10 Months

My sweet baby turned 10 months old last weekend!  Ahh, I will have a one year old before I know it!  Time to start thinking of some fun party ideas :)

But in the meantime we will recap the previous month.  Its been a big one.  Phoebe has started "crawling" well army crawling anyhow.  She hasn't quite mastered getting her knees up underneath her.  She will pull them up under her in her crib and rock back and forth, but has never moved anywhere in the crib. She won't pull them underneath of her on the floor.  This crawling means we have started saying "no" to her for the first time.  Her favorite things to crawl to- electrical wires, Knox's toys, food, and water bowl.

She claps and waves now too.

Look at those chompers!

She has five teeth now and no longer sleeps through the night.  Although her teeth hurting or waking up in a strange place while at the beach *may* have initiated the night-time waking, I'm beginning to think a habit is forming...  She did not sleep very well at the beach and we were hoping once we got back home her sleeping would improve.  It did not.  She now wakes up around 1am and around 5am almost every night.  We have been going in and rocking her back to sleep and laying her back down, but I'm beginning to wonder if we need to start letting her cry it out for a bit.  It would be hard, but I can't keep getting up every night.  She's not hungry- she won't eat.  She just cries, gets rocked, and falls back asleep.  I've tried patting her bottom in the bed and she calms down and stops crying, but then as soon as you walk away she starts again...obviously she doesn't get back into a deep enough sleep before my arm gets tired and starts to cramp.

Her eating is still so-so.  Sometime she will eat, sometimes she will refuse.  Sometimes she will take a bottle, sometimes she will refuse.  We haven't been able to get her to drink her bedtime bottle for over a week, so we have started putting her down without and then "waking" her up before we go to bed to give her the bottle.  She wakes up a little bit, but really just enough to eat and then she easily goes back to sleep.  Chris will typically rock and her read for 30 minutes because we are now trying to keep her elevated after eating.

Also new in the past two weeks since we got home from the beach is night-time vomiting.  This is more than spitting up- this is close to entire contents of dinner or previous bottle requiring a change of clothes and bath for mom, baby, as well as some carpet cleaning.  It doesn't happen every night, probably about 3-4 times/week. So now the doctors and myself as well are wondering if maybe there is some reflux going on??  She has never before this point acting uncomfortable after eating or had any problems spitting-up or vomiting.  I can count on two hands the number of times she spit-up between birth and 7 months of age.  Now they are wondering if her aversion to food might be the result of a little bit of reflux??  Obviously not enough to bring anything back up but enough to cause some discomfort (that she never showed any visible signs of).  No one ever though she had any reflux problems in the past with her poor weight gain and poor eating habits.  So who knows, but we started her on Zantac a couple days ago to see if that helps or changes anything.  If it doesn't then we can at least rule it out definitively.

Let me tell you she does not like taking the Zantac.  I'm going to take it back to Kroger today to get some flavor put in it to see if that helps.  It can't make it any worse...  Poor baby has enough issues rejecting things put into or around her mouth, so it would be nice for this to be a bit less of a fight.

Destin

After a week at Summer Conference we drove over to Destin and met Chris' family for a week of "real" vacation.

We spent most of the time at the pool this week too.

Chris and I did head down to the beach for one day and it was fabulous!  Probably my second favorite day after deep sea fishing.  I love just sitting out at the beach - tanning and reading and relaxing listening to the waves.  The beach with a baby was definitely a different experience though.  There wasn't much reading (despite all the books that I naively brought...) or tanning or relaxing listening to the waves.

It was a fun week with good food and good company!  Thanks!

RUF SuCo 2012

Well besides airbrush t-shirts, we had a great time at Summer Conference.  It's a fun week because a lot of the campus ministers' families will come, so I enjoyed hanging out with other wives and children while our husbands were busy working.  Chris was the director this week so he was pretty busy, especially at the beginning of the week.  Phoebe and I hung out at the pool because getting a baby and all the accessories out to the beach by myself was a little bit more than I was willing to take-on.

We did take Phoebe to the beach on Sunday afternoon before the students arrived on Monday to see how she liked it, and the sand didn't bother her at all.  She wasn't extremely fascinated by it, but she didn't "not-like" it either.  She played in it a little bit, but mostly I think she could have been sitting on our living room floor and not really noticed the difference.

