Half a Year with Sabrina Day

We can't believe that it's been 6 months since our wonderful daughter was born. She has amazed us in so many ways in the past 6 months and we can't imagine our lives without her in it. Brent, Sabrina and I all went out on Monday night to our local restaurant, Murphy's, and celebrated a number of things. We celebrated Brent's new job at Jive Software on Pearl St. Mall in Boulder, my new position at my current company as Director of Operations for the Sustainable Building Services Group at AEC, and our daughter's 6 month birthday. We are feeling happy and lucky these days.

Here are a few photos to show what 6 months can do. This first photo was taken at the hospital when she was first born:



And this photo was taken this past weekend at the condo in Breckenridge.

We spent a great weekend there with Nana and Poppy...and lots of dogs! Nana and Poppy are thinking of adopting Penelope (Penelly, or Nelly as she's being called) who is a buddy of Gracie's from her doggie camp. Nelly's mom just adopted a little girl and is having trouble keeping Nelly entertained as much as she would like. Gracie and Nelly get along great and I think you'll see in the photos from our weekend that Nelly would probably have a pretty sweet life with Nana, Poppy and Gracie. And Pongo thought he had hit the bully sticks a little hard when he started seeing double white fluffy dogs, but he decided that whatever the cause, two Gracies was pretty darn cool. That is, until he lost them in the snow field camouflage. Photos from the weekend are below:



Developmentally, Sabrina is seconds away from crawling. She is constantly moving around the room in all directions. We often put a blanket down and then we are still surprised when she's 2 feet off the blanket when we turn around, even though she's been moving pretty well for a few weeks now. In the past week we've noticed a lot of "revving the engine" where she'll get up on all fours and rock back and forth focusing on an object in front of her that she wants to grab SO badly. Then she usually gets mad and flops down on her belly. However, several of us have witnessed a few legitimate crawls here and there, but they are still few and far between. Uncle Tim is in Colorado for work this week so he got to visit Sabrina tonight and he witnessed one of her true crawling moments out on the back deck. Apparently, the spoon in front of her was worth a real crawl. I think it's really just a matter of figuring out the object that she wants badly enough that she'll decide to crawl one day. Unfortunately (or amusingly) right now beer bottles seem to be one of her biggest motivators...she loves the feel of the cool glass on her gums! I'm afraid she learned this trick from her big god-sister, Cecilia. Or could this be yet another bit of paternity proof?

Finally, here are a few photos from dinner tonight with Tim and BerndUwe who is driving to San Francisco and stopped in Boulder for a quick visit.



Happy Half Birthday Sabrina! We love you like crazy.

Mea Culpa

Ok, in case you haven't noticed, or I haven't already talked to you about how embarrassed I am about this...it's time to come clean. I cut Sabrina's hair and...well...according to Ashley the bangs are very "hip" if she was living in the Mission in SF, so I guess that's what we'll tell ourselves. Thankfully, this was a few weeks ago and she's growing into them, but here are a few before and after photos to document what really happened that fateful Memorial Day Monday in 2010.


BEFORE






AFTER




ai yi yi

But here are a few more recent shots of her looking just as adorable as ever, even with the new bangs:




Also noteworthy about the picture above is that she can now sit in a high chair at restaurants. Except today of course, when she was having too much fun with Poppy (Grandpa Robert) at lunch and she didn't WANT to sit in the high chair. But on several other occasions we've been able to put her in the high chair while we eat and she just sits and plays with toys! Both of us eating with two hands again. Wow. They sure are cute when they're tiny, but they sure are fun when they grow up too. So far, we've loved every stage! Can't wait for the next adventure.

Sabrina Eats!

This morning we entered a new phase with our little girl. She eats! We fed her about 1/2 tablespoon of mushed avocado mixed with breastmilk. Here's how it all went down.





And a few more photos on our Picasa site:

Sabrina Eats

Rainy Saturday morning videos

Here are a few cute videos of Sabrina from this morning. We are all stuck in the house because it's cloudy, rainy and cold outside. But it's actually a nice change from all the heat we've been having in the past few weeks! so we are enjoying staying in and doing things around the house.

This week Brent survived his first Mr. Mom test with flying colors. I had to travel for work on Tuesday and Wednesday (my first night away from Sabrina!) and Brent held down the fort extremely well and even took Sabrina to her first swim class on Tuesday night with friends Laura and Brad and their little girl, Lyra.




In the above video I'm playing a "development" game recommended by a BabyCenter email today. The email talked about how she is now at an age when she can anticipate things, so pretending to tickle her or "get her" is supposed to be a big hit. And...I think it worked!




And in this one she's just playing in her "neglect-o-matic" (as a friend suggested we call it...and it fits!) and showing off how she can turn around and play with all the toys.

We've have a somewhat difficult few weeks with getting her to sleep through the night. She seems to wake up about once or twice a night now without much of a pattern. She'll still go for long stretches at a time, but every now and then she'll pull a 1am wake up and it's throwing us off a bit. But all in all, she's as cute as ever and developing wonderfully! We couldn't be happier with her.

Sabrina drummer girl

Sabrina's tambourine antics with Señor Frog inspired Luke to get out the drum and have a little jam session with her.