A Thanksgiving (and beyond) Gallery of Firsts

Not a first, just pretty darn cute.

Also not a first, but cute. 

Look at those two teeth!

First tubby in the big girl tub.

First Thanksgiving!

Zoë and Grandma

Thanksgiving Dress

The Seaman Family

First swing with Dedo!

Thanksgiving dress with vest.

Kolczynski Family

First Thanksgiving Dinner

First horsey ride (loved it, balanced like a champ!)

First bubble bath

First bubble bath beard

First Christmas Light Decor in Bedroom 

First Christmas jammies!!!

Adorable baby girl (and husband)

Ten Months!

Zoë's new favorite sound is 'da da da'.  In fact, she's become quite the regular talker.  While crawling around, while scooping cheerios up on her high chair tray, while laying on the changing table.  'Da da da' the whole time.  It's pretty adorable and I feel like she's initiating a conversation with me!

10 months already!

Block towers are her favorite!

First day with play dough

Sunday we played with play dough.  Well, Zoë tried to eat it for about 20 minutes and I tried to keep it out of her mouth for 20 minutes.  I think as she gets a little older it'll be more intriguing for her.  I made a home-made play dough recipe that's made with rice cereal and since we have A TON of that I figured it was a good one to try.  It was super easy and fun and I will definitely make it again.

She's eating like a champ, sometimes three times a day.  Aaaaaand she got a second tooth last weekend.  We've now added yogurt, applesauce, and some cheerios to a regular day.  My favorite new development is that she'll share cheerios with us!  She'll hold her hand up and smile a great big smile when we suck it out of her fingers.  Ah!  So cute!  Her OT and PT at Children's Therapy tell us to keep trying new foods, but we tried sweet potato fries tonight and she gagged on a small piece and threw up.  Three times.  It was really soft but apparently not soft enough?  We're just waiting for this developmental milestone to click with her because the gagging and vomiting after eating small pieces of anything is tiresome (though she's just fine with Cheerios, of course).

Apple!

On that note, both of the amazing women that saw her yesterday at Children's Therapy said that Zoë is doing just great.  In fact, the physical therapist said she wished she could get Zoë's movements on video camera because they are just so perfect; gracefully moving from her tummy to her side and twisting back and forth.  So that's great.  :)  She said that the going from the tummy to a sitting position and full fledged crawling on hands and knees will come.

Get that glass, Zoë!

Zoë also loves to drink out of glasses.  Any kind (except a sippy cup!).  The therapists told us to get her a sippy cup that doesn't have a spill proof lid (they said it was a parent convenience) because it'll teach her to drink out of a cup faster than one that she has to actually suck out of (like a bottle) since that's the end goal, anyway.  So, I guess I'll be shopping this weekend for a new cup.  :)

Facetime with Baba and Dedo

Her sleeping has been better, too.  She still wakes up in the middle of the night once but we go in, reset the pacifier, and she falls back to sleep instead of insisting that she come to bed with us.  We're getting much more sleep, for sure.

The holidays are going to be so much fun, we have lots of fun things planned (pictures with Santa, snowflake lane in Bellevue, Zoolights, family time, yay!) and lots of picture opportunities, too.  :)

Tooth!

We have a tooth!  We were at a friend's house on Friday when I rudely halted the conversation we were having by shrieking, "She's got a tooth!" after doing my daily feel around Zoë's gums for one.  So exciting!  It was so sharp and I didn't end up seeing it until Saturday, but it's definitely there.  I'm both thrilled and sad that her gummy baby smile is changing.  She was oh-so-cranky on Sunday through about Tuesday mid-day and we were really having a hard time with our new fussy girl.  I thought babies were supposed to have a hard time BEFORE the tooth broke through the gums?  Hmmm...an anomaly as always.

Also, Zoë is definitely close to officially crawling.  She gets up on her knees and rocks back and forth often and there are no boundaries for where she goes now.  And she's quick!  We're working on getting a gate for the stairs, and we have to cover the outlets and do other baby proofing tasks within the next few days.  Crazy!

I've had a lot more of the moments lately, vacillating between feeling so excited for the newest milestone and sad that she's growing so fast.  I just can't believe that we're so close to her first birthday and she's hitting so many big milestones.

Her favorite position, hanging out on her side.  Chris calls it her "Jane Fonda".

And, to swing in the opposite direction, Zoë hasn't been sleeping very well for the past two months.  Since about mid-September, she's been waking up once or twice in the middle of the night and needing some middle-of-the-night consoling.  Until very recently (about the last week and a half), we were able to put her pacifier back in her mouth and she'd go back to sleep.  Now, she won't take the pacifier and swats it out of our hands.  She'll cry until we pick her up.  We can sit with her in the glider until she falls asleep again, but the moment we set her back in her crib she's awake and crying.  If we bring her in to sleep with us she falls fast asleep until morning.  So frustrating!  We thought at first it was related to all of the new growing she's doing, but we are pretty sure we're being played now.  We can add even more evidence to the fact she's learned how to play us.  She's now crying and fussing if we leave her for too long playing by herself.  The minute we pick her up she's fine.  :)  It's been quite a frustrating week, but we're sure glad we get lots of smiles still in between the fussing and not sleeping.  She's still a pretty cute little girl!  At least the crying and fussing is accompanied by the arms up gesture she makes when we come to pick her up.  I love that!

Having fun with mashed potatoes

One more week until her 10 month birthday, I can't believe it.

