9 Months

Nine Months Old. 3/4 of a year! Wow, I can't believe it. She is getting so big so fast.

She can't wait to start walking. She only started crawling a few weeks ago but she is quickly moving on to walking. She would much rather cruise around the house holding on to things. She can even walk just keeping her hands against the wall, no ledge needed. She still face-plants as soon as she tries to take a step on her own. But she gets really frustrated when she can't get from point A to point B by walking alongside something. She will eventually get down and crawl but only after a few minutes of looking around and whimpering. Crawling is so beneath her!

When she does decide to crawl, she is super fast. Every picture of her crawling is out of focus because she comes after me and the camera can't focus and snap fast enough.

Grandaddy visited this weekend and turned this milk crate into an amusement park ride. Up and down and around like a ferris wheel. She had a blast - until she stood up in the crate and we had to stop for fear of her falling out.

Speaking of getting big.... due to a recent growth spurt, we are completely skipping 9-12 mo clothes and moving right on to size 18 months. I've been organizing and packing away all her birth-9 months clothes to make room for fall and winter clothes. A lot of the things I had put away for fall, she will never wear. But I just got a ton of cute things my mom picked up at a consignment sale. I can't wait for cooler weather because they are so cute. In the mean time, Keziah had a blast playing in the box I packed outgrown clothes in.

I love this picture. There is just something about those baby cheeks. I just have to kiss them 100 times a day.

As far as solid foods go, bread and apples are about the only things she is interested in eating. But she is still a very eager nurser and nurses about every two hours. She likes to put a foot up on my chest which is just so cute. And of course she has to grab my necklace if I'm wearing one.

I am so thankful she is a good nurser. My favorite moments in the day are when we snuggle up for a little snack.

Happy 9 Months, Keziah!

Conflicting Duality

We just got back from the store. We went to buy cat food and rat poison. Hmmm. What is wrong with this picture??? It would seem that our kitty kat has not been earning her keep lately.

Happy Fall

Fall officially starts tomorrow. My favorite season. I love the colors, the crisp air, the feeling of change. (Check out my new fall colors blog background.)

Fall seems to be the season when I grow the most. Maybe the changes in nature just make me more aware of the changes in me. But is just seems like a lot of the major changes in my life have occurred during fall.

I met Michael Paul in the fall and we got married the following October. I loved having fall colors in my wedding. I loved our honeymoon in the mountains as the leaves were just starting to change. We have celebrated every anniversary by going to the mountains and enjoying the colors. If you pay attention to our marriage ticker at the right you will see that our 6th anniversary is right around the corner!!

Every Fall for the past ....hmmmm....23 years (goodness!) has been marked by a new school year (17 as a student and 6 as a teacher). A lot of people have asked me if it felt weird not going back to school this fall. Honestly I didn't even think about it. This question has been catching me off guard. I usually respond with something like, "oh yeah, school has started, gosh it seems like another lifetime ago that I was a teacher." A dear friend in my small group told me I haven't missed it because I am now finally doing what I was made to do. I have no regrets in deciding to stay home with Keziah full time.

This fall I am keenly aware of how fast my baby is growing and changing. She is looking more and more like a little girl and less like a baby. She's crawling all over the house and getting really good at walking around the coffee table and couch. Sometimes she forgets she can't walk without holding on to something and takes a step away from the table - which always results in a painful face-plant on the hard woods.

And yet she is still my baby. I think her recent mobility scared her a bit. She doesn't want to grow up and be super independent yet. After long days crawling and playing by herself, she's been getting really clingy at night. I've enjoyed her renewed interest in cuddle time. We even have gone back to doing some kangaroo care in the moby wrap. At night she crawls up on top of me and rests her head on my belly to sleep. I love this stage for it being the best of both worlds.

I have a feeling she's going to be walking by winter and who knows what else. I'm looking forward to many changes this fall. Happy Fall Everyone!

Football Fun

It's Fall - my favorite season for so many reasons - and one of them is that it is football season. And that means Sunday afternoons watching my favorite team, the TN Titans playing. The first regular season game was yesterday and we killed the Raiders 38 to 13! And the best part is, I got to go to the game with my mom and bring along the newest little Titan fan! She was quite the little cheerleader. We all had a blast.

We went inside to cool off at halftime and Keziah got a little nap during the 3rd quarter.

She loved standing and cheering. Thankfully the person in front of us stayed inside most of the game so Keziah could stand and see.

She had a lot of fun and looked so adorable in her little cheerleader outfit. She will be wearing that every Sunday this fall! GO TITANS!!!!!

The Most Inconvenient Time

My mom has been saying Keziah will start crawling at the most inconvenient time - because that's just what babies do. She was right.

So I woke up this morning to find my living room a complete mess. This is typical when my husband is on night shift. He likes to do projects at 3 AM in the living room and then fall asleep before cleaning up after himself. Last night he was apparently doing something with a guitar pick-up, a soldering iron, and lots of tiny little wires and electrical type thing-a-ma-jigs.

