Bonnie England

At Trafalgar Square (Lord Nelson monument behind us)

There was an egg hunt all around London for Easter

 Though I said I'd post an update about England right after my last post, obviously its been a few days :) I accidentally planned a bridal shower for a couple of days after we got back in New Jersey and the rest of the time we've just been sort of in recovery from the week. Par example: Levi is on his third hour of a nap that began at 5 p.m. tonight. I'll have to wake him up soon...to put him to bed at his normal bedtime.

Anyway. First off, everyone's wondering: how was he on the flights? Answer: surprisingly good! On the way there, we took a red-eye flight, so he mostly slept. Granted, it was six hours instead of his normal ten, but he was surprisingly resilient about staying asleep even though the plane lights were on for most of the flight and every time there was turbulence I had to take him out of his little baby seat and hold him buckled in my lap.

On the way back, he wasn't nearly as good but a) Levi not nearly as good is still pretty calm and b) there were three other babies on the flight, so it was just par for the course. On the way home, he got confused about sleeping because many of our passengers left their window shades open, and even though we flew for 8 hours and landed after midnight on British (Greenwich Mean Time) time, it was daylight the whole flight. Levi slept a bit when we first got on, amidst some tears, and a smidge bit toward the end of the flight. The rest of the time he played with toys, peekaboo and threw things on the floor for us to pick up over and over again. So overall, he was great, but also overall, completely exhausted after each flight.

Playing at Grammy and Grandad's

Now, as to what we did in England: ate lots of food. Went for walks. ate some more food. oh, and drank lots of tea. Its amazing how natural it seems to start drinking tea a half-dozen times a day when I only have it when I'm sick at home.

We stayed with Tim's uncle Colin and auntie Ann. Tim's parents were also there during the first part of our stay. We spent time visiting Tim's grandparents who lived down the road and playing Granny's favorite game: scrabble. We also saw his various cousins and had a big Easter dinner on Sunday. We introduced his family to Dutch Blitz, and spent most of the afternoon playing it -- after the Easter egg hunt outside of course.

With Uncle Colin

While there, we spend time visiting the local (flea) market, walking some of the nearby hills and even getting some home-made ice cream from a local farm. It did almost rain on us directly after the ice cream - being early April in England and all, but it was delicious! We also explored the local town of Wimbourne, walking through the church there (Wimbourne Minster) and seeing all the tiny shops and boutiques in the main section of the village.

On Easter Sunday, Levi was slated to find the yellow eggs in the garden (yard) of Tim's aunt's house. Levi's...cousins (Tim's cousins kids), a three year old and five year old girl, were slated to find all the purple, pink, blue and green eggs. Levi got the concept of putting the yellow eggs in his basket really well, though when we tried to video tape it he put his sock in the basket instead...

At Covent Garden, an outdoor market

After a few days with Tim's family, we continued our trip onto the London portion - we got two free hotel nights in Kensington with our flight tickets, and spent some time walking around the city. I forgot how compact London really is - we saw a good bit of the major sites on the west side of the city in only a few hours over a couple of days. Levi mostly slept in the ergo Krista graciously let us borrow, but woke up for a few pictures here and there!

We also took time to visit Warner Bros' studio tour recently opened north of London, full of actual sets, props, costumes and authentic butter beer from the Harry Potter movies. It was SUPER exciting.

The quintessential telephone booth

Tim in front of Westminster Abbey

Levi and I in front of Buckingham Palace

Tim from farther in front of the palace, with the monument and a thousand yellow tulips

With the London Eye in the background, on the Thames (one of Levi's top ten places to nap)

At St. Paul's Cathedral, where we got engaged

The great hall set of Harry Potter

In front of the staircase to Dumbledore's office

Driving Mr. Weasley's car

In front of the larger than life chess pieces from the first movie

No 4 Privet Drive

Diagon Alley set

The enormous model of the castle that was used to make all of the soaring shots

After walking through some of Harrod's

In Hyde Park

Kensington Palace is in the background

Getting ready for our last tube ride

And now we are back on home country territory, still getting back into the swing of things. 

Standing manvation

This will be the first of two blog updates: one mainly about Levi and the other mostly about our recent trip to England!

Where Levi is concerned, he's working on being a standing man. He's been pulling himself up to a standing position for a couple of weeks now - apparently I was one of the last to witness it. He's never been one to want to practice walking, or seem to understand what we're trying to do by holding his hands and trying to make him move his little feet. But the past few days while he's been standing, we've been practicing letting go to see if he can stand on his own. and today, twice, success! For about a second but he's learning to balance!

He doesn't edge along anything by taking little steps while standing and holding onto something, but he'll get there soon I'm sure!

Tim has also declared that "dada" is Levi's official first word. Levi regularly has conversations, usually when he's excited about something, almost entirely consisting of "dada," "mama", "baba" and the like. Dada is the sound he uses most consistently, sometimes when Tim is around, but often when he's not. so. There's no official proof Levi equates it to Tim. Though mama is his least-used regular sound, and he seems to have no idea that it could be related to me.

