Eight Months

CB, you're officially 2/3 of a year old! Let's look at what you've been up to:

Likes:

• Being tickled
• Being tossed in the air (carefully)
• Any food you can feed yourself, especially the Little Puffs (baby cheerios) that you can sort of pick up and feed yourself. (Quite a few end up on the floor.)
• Mommy (oh my gosh, the separation anxiety has set in with a vengeance)
• Daddy (but occasionally that changes the second you see Mommy - but then he throws you up in the air a bit and you're back to being his buddy)
• Chewing on things (boots, toys, hands, hair . . .)
• Knocking over towers of blocks
• Snuggles
• Crinkly noises like bags of potato chips
• Things that squeak (still)

Dislikes:

• Being taken from or in any way separated from Mommy (not all the time, but quite a lot of the time especially when you're tired)
• Crawling on the short shag carpet in the living room
• Pureed broccoli (need to try this again, but the gas was so stinky I haven't been able to)
• Sitting still, especially for any terribly long length of time (i.e. church)
• Being put down on your changing table right after I've retrieved you from your crib - even if your diaper is extremely soiled. (I think you don't realize I'm going to pick you right back up.)

What our photoshoots actually look like now - this happened while I was seeing if I had enough good shots.

Accomplishments:

• You grew two teeth this month! They came in about two weeks apart, and having them break through has not lessened your insane drooling. I cannot dress you without a bib or I have to dress you again in 5 minutes.
• You are creeping and army crawling all over the place, but only when you really want something. It's not graceful, but it's getting more and more functional. Occasionally you go up on your knees and rock a bit, but you usually go down on your belly again pretty quickly. You're finally figuring out that alternating arms is more effective than just pushing with one until it flips you over. 
• Switched from bathing in the sink to bathing in the bathtub - although still in the baby bathtub. It was just too hard to move everything out of your reach, and you are climbing too much to let me feel safe with you up that high.

• You love to stand up against the couch. You don't even hold on, you just lean and play with things. In church yesterday, you let go of the bench completely to reach for the hymnbooks behind you - and didn't fall! I'll be interested to see if you get coordinated enough to walk early, because you are really quite good at the first part.
• I'm just starting to transition you to three solid meals a day, but you still nurse quite a lot.
• You're getting better and better at picking up small things and sticking them in your mouth. Awesome for eating cheerios, terrifying otherwise.

CB, your really do get more fun each month. You have become quite ticklish, especially your armpits. When I told your daddy to try it out and you let out a shrieking giggle, the look on his face was the most delightful mixture of amazement and humor. I wish I had it captured on camera, because it's a moment I never want to get. I think you like it when I kiss your cheeks too, but I don't know if it's because you're figuring out it means I love you, or if it's because it tickles too. (I have received a few pretty wet "kisses" from you though - but it seemed more like you were trying to eat my face.)

You've become pretty clingy this month (starting around the time you picked up a cold at Great-Grandma Winegar's funeral, I think), and it can be a little exhausting. I'm told this is a developmental milestone, but it coincided with a time when your dad had a lot of late jobs, and you have really become a Mama's girl. You'll be playing happily with your dad, and then I walk in and you immediately start to cry for me. I love that you love to be with me, but I hope you go back to loving everyone again sometime. 

You love it when I give you whole pieces of food to gnaw on, like broccoli, cucumbers, and kiwi. It scares me to death because I'm afraid you're going to choke, but so far it seems like I'm picking good sizes. Sometimes I even let you play with your mushed up peas, and you try to pick them up as well. 

You still love to explore, even from my lap. I feel like I'm holding a wiggly puppy when I go to church. In fact, you've become pretty puppy-like all around. You chew on my shoes if I don't stop you (and you go to TOWN on your own shoes). You beg for our food. You scratch me while you're climbing all over me trying to explore. The other day I heard your dad saying, "Come on, CB, come on!" and as I walked in I saw you knocking over a tower of blocks, and your dad rubbing your head and saying, "Good girl!" Yeah. That happened. 

I love you, puppy daughter, 

Mama

Talk About Your Joys

I saw this cool quote on facebook the other day, and it really resonated with me. I decided before CB was born that I didn't want to be the kind of mother who made potential mothers not want to have kids. I have friends who make motherhood sound awesome, and I have friends who make motherhood sound like one big misery.

So I was thinking about writing this post the other day, and thinking about how I feel like I do a pretty good job about talking about my joys instead of my problems (at least publicly) these days. I want CB to look back on the things that I said about her I know that I enjoyed being her mother, even though there were days when I was frustrated. I want to remember the great moments. I only want to remember the bad ones so that I can remember how I got through them, how they didn't last as long as they seemed like they were lasting.