Officially counting down until Christmas

The red cups came out at Starbucks on November 1st and I am officially on a Christmas countdown.  Christmastime is always my favorite time of the year, but I know this year is going to be so much more amazing and special because it's Zoë's first!  We even sent Teta and Uncle Jed a special Kolczynski Family Tradition- the paper chain countdown.  We're excited they're coming for Christmas!  It will be the first time Uncle Jed will meet her and she's so much different since Teta was here in April.

We've been having fun with our new camera, and Zoë's been having fun with blocks.  She's doing a fierce army crawl and has gotten up on her knees a few times while on her tummy, but hasn't traveled anywhere on them yet.

Zoe's first Halloween!

Sure, barista might not be a typical first halloween costume, but it was a Pinterest find and I thought it was oh-so-cute.  Plus, in a few years she's going to want to pick her own costume, so we should be able to have some fun before then, right?

We went to a friend's house on Saturday night for a baby-filled Halloween Party and I am proud to say she was the only barista there.  :)  There were SO many babies (all adorable) and we had a great time.  It was a good reminder of how much our lives have changed in the past 9 months!  Before we went to the party we stopped by Starbucks to show off the cutest costume in the world and we got the exact response I was looking for from the three female baristas: "Oh my goodness, she's so cute!  Can I take her picture?!".  She was a hit.  She also wore her costume to Lindbergh High School and was a hit there, too.

Loves standing, we'll be fine waiting a while
until she can pull herself up on the crib, though...

She's been changing so much, per the usual, and the biggest change the last few weeks is that's she's scooting on her belly!  It's not quite an army crawl, but pretty close.  She started with laying on her side and it looked like she was doing the side-stroke without being in the pool.  We think her favorite position is still rolled up on one side, looking around.  The most enticing things to put in front of her are a phone (loves that screen) and a pile of blocks.  Baba taught her to "kaboom!" the blocks by knocking them over when they're stacked.  She loves it and completely understands what "kaboom!" means.  Chris has fun setting them up around the carpet for her to knock them over one tower after another.

Happy morning baby!

I decided to do "sensory Sunday!" and get her touching some fun stuff, so I set up a glass dish filled with oats and put in a few blocks for her to discover.  Well, I should have known that she would go STRAIGHT for the blocks and completely ignore the oatmeal, but I didn't, so I ended up taking out the blocks so she would focus on the oatmeal.  She was pretty tentative at first and I thought, "well, this is a bust", until I sat her IN the glass dish IN the oats and started cascading the oats all around her.  She eventually got her hands into it and was pretty well entertained for about 20 minutes.  It was fun, and now we have oats that are for play only.  :)

Going straight for the blocks.

What IS this stuff?

The "not for your mouth" experiment didn't work too well...

One more chance with the blocks.

She is rolling like a fiend, HATES to have her nose wiped (as we're really discovering now after she was sick for about three weeks, got better completely for about two days, and now has a cold again), and is blowing raspberries like a champ.

A delightful combo of avocado and pureed carrots.

She has been eating like a champ, too, and eats a full jar of baby food twice a day.  Green beans are definitely her favorite, with peas being a close second.  Weird child.  She canNOT eat anything more solid than a puree.  She'll gag and then throw up everything she's got in her stomach.  It's weird.  She can suck on Mum Mums just fine, but ANY solid anything results in the gagging.  Even a few grains of rice.  She tried some avocado the other day, but even that resulted in a lot of gagging.  She has a nine month check up tomorrow, so it'll be a good conversation to have with the doctor about her progress there.

No, she's not even eating Nutella.

"You know I'm going to gag on this, right?"

Nine months!

Whelp.  The show must go on...despite being robbed today, we got a picture (it's blurry) for Zoe's (and, don't ask me how irritated I am right now because I can't figure out how to type an umlaut on this keyboard that is not MINE because it was stolen) 9 month birthday.

So over it.

Look, I'm standing!  :)

I came home today and walked into our bedroom to find it completely trashed.  Dresser drawers opened, mattress askew, clothes pulled out of the closets.  Ugh.  A policeman came, my parents and Chris' mom came, and we pieced the house back together including boarding up the back door that the burglars had splintered to break in.  We've determined that they took the laptop, ipad, playstation, cameras, video camera, and my Theta badge so far.  Which means all of the pictures and video are gone.  Gone are the pictures from the last few months (I had just dumped them off my phone not two weeks ago) because I hadn't backed up the computer since early (I think) summer.  Gone are the pictures from pumpkin picking, summer time, each monthly picture, and all of the daily pics from my phone.  Gone are the videos of me holding Zoe for the first time, the videos of her coming home, the videos of her Teta holding her for the first time.  And gone is the slideshow that I had begun to piece together of a picture a day for her whole first year.  I was going to show it at her first birthday party, with the date in the lower right hand corner of each picture.  That's what got me.

I keep telling myself that because of my obsessive posting on Facebook I've still got tons of pictures.  Because I backed the computer up in early summer I've still got all of our wedding pictures and pictures from our early dating years.  Hopefully.  I'm too tired to check it now and too worried that I didn't back them up correctly.

BUT, we're safe, there's not any serious damage to the house (except for the door), and we are all home together to eat cookies and drink beer while Zoe slumbers in her crib (until about 1 or 2 am, since that's her MO lately).  Fiona and Joe are fine and all we're out are a whole bunch of electronics (and pictures).

Thanks to all of our friends who have inquired to make sure we're ok and offered help.  We so appreciate it and are once again reminded how very lucky we are to have all of you in our lives.

More on Zoe later this week, but I just HAD to make sure we posted her nine month picture today.  :)