Samantha ate her first ice cream cone and Cynthia captured the result. Check out the video to the right to see how messy she is.

Samantha celebrated her first birthday this past week. Last weekend, we had a party for her and lots of friends and family attended. Samantha wore the dress Grandma Heather made for her. It was a great party and Samantha was very happy as the photos show.

We will add some more details later. For now, check out the pictures.

Samantha is starting to change more quickly. She is sitting now. You have to put her in a sitting position but once she is there, she balances very well and reaches for things and only rarely falls over. She rolls over onto her stomach all of the time and is definitely close to crawling. Samantha will pick her body up and be in a four point position and then rock a bit. Then, she will go back onto her stomach, lift up her arms and legs and flail for a little while. Then, back up on all fours. She will figure it out soon I am sure.

But still, she is pushing herself backwards with her arms. Of course, she is looking at something in front of her and trying to go in that direction so she ends up pretty frustrated when it ends up farther away. But, if you look away for a moment, she will have moved some distance when you look back.

The latest thing she is doing is clearly saying “ba” over and over. Just a couple of days ago, Samantha and Matthew were saying “ba ba” to each other back and forth. Cynthia and I looked at each other knowing that before we know it, we will have another voice in the house and the volume will be that much louder.

I have been delinquent in updating the website so this isn’t exactly news because it happened two months ago now. But, Samantha had her first real meal and we have the pictures to prove it. As you can see, she did fine and only had a bit on her face. Of course, since then we have had some messier meals.

Now she is up to having three meals a day. She is eating cereals like rice, barley and oatmeal with a bit of something else mixed in like peas or sweet potatoes. But what she really likes are the rice cookies afterwards. She gets to feed those to herself and she sucks on them until they disappear.

Still no sign of teeth but they should be starting to arrive soon.

Samantha is still seemingly the happiest baby in the world. And we have some pictures to prove it. Honestly, she really does seem to be smiling almost all of the time. She is now up to 13 pounds, 12 ounces and is still fairly small for her age but is very healthy and doing very well. She isn’t rolling over yet but gets very nearly there. Not nearly as much babbling as last month but she is making stranger and louder noises and is definitely experimenting with her voice. Soon enough, she will be half a year old and who knows what she will doing then.

This month, instead of pictures of Samantha, we have a video. The video clip shows her latest pass time (first pass time?). When she is in the right mood, she has started to babble to us. She looks us in the eyes and babbles for several minutes. Cynthia captured this clip of her a few days ago and is a good example of what she will do. We can’t remember much from when Matthew was that age, but we don’t remember him doing this, or perhaps not to this degree.

Of course, Matthew was ahead of her on rolling over. Samantha had her four month check up and the only thing on the list she wasn’t doing was rolling over. Although our memory is fuzzy, we are sure Matthew was doing that on time. But it isn’t much of a concern and certainly Samantha will be rolling over soon enough. She is holding her head up very well and is very steady. And at her last measurement during her check up, she had reached 11 pounds, 11 ounces.

Even better, she is starting to sleep though the night. Several times now, she will have her last feeding around 7:00 or 8:00 and then not wake up for another feeding until 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning which is pretty good. I think she made it to 5:00 once. I suppose this is her Christmas present to us, which we will take gladly.

But best of all, she is just as good natured as ever. Only rarely does she cry out and usually when she does it is because she is scared. When she is hungry, she smacks her lips and gives us other signals but doesn’t cry much at all. She is all smiles and she giggled the other day when I was changing her. Cynthia thinks I tickled her a bit. Not sure what it was but it was a funny sound.

It is nearly Christmas as I write this and I hope to get some pictures of events around the house here tomorrow. Until then, Merry Christmas to everyone.

November has been a great month for Samantha. She went to the doctor for a check up about two weeks ago and everything is just fine. At the time, she weighted 9 pounds 14 ounces. Just today, Cynthia took her to a weekly “Well Baby” event and she weighed 10 pounds 10 ounces. Of course, there was another baby there who was 3 days younger and 3 pounds heavier. Just like Matthew, she is smaller than average but growing and progressing well.

The pictures linked here are mostly of Samantha but there are a couple of others of Matthew and the rest of the family. As the pictures show, she is starting to smile a bunch. She still has a great disposition and is very patient when she is hungry. The feedings are still averaging about every 3 to 3.5 hours but every once in a while she will go 4 or 5 hours in a stretch. We are getting a bit more sleep though.

She is enjoying her gym a fair bit also. The pictures show her sleeping in it but that was after playing for a while. She kicks and grabs for the toys hanging over her. So, when she isn’t sleeping, she really likes to play in the gym.

Samantha continues to grow and is doing very well. She had a checkup with the doctor last week and is now up to 7 pounds, 3 ounces. The funny thing is that good friends of ours, Christine and Joe who recently invited us to their place to celebrate their son Quinn’s birthday, just had another baby Wade. Wade arrived at 7 pounds 4 ounces, so Samantha is probably the exact same weight as Wade although she is a month older.

She is still just eating and sleeping of course and we are managing the late night feedings well. We do look forward to the day when she sleeps through the night but that will be a while yet. She is also getting pretty strong and is holding her head up without any problem. We still need to be very careful because she will often just decide to go limp and we have to be ready to catch her head. She’s just trying to keep us on our toes.