Then today I read this quote:

"I know it is hard for you young mothers to believe that almost before you can turn around the children will be gone and you will be alone with your husband. You had better be sure you are developing the kind of love and friendship that will be delightful and enduring. Let the children learn from your attitude that he is important. Encourage him. Be kind. It is a rough world, and he, like everyone else, is fighting to survive. Be cheerful. Don't be a whiner." [Marjorie Pay Hinckley]

And you know what? That is definitely an area of my life where I could use some work. I am pretty good about being cheerful on social media, at church, to most of my friends (and the ones to whom I'm not are my venting friends - it's agreed that we can get out our frustrations). I'm not as good at being cheerful to my husband.

I mean, I'm not saying I'm complaining to him nonstop. And I'm not saying that I shouldn't be able to complain to him when I am frustrated. Part of the whole marriage deal is that we get to take care of each other, and we can only do that if we let each other know when things are bothering us.

But . . . I could do better. A lot better.

Talking about our joys is important, but that includes sharing that joy with those who are most immediately affected by our attitudes. Which is it going to be? Am I going to constantly talk about my problems to my husband, or my joys? And, more importantly, does he know that he is one of my greatest joys?

I hope so. But if not, that's definitely something I can change. It's time to break the habit.

On Achieving Financial Greatness (Baby Steps)

I hope you don't mind if I share something that has made me really happy lately. I promise I'm not bragging - we've just been working on some things that really make me feel awesome, and I want to share.

For the past couple of months, Eric has been doing a lot of video work for a guy named Brian Ford, who does financial training seminars called "The 8 Pillars of Financial Greatness." After seeing a couple of them, Eric came home and told me that (among other things) we needed to cut up all (2) of our credit cards. I was willing to see what he was talking about, so we started watching the seminars. And I LOVED them. (Side note: if you bank with Mountain America Credit Union, they will have these seminars available online for their customers for free. Neat, huh?)

I feel like in general, we're pretty good with money. But for the past year or so, we've felt like we were just treading water - barely breaking even at the end of each month. Eric is essentially self-employed, we're self-insured, and we're trying to pay of student loans and medical bills, so it's sometimes difficult to know what to do from a budget standpoint, because the paychecks just vary quite a bit from month to month. However, we learned that there are definitely some things we can do to help us feel more in control, and we have been loving the last couple of months. Here are some of the things we've done. 

• Established a Financial Confidence Account. That's a fancy way of saying we now have an emergency fund, so if our car breaks down or someone breaks an arm or we accidentally neglect to pay a medical bill for 4 months, we can pay for it and sail on our merry way without ruining our financial plans. Our tax return helped us quickly reach the first goal of $1000, and now we'll add a little each month until we have 3 months' living expenses. 
• Created a budget based on our values. We made a list of the things we valued most right now, and then asked ourselves whether our financial plans are in line with the things that are important to us. Sure, there are lots of things we want right now. I'd like a 4-door car and a new computer. But when we wrote down our values, I realized that what I want more than that is for CB to eventually get some siblings, and our insurance is such that we should start saving for that right away or we'll never be able to afford it. (Our insurance covers complications, but we'll basically pay the full cost of a normal birth unless something changes between now and whenever we have another baby.) Instead of using our tax return on a new computer or a vacation as we'd originally discussed, we put a big chunk of it in an account labeled "future baby," and we'll add to it each month. We also started an account for travel (so we can visit E's family in Texas), and soon we'd like to start a future home account.
• Zeroed out our credit cards and switched to a cash-based system wherever we could. Credit cards are fine when you pay them off at the end of each month, and we pretty much always do, but we still get to the end of the month wondering how we spent so much money. Let me tell you, when you go to the grocery store with your grocery money in cash, you think twice about those extras that get thrown in the cart here and there. We came in $10 under budget this week! (I guess we could have gotten those sausages after all.)
• Created a discretionary fund for each of us. We take a certain (small) amount of money out for each of us at the beginning of the month that we can spend on whatever we want without feeling guilty for spending the family money and without feeling like we need to consult with each other about our purchases. This keeps us from feeling strangled by our budgets, but also helps us think carefully about what we personally want to spend that money on. If I want new jeans, I'll probably need skip a few extras somewhere else.
• Started having weekly planning, budgeting, and menu planning meetings. Planning out our weeks and our menus together before we go grocery shopping means that 1) we don't buy things that we don't need or that will go bad before we can use them, and 2) we know what we're going to make, so we don't decide to go and pick up Chinese take-out at 7 pm. Not only are we spending less money, but we're eating healthier and our lives are more organized.
• Automated as much of our budget as possible. Our bills and our savings come out automatically so we aren't tempted to put them off until we don't have any money left for them. 

We're only about three pillars in, but let me tell you - I am loving it. We feel like we're making progress on our goals for the first time in a long time. We feel in control of our money, and we feel less frustrated when we have to pay our bills each month.