We call Levi Bubba a lot, and he's seemed to make a sound sort of like that recently. He also says a phrase like "ayaya" which seems to mean "feed me more NOW." He uses that one a lot :)

As demonstrated by our recent vacation - he generally put down as much food as I did at a general meal. The time change threw him off, of course, but it was most likely that he wanted yet more food every couple of hours than needed a nap when he was fussy. Even without dairy, eggs or nuts (Tim's allergies) and peanuts, he gets an intense amount of food in his little tummy.

Speaking of tummies, though Levi has my skin and hair, he might have been born with Tim's digestive system. Not food allergies, we haven't discovered any yet, but his processing of something when his tummy might hurt. My system works to get rid of any problems quickly and painlessly. Tim's? Not so much. Levi, the last couple of days we were in the UK, went a couple of days without pooping, which he hasn't done since he started eating solids. and rather than a big explosive diaper, which we were expecting, he had a couple of normal, if small, poopie diapers. to lull us into thinking maybe he just hadn't eaten as much for a couple of days. not the case - crazy - change on the bathroom floor because no other surface can handle the mess, diaper right before our second day of sight seeing in London. and I said "you know, that's kind of weird - you wouldn't have thought he would have had a couple of normal diapers before this one - you'd think it would be the other way around." Tim just shook his head and said "not if he's got a system like mine." Only Levi is always so happy unless he's hungry or tired - his tummy probably hurt and we didn't even know.

Today I've spent most of the day holding the poor boy while he switches between dozing and crying - time change = not so fun. We had an eight hour flight yesterday which landed at 7:30 p.m. EST, and we got home around 11. But at that point, it was 4 a.m. GMT, where we were coming from. Levi only slept for a total of two hours the whole flight (which landed after midnight in the timezone we were coming from) and then slept for a couple of hours on our train and car ride back to our house. and then was up at 6:30. yes. so today was a catch-up day. Me on laundry, him on sleep :)

Jazzercize and Jabberwocky

Levi. does leg aerobics.

I've known this for quite some time - we've called him "kicky boy" since he was practically a newborn. But his leg exercises have now taken on a much more regular rhythm.

Particularly when he's nursing , he'll do leg raises just like in an old '80s workout video. He also does yoga poses (downward dog-style), when we try to have him stand and walk, he does a little jig, and at any time when he's sitting with his legs hanging (high chair, holding him on my hip facing out, grocery store cart) his legs are constantly swinging :)

So hopefully when he realizes us holding his hands while he's standing is actually because we'd like him to try this thing called walking and not just to dance, his legs will be tones and sleek and ready for it. Maybe I should get him some legwarmers!

Levi also has become very, very talkative. Not that he's saying any particular words yet, though his sounds strung together sometimes sound like words. He will chatter to himself nonstop most of the time. If he wants something, he'll just talk louder until we figure out what it is (usually more food).

Tim tells him "No sprechen sie baby" but Levi just laughs and laughs like he's got his own conversation going and its funny that we can't understand him. Sometimes we make up phrases he might be saying - this morning he was chowing down on some puffs, sitting between us while we dozed in our bed. And he started yelling and gesturing. It sounded like he might have been saying "bring me my robe and slippies!"

Last weekend we headed to New England to see most of my family, as my brother was nearby for the weekend at Eastern Nazarene College. Levi was much better on this trip than he has been the past roadtrips we've done - he slept or played very well most of the time, which was great. and he was good about sleeping at night and still napping during the day and eating whenever and wherever we were at the time. yay!

In other news, we'll be headed to see Tim's extended family across the Atlantic in about a week, and prayers would be appreciated as we take an almost one-year-old with us!! You'll hear all about it once we're back, with I'm sure many photos.

There's a monster at the end of this blog

Levi's gaining more and more teeth. His smile is almost even now.

I don't know if it's the teeth or what, but Levi has also become an eating machine. He eats just about anything we put in front of him and never quite seems satisfied. Sometimes he falls asleep after he eats, which seems like the only time he stops :) Though he still eats some baby food, he eats most of what we eat now, with the exception of dairy products of course, just to be safe. He prefers to feed himself, though sometimes that translates stuffing a big handful of food into his mouth and dropping most of it!

Speaking of food, we had our first tummy bug as family on Friday. Well, I didn't get it, but I think the last time I was sick like that I was in middle school (other than during pregnancy, which doesn't count). Anyway, Levi was up at about 1:30 a.m. on Friday and it took me almost a half an hour to get him to go back to sleep - which is very rare. a couple of hours later, I figured out why, when the first of several throw-up incidents occurred. Of course, Tim was also out of commission, though not quite as sick at the same time as Levi was. So about every half an hour I got up to change out the sheets/mattress pad under Levi. Around 6:30 I fed him and he was so wiped out he fell fast asleep - which is good, because i was down to my last mattress pad, which was actually for our pac n play and only covered half of his crib mattress! I threw laundry in and tried to catch up on a couple of hours sleep before trying to juggle working from home and the boy. He had a couple of not so great diapers later in the morning (Tim would like me to insert the phrase "ankles to armpits" here, and I would like to point out that a few months ago he balked at me even TALKING about poop on the blog), but after that he's been fine. Fussy, but fine. I had to spend about three hours on Friday outside n a blanket with Levi, even though it was barely 50 degrees, because it was the only way to keep him from fussing while I tried to work. So there we are, him trussed up in warm jammies, a fisherman's sweater, the warmest, baggiest sweatpants I could find for him and a hat, vacillating between climbing on me and staring vacantly at the wind blowing (blowing hard, I might add) the trees around us. I'm laying on my stomach to block him from the laptop, squinting to see the screen.

