Little Baby, Big Love: Life lately

It's been a couple of weeks since I've blogged, for no reason other than life has been busy! We have had a nice couple of weeks, we celebrated Father's Day, our niece's graduation, and both my mom and my mother-in-law's birthdays. We were hoping June would also be Ben's birthday but it's looking like he wants to hold out and be a July baby. Poor Sandy is DONE and is hoping he will make his grand entrance into the world soon!

Gabriella is doing well! She is sleeping through the night; I hate to jinx it but for the past couple of weeks she's consistently gone to bed by 7:30/8:00 and slept until 7am. It 's been a nice change and we are enjoying her early nights because we know that at some point, it will change again.

Our physical therapist has been working with us not only on Gabriella learning to sit and crawl, but on eating foods that have a bit more texture to them. She suggested that we use an infant "toothbrush", which is really a covering for your finger that has hard bristles on it, and gently rub her back gums, where her molars will eventually come in. This encourages her to bite down with her molars and begin chewing instead of just swallowing purees. It has worked really well and she is now very comfortable chewing puffs, especially when we place them between her back gums. I also am slowly pureeing some of her foods a little less so they have a few more lumps. Today she had cottage cheese with fruit for lunch and did really well with it. Some of the cheese lumps were a little big for her, but overall she did a lot better than I thought she would!

She has also become very, very interested in animals and other children. The poor cat gets grabbed, hugged, pulled, but she's a good sport about it. I actually think she likes the attention. I am sure the day will eventually come when Gabriella is carrying her down the hallway. Today, we went to the public library's baby music class and she loved it. The other kids varied in age from about her age up to age 2 and she was loving all of them. It was so fun to see her with other children, she was interactive, noisy and really into the class so I'll have to go more often. She's currently napping really well (going on an hour!!) so I think it tires her out as well.