Noms

Nate loves to eat and so far, hasn't refused anything we have tried with him. He prefers real food, and so we just give him baby-safe bits of whatever we are eating these days. Today he was eating some fancy mac and cheese and I handed him the fork to see how he'd do with it. Here are a couple of cute videos of him eating and showing off his fork-handling skills.

Backflop!

Nate loves to fall over backwards, he'll crawl over to me, get up sitting in front of me and I have to hold his hands while he falls backwards. When he figured out that he could do it on the big bed without any hand-holding, he was pretty excited!

Pushing the Boundaries

As I mentioned, Simon can get a little distracted at gymnastics and need some wrangling from the coach. It's not enough to pull him from the class, but he does push the boundaries a bit. Here are a couple of videos of Simon doing his thing at gymnastics.

Friends

We had the Mancino family over last weekend, and all of the boys had a great time together. Simon and Max ran around like crazy, and even Nate and Luke got to know each other:

brotherly love

The boys are developing a whole new dynamic now that Nate is crawling. We are teaching Simon to share, but that it's also ok sometimes to want to play with something alone. He is generally really good with the baby, and if he doesn't want Nate to play with the same toy, he will find him something else to play with. Unfortunately for him, he hasn't yet realized that the toy Nate wants with is the one his cool older brother is already playing with.

Here are a few cute shots of the boys together.

Outtakes

We got so many cute pictures of Nate the other day that I wanted to share a few more...

10 months

10 months old, and what a month it's been. Nate has made so much progress with his physical skills this month, so much has changed. He is fully crawling, pulling up on a lot of things and able to put himself into a sitting position. He loves to eat, and will eat pretty much anything we give him. He even enjoyed a salmon and baked potato dinner a couple of nights ago!

His second tooth is officially in, so he has his top two teeth and no others. He is entering the "getting into everything" phase, which I forgot about since Simon was this age. I tried to use the computer the other day and was reminded of the complete fruitlessness of that with a mobile baby around.

And his sleep is vastly improved: we slowly moved him to his Pack N Play in our room and he is sleeping much better in there. He goes down really easily at bedtime and wakes a few times during the night, but is generally pretty easy to soothe. We are hoping that we can try moving the boys in together again before too long.

So, that's our month. Here's the 10 month picture!

Gymnastics!

We started Simon in gymnastics class last week. It's at an actual gymnastics place, rather than something like a Gymboree, and he is doing a 13 week class for boys ages 3-4. There are 5 of so of them in the class and Alec is their teacher. Parents aren't allowed to stay with their kids, so this is a big step in terms of activities for Simon.

Week one, well, it didn't go so well. Simon didn't pay attention and kept running off, making Alec chase after him. We spoke to the teacher afterwards and decided to give it one more week...and it went wonderfully yesterday! He really seems to like it, he is completely able to do all of the activities and we're hoping he can stay focused during class moving forward.

Here are some pictures and videos...

Bathtime

Nate and Simon have a ton of fun at bathtime these days. We have been making the water all kinds of fun colors, and Simon likes to help swirl the water once I've put in the food coloring. Nate is really into splashing, he even likes getting water on his face.

More teeth and other updates!

Nate already has teeth 2 through, and I haven't had a ton of luck getting a shot of both. Here is a slightly blurry picture of the first arrival:

We also took Nate in for his 9 1/2 month check up, and current stats are:
28.5" (50th percentile), 22 lb 7.5 oz (approx 80th percentile).

Here he is being cute at the doctor's office.

Another first!

Nate has his first tooth! Top left...and it looks like about 3 of his friends are following right behind. Wish us all luck...

August

It's been a big month for us, starting with our big trip east and wrapping up with Simon's birthday. Between those two events, I think I've covered August enough on the blog. But one more thing needs mentioning...and that's the fact that Nate, as of this past week, is fully crawling! He is getting faster and more confident by the minute, here's a quick video:



He is also trying to pull up and loves to stand and play with his music table:

So that wraps up August for us, and we're hoping for a nice September so we can get out and enjoy the last sun before Seattle winter hits!