Teething Again?

Do you think Harrison could be teething again? He is certainly doing his best to put everything in his mouth...even my nose!

10 Months Old!

Golly Gracious! I cannot believe Harrison is in the double-digit month count. Unbelievable! It is going by SO fast; it is going so fast, that I can't even remember to post on the actual day that he turns 10 months old. Fear not, I didn't forget to take pictures yesterday. He had play date with his friend, Stella, from across the street. If you haven't been following from the beginning, Stella is my friend's daughter who is two weeks younger than Harrison (our due date was two days apart). During the play date I realized that Harrison desperately needs to be surrounded by more kids because he was afraid of everything at first. It took a while for him to warm up to her talking/babbling and the sharing of toys. The night before he played with a two year-old, which was extremely overwhelming for him. After yesterday, we vowed to have more regular play dates.

I also realized yesterday that I have to start thinking about Harrison's first birthday (& party)! I realize that this function may be more for the adults, but I am always looking for reasons to celebrate...especially my little one. Not sure exactly what we are going to do yet, so if anyone has any suggestions, I am open. We thought we might head back to SC for the big celebration, but because of our (mainly mine) crazy travel schedule for the months of February and March, there is just no way to get home. I am happy to celebrate in Colorado, but I am certainly going to miss family and friends in SC.

Hilarious!

My sister gave Harrison a couple of DVDs for Christmas and there is one that he has fallen in love with. I think it is called Baby Newton (one of the Baby Einstein series). It is about shapes and it has really captured his attention. He gets so into it, that if you try to talk to him or move around too much, he glares at you. That alone cracks me up. It gets better. And I am not sure I can do it justice because you really need to see it, but I will take a stab at describing it. So there is a segment on the DVD that focuses on the square. In order to explain a square, they show a jack-in-the-box. There is a clown that turns the handle and then a clown pops out of the box. Every time the clown pops out, Harrison jumps because it catches him off guard. And each time he watches it, he jumps more and more. And every time he jumps, tears come down my eyes because I am laughing so hard. And because I am making noise, he glares at me. It is a funny little cycle that cracks me up. I realize after typing this that it really doesn't sound that funny, but it truly is hilarious. I told Adam that we need to buy a jack-in-the-box for him to play with, but he thought it was cruel. I thought it would be entertaining. Oh well! The pictures above are of Harrison while he is watching the DVD. It took a while for me to get the smile out of him because I was distracting him from the movie and he didn't like that. The first five pictures are of him glaring at me. But my mom doesn't like it when I post pictures of him that aren't that cute (as if there are any like that), so I put the one of him smiling and the ones of him concentrating on the movie.

Motherhood Thoughts

There are a couple of things about motherhood that no one can adequately describe for you until you are actually a mother. Actually, there are a TON of things that you just don't understand until you are a mother. The past two days there have been a couple of things that have really tugged at my heart. Last night, Harrison, Adam and I went out to dinner and I sat across the table from both of them (as the picture above clearly shows). I watched Adam talk and play with him and I found myself falling more and more in love with both of them just over a couple of minutes. I remember when I was younger and I thought about the man I was going to marry, I always was certain that I could never love a man more than my dad. And while that remains true, I love all three of these guys (Dad, Adam, and Harrison) so differently and immensely, not one more than another. I also remember being nervous when I was pregnant with Harrison that I wasn't going to love him as much as I love Adam. I guess I am inflicted with some sort of selfish-love complex. But again, I love him in a way that I never anticipated and in a way that no one can tell you about. And I can't describe it any other way than what happened to Harrison and me today.

We went to the pool (indoor pool at the rec center) where they have a great kiddie section. This isn't Harrison's first dip in the pool, but it has been a while. The pool is about 3 1/2 feet deep, which obviously requires me to hold Harrison at all times. As we got in the pool, Harrison clung very tightly to my arms, shoulders, hair, whatever he could find. The more we explored, the tighter he grabbed. Eventually, he would loosen his grip. But it made me feel so good that he was clinging to me. He knew that I was going to do my best to protect him, and that I wasn't going to let anything happen to him. I couldn't stop squeezing him tight. I just love that he is at the age where he knows that he needs me. At that same time I love this age, because he isn't trying to tell me that he doesn't need me. Anyway, I love that I am getting to experience these new feelings for the first time. I'm sure that I have said this before, but it is times like these that I want to bottle up and pull out when he is 15 years old .

Domestic Harrison

Harrison loves laundry baskets. He must know that laundry is in his near future and is already growing a deep-rooted love for the domestic duty. I do think he has a couple of things backwards. In his room today, he pulled all of the shirts out of his drawer and thought it was hilarious. He also pulls dirty clothes out of the laundry basket in our closet. For those of you who might be alarmed at the thought of Harrison in our closet, please don't fret...our closet is a walk-in closet. I'm not putting him in a deep, dark dungeon for him to survive in (like the closets when I was growing up). I digress. But I think he needs to figure out still that clean clothes stay in the drawers and dirty clothes stay in the baskets. He is still grasping concepts like "mommy," "daddy," and "dog," so I will wait on the aforementioned for a little while. Until then, enjoy these pictures of Harrison playing in a laundry basket from today.

Uh-Oh

Last night while I was doing some work, I turned my attention away from Harrison momentarily and this is what I saw. He was headed up the stairs. Granted, he can't make it up one stair, let alone many stairs, so I had plenty of time to grab my camera (which is always pretty close to me, if you can't tell). He has, however, turned into a quick little booger. He finally does the "real" crawl when he is going somewhere close by, but when he has a long distance to go, he prefers the army crawl. I don't know why. It sure seems like the army crawl takes a lot more effort; especially since he grunts with every motion involved with army crawl. And as if I even have to point this out, check out his drool on picture #2. He truly is an unending fountain of drool. I sure do wish I could bottle it and sell it...

Show Me Your Teeth!

I wanted to show our blog followers Harrison's new teeth, but when I decided to take his picture to try to capture them, I knew that my chances were slim. I brought the camera out and I said over and over again, "Show Me Your Teeth." And he did! But he gave me lots of cute smiles. You will also notice quite a bit of drool in the pictures. As of yesterday, Harrison decided to hop back on the drool train (just a week and a half after the first two teeth surfaced). I guess that means there will be another tooth in our near future, but I won't hold my breath. I can confidently say that Harrison has been drooling for two-thirds of his life. That's a long time. But we have gotten quite comfortable with the slobbery face. We know that he has to wear a bib pretty much at all times while he his awake. I actually took his bib off to take these pictures because I was tired of seeing bibs in pictures. Within 45 seconds, his shirt was super wet. Anyway, here are lots of pictures of "toothy" Harrison. I know that there are a lot, but I just couldn't choose.