Our Little Pumpkin

We have had such a great Fall this year. It's the first October where we didn't receive any Snow! Below are a few fun pictures we took throughout the month.

Apple Picking

 Pumpkin Patch

Learning to Walk

Halloween

Always wanting to hold her own bottle 

First Tooth

Avery's First Steps

Shortly after Avery turned 9 months old she started taking her first step, now at 9 1/2 months she's up to 10 steps. Here are a  few videos we've captured so far.

Avery's 9 Months Old

9 Month Stats

HEIGHT: Avery is 27 1/2 inches tall. This is in the 50th percentile for her age.

WEIGHT: This string bean is 16 lbs. and 11oz. Although she's only in the 15th percentile, she's gained over a pound a month since she's stared eating solids. She's a great eater.

TEETH: 1- Bottom left

DIAPERS: Size 3

CLOTHES: 6-9 Month

Lately, she's become a lot more clingy to us, especially me, and has developed stranger anxiety (all normal according to the books:).

She's definitely and active little monster, trying to eat anything in sight. Dr. Sleeper said she is extremely athletic. She loves to crawl as fast as she can playing chase, hid and seek, and when she decides to attack poor Bailey. She still loves to laugh at us and herself now.

This month we started a new schedule because I started a new job. We all get up a little bit earlier now (6:00am) and hop on the Andrew bus at 7:35am. I get dropped off at the train station first, then Avery at school then Andrew heads north to work. This last week Andrew's been traveling for work and all I can say is WOW, doing this whole Mom thing alone is tough! I have such a wonderful husband who loves to be Mr. Mom and help out so much. Very blessed to have him in my life!

Trip To Austin

We had a great trip to Austin a couple weeks ago. The weekend was packed with a birthday celebration, UT game and lots of family time.

We celebrated mom's birthday on Thursday with the family at Z-Tejas and again with her closest friends on Friday night. Saturday was jam packed with the UT Tailgate where we hung out with
Reid & Demetria, Kelly, Mark & Elise and lots of family from my Dad's side.

We even squeezed in an hour of paddle boarding! 

We left Austin full of Mexican food and counting down the days until our next visit. T-55 Days!

Here are a few pics from an awesome weekend.

 

Avery hanging out with Trey,  15 years old.

Josh & Britt

 All the girls with the boys!

Brandon & Tiff

New England Aquarium

Andrew and I love doing all the touristy things! We'd heard that the New England Aquarium was redone so we took the opportunity to check it out on Labor Day Weekend. Here are a few pics.

Touching the Stingray in the touch-tank.

Ok, time to go!

Good Morning!!

This is how we wake up each morning.

 

Avery With Her Walker

Here's a great video of Avery using here awesome walker! 

She even waves goodbye before heading off. 

Avery is 8 Months Old

WOW, I can't believe Avery is 8 months old already. This little one has changed so much so quickly. Here's what we've been up to the last month:

Mobile: Avery is such a fast crawler! She can chase me around the house! She loves to pull up on anything/everything insight and can even walk if you hold her hands. The walker Nana gave her has been her favorite toy- unless she runs into a wall or piece of furniture and gets stuck.

 

Avery loves to Play!  Here she's playing Peek-a-Boo with me. 

She also loves to rock on her rocking horse.

Frequent Flyer: Avery has her wings. She flew her 7th time this past weekend. This trip was to Austin to visit Cupcake for her birthday. Avery loved spending time outside. Everyday we went for a walk around Lady Bird Lake. She went to her first UT Tailgate. And, we managed to squeeze in one morning swim.

Avery Supporting her 2 favorite football teams, the UT Longhorns and Texas Tech Red Raiders!

Meal Time: Avery eats 3 times a day, breakfast, lunch and dinner, and sometimes has puffs as a snack.

- For breakfast she has cereal and fruit. She loves blueberries in her cereal. Another favorite is pureed fruit cup or applesauce.  

- For lunch it's usually a pureed vegetable (carrots, sweet potatoes, peas, avocado...). 

- And for dinner we feed her just about anything she can pick up on her own so we're constantly thawing out frozen peas, carrots, blueberries, or slicing up cheese, banana, avocado... We also try to incorporate a protein at dinner such as turkey, chicken or soy beans.

 

And most recently we've started having water at dinner time.

Bath time always follows dinner!

At 8 Months Avery is one happy camper!

