Nine Months!

Our baby girl is nine months old. She is such a good baby and we are lucky. For the most part she is super easy-going and just happy to be enjoying her day. She is very alert and watches everything quite intently.

Some things to remember about Teagan at nine months:

- She is definitely developing a bit of a sassy side and will let you know when she doesn't like something or wants something faster than you are getting it for her.

- She is a great eater. Pretty sure she inherited Jake's hollow leg gene. She can put away food like it's her job! She is fully on finger foods and does not want us to feed her anymore. We have yet to find a food that she doesn't like, though at each meal there is definitely a hierarchy to which parts she eats first (usually the sweetest thing goes quickest). Some of her favorites now are sweet potatoes, mandarin oranges, squash, blueberries, and club crackers. She basically gets to eat whatever we are eating just cut into little pieces.

- She is fully on the move! We were blessed with a fairly long period from when she sat to when she crawled. Since she was never much of a roller, she was easy to contain for a couple months. Just sit her down and when you turned back around she was still right where you left her. That is not the case any more. She crawled backward for about a week or two before she figured out she could also go forward and be less frustrated. She has a unique little crawl and it is adorable. She puts her right foot flat on the ground as if to bear crawl, but leaves the left one bent and scoots it along kinda sideways under her. It's not the norm but it totally works for her. She is getting quick! It is fun now to be able to go down the hall or into a different room and tell her to "come on" and she will follow behind.

- She is also pulling up to standing on anything she can get her hands on. I am hoping this phase lasts a while, as I am not ready for her to start walking yet!

- Her official nine month stats: weight - 18 pounds 15 ounces (50%); height - 27 3/4 inches (54%); head - 17.6 inches (71%).

- She is babbling more and more every day and has certain noises she makes for certain things. Occasionally though she moves her mouth a lot but doesn't make any noise. The face she makes when she does this is awesome.

- She is a smart baby! I don't really have a great comparison but I think she is super smart. She knows mama and dada (can't really say it, but will look at the right person when we say it), she knows her stuffed animals names when we say them (favorites right now are Mrs. Octopus - a 6 legged pink/gray octopus and Squishy - a round pink thing), she knows "no" but only occasionally chooses to acknowledge that one.

- She loves music. It can be her musical toy, Disney Pandora or any other music we have on, she will dance to the songs she likes.

- She loves bouncing on the couch. Holding on to the back cushion and just bouncing, bouncing, bouncing is the greatest thing ever!

- She is into a not-so-fun phase of wanting to drop or throw everything overboard. Whether it is off the couch, out of her highchair or just when you are holding her. She thinks it is hilarious, I find it less amusing.


I can't wait to see what she does next.

A few favorites since the last time I posted.

Snuggling with Daddy (6 months)

Sunny Day (6 months)

Happy Baby (7 months)

Cousin Love with Baby Dylan (7 months)

New Dress! (8 months)

Squishy! (8 months)

On the Farm (8 months)

Hiking in the Woods (9 months)

Peek! (9 months)

Nine months in...

Nine months out!

Time Flies

Everyone always says that time goes quickly when you have a baby. It turns out they are right. I can't believe that Teagan is 5 months old! She has been in our world for half as long as she was in my belly.

Here are a few highlights from T's first five months.

- She is a great sleeper and we know how lucky we are with that. I went back to work when she was ten weeks old and about the same time she started sleeping basically through the night. We had a couple weeks of getting up at 3 to feed but that passed quickly and she has been pretty consistently sleeping through the night.

- She is a good eater too. We started off a bit rough because she had a bad latch and breastfeeding was not a good experience. We made it to about 8 weeks before we switched to exclusively pumping and feeding from a bottle. It made sense anyway as I was going back to work. She took a bottle like a champ! Which was awesome, because I have heard horror stories of having to try every bottle on the market to find one baby likes. 

- She loves her toes. She discovered that she can get her toes up to her mouth and has loved it. Her standard go-to though is her middle finger and ring finger on her right hand. I didn't know it was genetic, but that is the same combo of fingers that I sucked on as a baby.  No denying that she is mine!

- She started to sit up with a little support around mid-February and by early March she was sitting up with no support needed. Her favorite is standing though. She loves to stand and look around like a little meerkat! She also likes to "walk". If you hold her hands she will take little wobbly steps all the way across the room.

- She hated tummy time at first, but in the last couple of weeks she is getting better with it. Now we can start her off on her knees and straight arms and she will actually stay like that for a minute.  In the end though, we are pretty sure she is going to skip crawling and just get up one day and start walking because she won't stay on her tummy for more than a minute without expressing how much she dislikes it.

- She learned how to roll from her back to her front a while back but then couldn't get back over again. She is smart though and figured out that she didn't like how it ended so she just stopped rolling over!