I love beach volleyball, so Phoebe and I did go out to the beach a couple afternoons so I could play in the volleyball tournament with the students.  Aubra and students that weren't playing would entertain Phoebe.

KSU students at our dinner out at The Back Porch

For those of you that have not had the joy of attending RUF Summer Conference at Laguna Beach Christian Retreat Center- it is gross.  I mean really.  I did not go at all in college and my first year going with Chris he failed to inform me that I needed to bring Lysol wipes and my own sheets.  I was not very happy... All that to say, Phoebe played on this sheet on the floor all week, and we were thankful she was not crawling yet.

Ready to go to the pool!

 Phoebe LOVED the pool!  She loved splashing around in her little float.  She really did have a ball.

This year we stayed in a "house" on the edge of camp.  The family that stayed above us had a little girl that was born the exact same day as Phoebe.  Here are Sadie Jane and Phoebe playing together in the pool.  (Sadie Jane has 2 older brothers...)

Sea to Table

Forget Farm to Table...

I will post more about our two weeks at the beach later, but the highlight of the whole trip was probably deep sea fishing on Friday before we left.  Chris' dad has a knack for making money off sports tickets, so he treated himself, JP, Chris and I to a deep sea fishing trip!  (Catrina and Margaret had no desire to go, so they stayed back with the kids.) Every year we enter to win Master's tickets and Master's practice round tickets for Rick from the Master's lottery.  Last year Chris and I won 4 tickets, so Rick bought them and turned around and sold them for a nice little profit.

I had never been deep sea fishing or actually any type of fishing before, and it was a blast!  Actually it was a lot harder to reel those fish in than I thought it would be!  It was hard work!  We got up early pushed off the marina before 6am.  On the way out we caught some bait and then motored out for about an hour to let down our hooks to try to catch some fish!  We weren't going out to catch a blue marlin or anything like that; I was just hoping to catch some Grouper and Red Snapper.  Most of the resturants were serving them as fresh catch, so I figured our chances were good.  But they were closed to private boats- it was only Snapper and Group season for the commercial boats.  Amberjack and King Mackral were what we could catch.

I sipped on my coffee during our ride out...

Sunrise from the boat

Apparently you wear "fishing" belts to help you reel in the fish.  I thought they looked akward, but after wrestling with one fish, I was thankful for them...

I had caught one Amberjack at this point, but it wasn't big enough so we had to throw it back.  The Amberjack was a challenge, but this next fish was something else.  It wore me out.  I kept thinking, this one has got to be big enough...

Look at that determination...

And it was!  I caught a Black-fin Tuna!  It was a strong!  (And we were able to keep the Tuna too)

I caught the fish, but I still don't really want it that close to me..

Gross!  It bled on me!  You can take it away now...

Here's the Amberjack I caught at the end of the trip that we got to keep.  Thankfully, he held it a little farther away from me this time.

We apparently were not getting as many bites as the captain expected.  Well then we saw it...  A SHARK!  There was a shark looming around our boat that was scaring away the fish.  And actually just waiting for an easy breakfast.  Rick was reeling in one fish when the shark ate the whole fish and snapped the line!  A little while later I almost had a Red Snapper in (which we would have had to throw back anyway) when jaws came along and took a big bite!  I ended up reeling in a snapper head...

This shark was certainly raining on our parade.  But wait, who got the last laugh

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That's right...WE CAUGHT A SHARK!  I mean really, how awesome is that?!?  It took Rick, JP, and Chris 45 minutes to wrestle him in...

The whole trip was great and we got a pretty good haul, but that shark was icing on the cake!

We got to keep all the fish we caught.  The first mate butchered them there for us and we took home the meat in plastic bags on ice in a cooler.  Chris and I took about half and Rick and JP got the rest.  We probably have 15lbs or so of fish in our freezer right now.  Sunday night after we got home Chris marinated and grilled some of the Amberjack and it was delicious!!  Kinda fun to catch your own dinner.

Now if Chris would only take up hunting we could get some red meat in our freezer too...