Then I cleaned out their nestbox, the parents re-nested and I thought I had a new round of cute coming my way. So I went out to the bird store (seriously, it’s a store with bird stuff, Wild Birds Unlimited) and picked up some sunflower chips (because I’m too squeamish to buy mealworms) and put them out at home!

And now 2.5 months later as I was celebrating the number of new birds those chips have attracted (I have cardinals coming out my ears, in addition to miscellaneous brown birds that all look the same to me except they come in different sizes!) I realized that I never saw any new babies and I haven’t seen the adult bluebirds lately either. So I checked the nest box and there’s one unhatched egg in it. It makes me sad. I don’t know if the influx of new birds scared them away or what but I’m a little bummed. Fortunately I have a ton of new birds(brown thrashers and what may be a house wren except it looks more black than brown (which really may just mean I have a bug problem!)) to help make it up to me!

Jack and I took a nap this morning, since it was so nice out! Unfortunately he was almost asleep by the time we got home which means he’s in his crib now complaining (lightly) about how much he doesn’t want to be sleeping because he totally just had a nap and 5 minutes of snoozing in the stroller TOTALLY COUNTS, MOM! Except that it doesn’t.

My “baby” is 7 months now and has 2 teeth in and two thisclose to being in. As a matter of fact I wish they would just go ahead and BREAK THROUGH already because Jack is really tired of me sticking my finger in his mouth to check on them.

Tonight will also be the first night Jack eats a meat-product. Chicken is on the menu assuming when I’m done typing this past that I can remember to go get the chicken breasts out of the freezer to thaw. I would say there’s about a 50/50 chance I’ll remember. Short term memory for stuff like that just does not seem to be my strong suit lately. Go figure.

OK, maybe it doesn’t really technically suck, but I had visions of fried okra dancing in my head when I bought those plants, and now like two months later here I am with really tall plants containing like 3 okras each, which does not so much resemble the mental images I had when I brought them home.

I’m really disappointed.

I think I may need to do a little more research into these food plants I see before just buying them in a fit of fancy.

Kind of like when I bought lettuce at the start of the summer only to be shocked (SHOCKED) to discover that it’s really a cool weather plant, as evidenced by the fact that I got like 5 leaves of lettuce off it before it went to seed. LAME!

(And also add, broccoli, and spinach to that list because I am an enthusiastic planter, but a very slow leaner!)

So anyways, if you’d ever considered growing okra but wasn’t sure how it would turn out, this is how it turns out. Maybe in a week I’ll have enough okra for me and Nate to have at one meal.

Maybe!

(Please pay no attention to those pathetic little jalapenos plants to the right of the okras! I think this pot is too small for that many food things, and so they’re very sad, and I’m too lazy to just pluck them and toss them out.)

Of course, learning to crawl was AWESOME for Jack! The freedom, the mobility! Certainly it could not get any better than that!

And then he learned how to pull himself up to standing. The best part is, sometimes he even thinks he can walk. (He can’t). So he’ll pull up on the sofa, turn away, let go, and immediately find himself back on the floor. Surprise!

So this morning I put him in bed for his morning nap (as I do most mornings). It was a tad on the early side, but someone kept yawning while I ate breakfast and was doing a really good impression of a baby desperately in need of a nap. Until he got in bed. I went on to make his bottles for tomorrow (since he’s going to be with my mom tomorrow) and then washed about 50 dishes (all bottle related) and by the time I was done Jack was very vocally not sleeping.

So I went over to his room and peeked in and there he was, standing in his crib, crying. So I went in thinking I was going to lay him back down, turn his musical seahorse back on, and remind him that he’s tired and supposed to be napping.

Unfortunately in his excitement (he obviously thought his nap was OVER) he went to get back on his hands and knees, but lost his hand grip on his way down and bonked his forehead on the crib bars.

Cue Hysterical Wailing.

So we came out to the living room, calmed down, played on the floor until once again, nothing is fun, everything sucks, wah wah wah my toys and it was definitely nap time for real this time. This time, since he was due to eat again in a half hour, I gave him a 2oz bottle snack and rocked him to sleep. Spoiled much? Hopefully this will not teach him that slamming his face into his crib is a good way to get out of nap time. (No, I don’t actually think he’ll make the connection).

But anyways, baby’s first major bonk on the head resulting in a small welt to the far right of his right eyebrow. And this just goes to show that every time you think you have baby’s nap time down, baby throws you a curve ball!

After a couple of cranky days (and a few night time wakeups) we have tooth! Finally one of the two teeth broke the skin and is jabbing through. It’s sharp! It also seemed to help the crank a lot today. Now I just have to wait for the other tooth (teeth) to come through!

I can’t believe my baby has a tooth! It’s like he’s turning into an actual little person or something.

So far we’re not very good at predicting when Jack will go up a size in diapers. So far he’s gone up from NB to 1, 1 to 2, and he’s now going from 2 to 3. Each time we had a TON of diapers left over in the old size. We buy in bulk, it always seems like a good idea at the time, and then suddenly poop starts leaking out the back and we consider maybe it’s time for the next size, except we probably still have over around 100 size 2 diapers left over. Oops.