- She is discovering her voice and is "talking" a lot lately. We love hearing it and having conversations with her. So cute!

- She loves her glow worm! It lights up and plays music and she loves to stroke its face while she is falling to sleep.

- She is doing great at day care. All of the big kids like to help with her and try to play with her. I think it has been really good for her to be around other kids and is helping with her development seeing the big kids doing things and wanting to join in.

- Her favorite toy right now is a little green rubber duck. She loves to chew on the tail end and it fits perfectly in her mouth.

- She had her first fever and was sent home from day care at the end of January. Thankfully the fever broke later that same day and it was just a few more days of runny nose and congestion.

- She also survived her first snowpocalypse! Portland is ill-equip to deal with snow, so when we got almost 8 inches over a few days in early February, the whole metro area shut down. Schools, work and daycare were closed. It was nice to have a 4 day weekend, and we even got T out in it to enjoy her first snow storm.

- T met more family recently when we took a short trip down to Lincoln City to meet up with my aunt Nana and Uncle Larry for lunch. T did great during her first time in a restaurant too!

We love her so very much and enjoy watching her learn new things every day. 

Teagan Grace

Teagan, Baby T, Sweet T, Teag...she goes by many names, each just as fitting as the others. Instead of writing a short novel here about how much she has changed and grown over these first three months, we will instead give you what you really want: pictures of our little girl and her beaming smile.

Baby T's Arrival

I left off at week 38 and the time since then has gone by so quickly. Here is the final weekly picture that we got for week 39 since I didn't make it to week 40.

If you are just looking for baby pictures, you will want to scroll to the bottom and skip this whole birth story part.

Oct. 1 - I had my final prenatal check-up in the morning and I was dilated to a 3 and 80%. This was a pretty good jump from just being a 1 the week before. But even with that progress, there was no guarantee that things were on the move. In fact, at that appointment we even made contingency appointments for induction at 41 weeks if I had not already delivered. Leaving that appointment I was a bit pessimistic and thinking that my due date (Oct. 2) was going to come and go with no baby. Much to my surprise though, it was not a few hours after we got home from the doctor that contractions started about 11:30. Not terrible at first and fairly spread out, so again nothing too alarming since that stage could continue for a long while. I decided to take a shower just in case and Jake got the bags ready to pick up and go. By 2:30 that afternoon we started timing as it seemed the contractions were lasting longer and coming more frequently. At about 5:30 we called the hospital as we were meeting the 5-1-1 rule. Unfortunately, the hospital we were planning on using had no open labor rooms, so we were told to go to a different hospital. It turned out that we should have listened to the advice and toured more than one hospital! There was no time to worry about going to a hospital we had never been to because it was either that or have the baby at home and that was not an option! We arrived at Sunnyside Medical Center in Clackamas at about 7. By this time I was now dilated to 4.5 and 90%. Yay! We were being admitted! They moved me into a labor and delivery room and got my IV all set up. I labored in the room until about 10 PM, then I went down the hall to the tub room. This was awesome! I loved being in the water. By this point I was also cut off of food, but I could have a popsicle and it was delicious. After about an hour and a half in the tub it was time to head back to the room as I had made it to a 6. I went into the whole labor process with the intention of doing it natural. I was not totally against an epidural, but wanted to hold out as long as I could. When I came out of the tub I had reached the end of my natural labor journey. The contractions were getting way more intense and I was not convinced that I would be able to keep up my energy long enough. So they called in the anesthesiologist and I received the epidural at 12:15 AM on October 2nd. When the medication started kicking in it was like a switch was flipped. Suddenly I went from a sort of brown out state where nurses were asking me questions and I had no recollection of answering; to cracking jokes and being a bit sassy. The wonder of modern medicine! The epidural also meant that I could actually get some rest. They came back in to check me at 3:25 AM and I had made it to a 10!! Sadly though baby was still not ready to come out and was sitting up high, so I didn't start pushing until about 5:30. I was not one of the lucky ones to get the baby out in a few pushes. Three and a half hours later and still no baby! The doctor came in and said that if baby wasn't out soon then we were going to have to move on to the vacuum and possibly C-section. The only thought that crossed my mind was "Oh hell no! I did not go through all of this labor to end up in surgery!". I told the nurse that I wanted to change back to a position that had been working earlier before we called it quits. A few pushes later baby Teagan Grace finally made her grand entrance at 9:20! They put her right up onto my chest and it was a feeling I can't describe. Instantly I was filled with love for her. I just kept saying over and over "She is finally here". At 8.5 pounds and 20.5 inches long she was certainly not a petite baby! I got to hold her for a little while until it was time for a few shots and her first bath. Those first moments with her were so sweet.

We stayed in the hospital until the 4th and then it was time to go home and officially start our new life together as a family of three.