Catching up on photos part 2

Daddy makes me laugh!

Snuggle time

How do I eat this?

Biscuits are much easier to eat! Fiona loves to crunch on these!

This sweater was mine when I was a baby!

What happened to MY genetic material? She looks exactly like Dave.

This one shows off her chompers, all 4 of them!

Just catching up on some photos

Fiona with her new front teeth!

Fiona, standing up for what she believes in

One of my favorite baby outfits! Who says a girl can't wear polka dots with stripes?

Fiona wearing her sweater from her Aunt Gwynne, who even spun the yarn herself! It's perfect for these cold days, and the color is so great!

Thanksgiving post

It's been a long time since we've posted anything, so I'll start with Thanksgiving and hopefully get caught up over the next few days.

For Thanksgiving, Adrienne came to visit! We cooked enough food to feed 10 people, but it was just the 4 of us, and Fiona doesn't eat much. We shopped on Wednesday (and finally found a Starbucks to have a gingerbread latte) and then cooked pretty much all day on Thanksgiving day. The prettiest food we made were our peace pies -- each pie had pecan, pumpkin and apple in one third. My personal favorite was the apple-pecan stuffing. Everything was made from scratch, except the obligatory can of cranberry goop.

Later that week when we were all starting to catch Fiona's cold, we went out to Lolita restaurant and my two lovely friends Melissa and Adrienne got to meet. We were brave and ordered the bone marrow appetizer, which was really good!

After all of our eating, we took a hike at a park with Fiona bundled up in a big fluff of winter gear and blankets. Adrienne made winter hats for all of us and inspired me to start knitting again. I'm making a scarf for Fiona that will match the one her Aunt Stephanie has! I have just enough yarn left over for a baby scarf :)

Hockey Night in (Oxford) Canada

Well, we went to visit my folks in Oxford. Jen and Mom went to the store and left us fellas in charge of Fiona, so we put on the hockey game. As you can see from the pictures Fiona likes to stare at the games as much as Daddy does. I'm still not sure if she was for the Maple Leafs or the Canadiens.

9 month stats

Cut me some slack -- it's hard to make a baby laugh and take a well-centered photo at the same time.

Fiona had her 9 month checkup and we found out that she is extremely average:

weight: 19lbs 1oz (55th percentile)
height: 27.5 in (50th percentile)
head circumference: 44 cm (50th percentile)

In other news, Fiona has a new tooth (for a grand total of 2, both on the bottom in the front) and her first word is "wow!" but we're not 100% sure that it counts since we don't know if she knows what it means. She can say mama and dada, but it's similarly hard to tell if she knows what they mean. When I picked her up from Nancy's house today (our daily babysitter) I put her in the car seat. She was not pleased and clearly said "Hey, mom!"

9 months already? really?

Fiona will be 9 months old tomorrow! One of these days we'll post some videos but here are some cute photos in the meantime. She got her first tooth this week!

Also, happy Veterans Day!

Mrow!

Halloween and some other recent photos

The last few weeks have been too busy to blog, so I'm finally getting around to a quick post. For halloween we dressed Fiona as a bunny and let her watch all the kids come up to our door to get candy. I guess our neighborhood is pretty serious about halloween, because we ran out of candy in about half an hour!

Fiona has learned how to cruise the furniture and a few times she has let go and stood up without holding anything for a few seconds. She can walk while holding onto the couch, and likes to try to grab any sleeping feline creature within her reach.

She also is about ready to cut her first tooth, any day now. It's really close to the surface, and we've been giving her frozen things and baby ora-jel to dull the ache a bit.

She's eating a lot more foods. She's no longer a vegetarian as of this week. Fiona got to try chicken and likes it! We were a little grossed out by the pureed baby food chicken, so we waited until she could eat pieces of it cut up. She also eats cheerios, baby yogurt, and bread. She loves to pick up the cheerios with her little fingers and feed herself!

We'll try to get some more video up soon, but until then here are some new pics:

8 months old today!

For her 8 month birthday, I thought I would list some of Fiona's latest and most ridiculous nicknames.

Bear
Squirrel-Bear
Beebo
Lovey
Lovey-Bear
Lovey-Girl
Girl-Bear
Snuggle-Bear
Snugs
Snugsy
Squirrel-Munk (something like a cross between a squirrel and a chipmunk)
Nutkin (as in the inimitable Squirrel Nutkin)
Nutty-kins

I think that's about it. Dave, help me if I'm missing any :)

A weekend at home (post 2 of 2)

More photos!

A weekend at home (post 1 of 2)

There's not much to say, other than we need more of these weekends at home when both Dave and I don't work and we have nowhere to be. Here are a bunch of new photos, mostly from this weekend.

Fall = Apple picking

Well last Saturday we went out to some farm near Berlin Heights, Ohio and we did it all. We picked apples, picked out a pumpkin, ate a little, looked at ducks and cows and such. In general we had a good time.
They had three kinds of apples ready so we grabbed some of each.


Momma sure does love her little Fi.

Pumkins. It's that time of year.
We picked out a nice big beautiful orange one.

By the car we found a little Wooly bear. Fiona's little nickname is bear.

What do you do with half a bushel of apples? Why you go home and make apple pie!

Yum! this is for us big kids Fiona gets homemade applesauce.

7 months old

7 months ago, our little Fiona was born. It's hard to believe she was this small! The hand belongs to her Grandpa Campbell, and this was taken at the hospital when she was a day old.



Now she sits up, crawls all over and chases our poor cats around.

Here's a photo from last weekend of all 3 of us:




This weekend Dave worked so Fiona and I did a little shopping and mostly stayed home. We did get to go for a walk with Lisa and the dogs, and we tried out the baby swing at the park.

Last week Grandma and Grandpa Starkey came for a visit. Our babysitter was on vacation, so it was a perfect time for them to get some alone time with Fiona and visit with all of us. They got a slick rental car and drove down Monday and went home on Friday evening. They got to sample quite a few of Elyria's fine eating establishments (mostly because we don't get much time to cook during the week!). On Friday, Dave took them down to Wellington and then further south to Amish country and they brought back some Amish produce and an apple pie and cherry bread.

Here's a video of Fiona showing off for the camera. This video comes with an epilepsy warning.

Happy Crawler from Dave Starkey on Vimeo.

TASTE OF CLEVELAND

Wow, the tastes we had in the land of Cleve.
Hey Jen. . . . that's a mighty big gyro you have there.
















So what else. Oh yeah, Fiona also got to eat. And we got to see both of Cleveland's buildings.



Yes. A good time was had by all. Have a good Labor Day Holiday everyone.