I’m not a big fan of the sizing of baby clothes either. We’re moving him up to the 6-9 month clothing (I can’t believe my baby is 6 MONTHS OLD – how did that happen?!) and there was a super cute pair of 6-9 month jammies* that I was SO excited about using except when I put it on him last night it was already too small for his feet so his little toes had to scrunch up. I’m pretty bummed.

Tomorrow Jack will be 6 months old and once again we’ll celebrate by going to the doctor’s office so he can have shots. Happy half-birthday to him!

I had to remove Jack’s crib bumpers for storage. In addition to the fact that Jack is thisclose to being able to sit up from the crawling position, he also had a mild allergic reaction to his face touching some part of the top of the bumper. The first time it happened it was a small spot so I didn’t see if til we were on our third activity past him being in bed so I wasn’t sure what caused it. The second time he went in the crib with no problem, and came out of the crib with red blotchy marks on his face that took about an hour to fade. So I washed it, packed it up and it will be missed. Especially since he likes to roll over to the side of the bed and wedge his head up against it. I have a feeling his mobile will be following shortly and it makes me sad to see them go!

*I typed this up at work and planned on emailing it to myself at home so I could look it back over later and decide if it was worth posting, although since I can’t think of anything else to post about I figured it would probably make the grade. Then I decided to attach it to a flickr picture. ANYWAYS! I typed “jammies” and hit the spacebar and Word turned it into “jimmies” and I almost didn’t notice. I’m a little sad that Word knows what jimmies are but not jammies, because seriously, who says “jimmies”?! SPRINKLES! I’ve since added jammies to my dictionary.

They have dogs. This in itself is not necessarily bad as we have dogs and the two families before them had dogs. The crappy part is the part where they seem to be outside dogs. (I saw the dogs outside yesterday during the thunderstorms. It made me sad. Yes, there’s shelter out there, but it still made me sad.) While they said “they don’t bark and only howl when they hear sirens,” I’m going to go ahead and call BULLSHIT.

They’ve only been here for two nights and on the first night they woke us up howling at nothing. Second night they woke us up howling and barking, again, at nothing. And they bark and howl plenty during the day too.

For the first week they lived here there were no dogs and we thought we hit the Neighbor Jackpot. Instead I think these are the crappiest dogs yet!

And just as a bonus, there’s a big metal archway in their backyard with the word”EVIL” on top, so that’s interesting! It’s not standing up, it’s laying on its side, but still. I’ll try to get a picture because it’s just funny.

I said “oh my goodness.” (I know, I was surprised too. I’m pretty sure I did say “shit” at some point though, and I think that accurately summed up the situation.)

So there I was with a giant spider on the wall trying to decide on the best course of action. After grabbing some paper towels and a shoe I decided I just didn’t want to risk it. If I whacked it with the shoe and tried to snag it with the paper towels (it was kind of higher on the wall than I could easily reach) then I would risk the spider escaping, and frankly that was a risk I was just not willing to take (plus, do spider guts leave a mark?).

So next I went to get a stool, a dixie cup and a stiff Applebees ad we got in the mail earlier. I stood on the stool, trapped the spider under the cup (the spider FLIPPED OUT, by the way. It was freaky) and then I slid the Applebees ad under the cup to trap it in before carefully escorting it outside.

By then it was closer to 10:30, I got in bed but I didn’t get to sleep for another 20 minutes or so. I just kept wondering if that spider had any friends that maybe I needed to know about. I really really really really hope not.

And of course it didn’t help that Jack woke up (but required no assistance) around 3:45am, but usually I’m really good at the falling asleep part, just lately (baby related) not as good at the staying asleep part.

For the last week and a half, sleep at our house has not been smooth. Naps have been short and restless, over night sleep has been interrupted, sometimes requiring a trip to the nursery, sometimes he just put himself back to sleep. This coming from a baby who for almost a solid month slept from 10pm-6:30am and was just starting to take good, semi-regular naps.

It sucked.

We figured it must be like right after he turned 4 months old and he was learning how to master rolling back to front and front to back and he spent ALL NIGHT doing it and it woke him up and we had a very bad week of sleep around then too, and then one night everything went back to normal.

I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself, but last night was the first night in over a week that everything was 100% normal. No crying, no getting up, not a peep from the nursery, and this morning I think Jack showed me why…

Skill Acquired.

Look out, world, my baby is mobile! (Oh Crap)

I mean I know babies are small, once upon a time Jack was small, but this baby is even smaller! (Jack was 7lbs, his new BFF is 6lbs). It’s hard to even imagine. He was so cute and so little and so sleeping and I remember it all so clearly but at the same time it feels like it was only a dream a million years ago.

And also as a side note, Jennifer is my hero because on Friday night she attended a cloth diapering 101 lecture thing with me in downtown Apex (she’s interested in cloth diapering, I’m only vaguely curious but mostly skeptical). I think it was like a month before I left the house after Jack was born, except for his doctor appointments!