7 Months Old

 
At 7 months old Avery is definitely adding a new dynamic to our family. Here are a few things about her:

Personality: She loves to sing and laugh! Andrew and her are constantly singing made up songs together which makes for a noisy household.  She also loves to laugh when tickled, or snuck up on (Andrew loves to try and scare her and she just laughs at him). Yesterday I was doing old cheerleading chants and dances in the kitchen and she was rolling over laughing... I must have lost my touch.

Getting Around: Avery has no problem getting where she wants to go.  She crawls all over the house so we've invested in 2 gates, with a 3rd on the way (thanks to my client Baby's Journey!).  Last night she even crawled up 2 steps on the stairs! But her favorite place to get into is the pantry. With so many smells and bright colors I can see how it'd be hard to resist...  Next house project is to install a baby proof pantry door.

Sleep: Getting much better! She goes to bed around 9pm and still wakes up at 6am, with 2 wakings throughout the night around midnight and 3am. I've had worse so I'm not going to complain on this front.

Food: Avery will eat anything... once.  At this point we feed her almost everything (except for the big allergy scares...nuts, peanut butter, strawberries...).  I'm trying to make most of her meals at home so the fruits and veggies have been the easiest. Some of her favorite foods are:

Veggie: Carrots & Sweet Potato

Dairy: Mozzarella (string cheese style)

Random: Spiral Pasta & Hummus - She could eat it all day long! 

Avery's 6 Month Stats

So, I know I'm a little late on this, but better late than never, right?!

HEIGHT: 25.5 inches

WEIGHT: 12.8lbs

FOOD: Avery is such a great eater... better at daycare than at home. At this point she's willing to try anything at least once. The foods we have tried include:

Cereals: rice cereal, oatmeal, cream of wheat

Fruit: banana, plum, cherry

Vegetables: avocado, soy beans (edamame), peas, sweet potato & carrots

Snacks: sweet potato Puffs

SLEEPING: We haven't nailed down the sleep schedule just yet. As soon as we get down to waking up just once throughout the night, we go out of town, which starts the cycle all over again which means waking up every 2 hours between 9pm-6am

From Napa to Sonoma

In July we covered the entire wine country, starting the trip off with a 13.1 mile race.

When I was about 8 months pregnant, I was so antsy I just wanted to go for a good long run.  With this urge, Andrew quickly signed us up for the Napa to Sonoma Half Marathon. This was the best motivator for me to loose all my pregnancy weight, and be rewarded with a great vacation.  On Avery's 6 Month Birthday, we hopped on a plane (Avery's 5th flight) and headed West for our first family vacation. Here are a few great pictures from the trip.

Ram's Gate

On our first day, we drove straight towards Sonoma, and stopped at Ram's Gate Winery. This was by far our most favorite vineyard of the whole trip. Andrew loved the Pinot Noir and I the Chardonnay. Below is Andrew relaxing after our long flight and Avery sitting on grass for the first time. She was a little skeptical of the the spiky green stuff. 

 Day 2 was race day. The weather couldn't have been better. Cool in the morning and comfortably sunny around 9am when we finished the race. Avery took a long nap and enjoyed the run until the last 2 miles where she started to get cranky. I couldn't blame her after sitting in the running stroller for almost 2 1/2 hours!  Here we are waiting to jump on the bus to take us out to the start line in Napa.

 At the start line, Domaine Carneros Winery

We finally Finished!! Ready to meet our Boston friends Deven and Purvee for the wine festival in Somona Square.

 The rest of the afternoon we winery hopped all over visiting Gundlach Bundschu, Hess and Artesa.

Day 2: St. Supery. No other tasting or tour will ever live up to the experience we had. We learned so much, drank some of the best wines EVER and made BFF with our tour guide. Nice job Andrew on arraigning this!

 Here we got to create our own red blend.

Even Avery had a great time!

 Day 3 we visited some Texas wine makers at Siduri where we tasted 11 Pintos from various regions. They happen to be bottling wine that day so we were able to check that out as well.

We spent the afternoon in Healdsburg and visited a few favorites...

 

Lunch at Healdsburg Bar & Grill, practicing our balancing act at the table.

 Ending the day with a champagne toast!

 Day 4 started off at Kunde. We discovered this wine about 3 years ago. It was a great place to start off the day as the grounds were beautiful and the old man working the tasting room so charming. We even did a cave tour.

 BR Cohn was our next morning stop. We enjoyed a private tour of the grounds and tasting by Cohn's daughter-in-law, thanks to my boss for arraigning. 

 Picnic lunch at Chateau St. Jean

  And last but not least, our final day in San Francisco.

Irish coffee at Buena Vista