Of course finding my living room a mess was not a big deal before the baby. Now it is. A very big deal. So I put Keziah down in the middle of the floor, a good 5 feet from anything dangerous - or so I thought. I decided the first thing to be picked up should be the charger for the computer - because it is not ours. We are borrowing my in-laws' charger because (shocker) Keziah broke ours by sucking on it. So of course my first priority is to protect the thing that is not ours. And in the 30 seconds it took for me to pick the charger up, Keziah managed to reach over to the coffee table, pull up on it, and go for the one thing I didn't notice - Michael Paul's favorite drinking glass. So it gets knocked off the table and shatters into a million pieces.

So now I have to grab Keziah before she goes playing in the glass. Did I mention that as I grabbed Keziah, she managed to reach out and grab the box of electrical stuff and spill it all amidst the shattered glass.

I put baby girl in the farthest corner of the room and give her a toy so I can try to get the glass swept up while trying to protect my own bare feet and being careful to not throw away the tiny electrical thing-a-ma-jigs that may or may not be important to my husband's project.

And this - THIS - my friends, is when my precious Keziah decided to get on her hands and knees and take off across the floor crawling.

Somehow neither of us got cut on the glass. I got it all cleaned up and even managed to snap a picture of her first crawling.

Yeah, mom was right. The MOST inconvenient time.

I guess it is high time I do some baby-proofing around here. A big part of that will be the discussion on 'cleaning up after yourself' that I will be having with hubby when he wakes up.

New Blog to Check Out

Hey Everyone, I just wanted to throw up a little advertisement for a new blog. My SIL just started a new blog called Just A Little Bit Downsy. It's a great place to get inside the head of a mom parenting a special needs child. Whether you have 'special' kids or 'typical' kids, you will learn a lot and be touched! If you've ever wanted to ask a tough question of a special needs mom, this is the place to do it. Please go check it out!

Reflections on Birth and Running

I've been reflecting on Keziah's birth a lot lately. This is mainly because of two things - 1, I have finally gotten around to developing pictures from the birth and scrapbooking them and 2, Keziah has not been sleeping so I am up a lot at night. Having looked at birthing pictures all day and then nursing my restless baby all night, I've had a lot of time to reflect on the emotions of it all. I wrote out her birth story here. But I mainly stuck to the facts. How can you put words to the feelings?

One of the things I was thinking about was the glorious endorphin high that hit me right before I entered transition. My sister, the runner, talks about the runner's high a lot. I have only once experienced that point where you have pushed your body so far that you suddenly receive a rush of endorphins that numbs all your pain and you feel like you can go on running forever - it was climbing Mount Katadin in Maine several years ago. It was one of those moments where I was halfway up the mountain and my only option was to keep going up or turn around and go down, but I had to keep going so I figured I might as well keep going up. I thought I was going to die. And then this rush of energy hit me and I felt like I could just go on forever. When I tried to imagine labor, that was the image I always reflected on. I knew it would be like that. You have no choice - that baby is coming - so you might as well just keep pushing through the pain.

My sister was the only person I wanted at my labor and birth besides my husband. She of course had no experience with labor but decided running a marathon would be the best way to relate. Julie trained for her first marathon throughout my pregnancy and completed it just a few weeks before Keziah was born.

Julie after finishing her 1st marathon. She is wearing bracelets I made for her with my initials and Keziah's initials. It was my way of connecting her run with my soon coming labor.

She is running her second marathon in December and is in training again. Today she emailed me this:

i had to get up and do my 6 miles this morning. i just ran in crockett mills so i wouldnt have to drive to town. it was a spiritual expereince. i started at 5 under a bright almost full moon straight above so it was light enough to see even out in the country. my whole first 3 mile lap, nothing stirred, no cars, no animals, no bugs, no wind. it was almost eerie and had i not been in my running meditative state where i feel most connected to God, i might have gotten spooked. one of the coolest things that happened was watching my moon shadow chase my street light shadow. i wont go into all the metaphorical meanings that made me ponder. then on my second lap, the sun was coming up. i got to see it go from black sky full of stars and moon to first light to a bright pink and orange horizon to sun rise. and to top it all off i ended up doing 6.5 instead of 6 and at a 9:40 pace and i was able to sprint at the end up a hill. i felt so strong, like supernaturally strong, like there is no concievable way i should be able to do this after just 4 weeks of training, like i had reached some new level of mind/body, and i could draw no other conclusion but that it came from God.

I could relate. My labor was a lot like that. Some weird meditative trance-like state. Knowing God was providing me some undefined strength to keep going. Reaching some new level of mind/body. Everything around me was quiet - like the world stopped. This morning the world stopped for Julie's run. It was like that when Keziah was born.

Maybe it was just lucky timing for me that my endorphin kick came right at transition. Pushing Keziah out seemed effortless and pain-free. I never felt that "ring of fire" people talk about. I never felt myself tear. I felt high and numb and yet not loopy like I was on drugs. It was incredible and I totally understand the runner's addiction because I could easily get addicted to birthing.

Ina May, the famous midwife, talks about the ecstasy of natural childbirth. She often has people reflect on the image of Bernini's "The Ecstasy of St. Teresa" because this is the face a woman makes in natural childbirth.

As I comb through my own birthing pictures I do indeed find one of my face in ecstasy. Not a great picture, but I can see the ecstasy on my face. And that is indeed how I felt.