luckily I had my mother-in-law to help and thankfully they turned out pretty tasty.  The staff at Georgetown University Hospital were great!

A little cancer tip for you all:  Cancer treatment, aka chemotherapy is actually given intravenously.  Before Ryan got his treatment I thought he would have to sit in a room with other patients and get zapped or something, but that's not the way it goes. There's your cancer tip for the day : D

Elias' 5th Month

Well, I downloaded all these pictures and wrote a whole bunch of things about Elias' 5th month and I wasn't able to post it.  I got super frustrated and a couple of the pictures I downloaded have disappeared, so I'm not going to download them again.  Sooooo I present you, with no explanations whatsoever, pictures of Baby's 5th month.  Now I can proceed to blog other things with (hopefully) less hassle.  If not, I may give up on blogging altogether. The End.

Love,

Keiry