Playing at the library

Anyway, I did most of my work and kept us both fed, clean and semi-happy. oh, and washed aaaalllll of the nasty laundry, plus aired out the not-so-great smelling upstairs. mission accomplished.

Onto a less grisly topic. Levi had his first ride at the swings on Sunday. Sadly neither myself or my friend remembered our phones or a camera, so we'll have to video tape it next time. He loooooved it. He kept giggling every time he came close to me when I pushed him. It didn't hurt that it was 60 degrees outside and beautifully sunny, yay spring! (p.s. boo daylight savings, I wish you weren't a part of spring to ruin a perfectly good Sunday).

And the last story of this post is about my success as a mother in quickly dressing Levi every morning. except the one time...

A busy boy on a Sunday morning, Biz Journal and emails to read

Every day I have approximately 3 minutes (Tim says, "not have but rather leave myself 3 minutes," which is true, but really who's counting) to get Levi ready. I can whip the diaper off and get a new one on almost before he's woken up, and zip him into his clothes lickety-split. But one morningish on a weekend a few days ago, I was slowly getting Levi ready, and he wanted to stand up on his diaper change table. So I figured, what the hey, might as well get his pants on while he was standing, might be quicker anyway. I got one leg in, then the other leg in, then pulled up until he was in them all the way. He was clinging to me, so I couldn't really see the pants, but his legs were in so it was all good. We cuddled while he stood there for a minute, and then he started fussing and crying a little, out of character for a boy who'd just been fed and woken up. I look down and realize that I put both of his legs in the same pant leg! So I exclaimed "why didn't you SAY something?!" which is all Tim heard walking up the stairs, me conversing with a 10-month-old with his pants on wrong.

Other than that though, he's always had his clothes on facing the right way and buttoned up and whatnot. on a weekday. Tim just reminded me that on Saturday I put his pants on backwards. Maybe my brain just shuts down on the weekends.

(insert SOOO MUUUCHH FUUNN dinosaur noise)

Lopsided smile

This is how I finish typing things and keep little hands away.

Levi has been teething for what seems like forever. I always though the actual process of teeth coming in was maybe four days for each tooth. I knew it would be a pain - not enough sleep for baby or parents, baby upset a lot of the time, etc. But I think his top teeth have been coming in for close to six weeks now. Some days/nights are worse than others, and we've definitely gone through a whole bottle of pediatric tylenol since he was born, and a whole tube or orajel (numbing gel) as well. We've gotten pretty structured on how we function at night when he wakes up screaming - at first, we'd try rocking him, cuddling him, maybe give him some Orajel, then go back to our room. ten minutes later he'd be awake again. Other methods include nursing him (which has never once actually made him go back to sleep, so glad I was so adamant early on that nursing would never be done for a reason other than hunger), giving him some Tylenol or ibuprofen for infants, or a frozen rubber pacifier (genius idea, let me tell you) most of the time, using only one method alone doesn't work. Now if he wakes up screaming, we pull out all the stops - Tylenol, Orajel, frozen paci and cuddling, and this works just about every time to get him back to sleep for the rest of the night. It's only about once a week that the pain is bad enough to wake him up anyway, so don't worry, we're not medicating our child on a daily basis.

Anyway, all that to say, he's now got two top teeth broken through, both on his left side. He's got the two top right teeth right at the gumline, but they haven't broken through yet, which makes him look lopsided. Kind of like a little monster :) A monster in ducky jammies. 

The crawling continues, and though he does get around to his various toys usually on the living room rug, he still doesn't quite get that he could, in fact, get to other places/things as well if we wanted to. Yes, I can hear every parent reading this thinking "enjoy it while you can, soon he'll be pulling everything out of cabinets and climbing up the steps." It's just funny, I didn't realize how much thought has to go into the crawling process - I figured most babies, once they started crawling, just went everywhere. The only time Levi seems to sort of move off his rug turf is if I've left the room for a minute, he'll start to whine and sometimes get a couple of crawling steps off the rug before lying down in defeat in tears because mommy left for four minutes to make her coffee (OK, perhaps that happened this morning). I'm sure he'll get there, I've already got the tupperware lids in the lowest drawer and bottles in the one cabinet that will be open-able.

Though Levi doesn't move too far, he does seem to have a knack for climbing things already. And by "things" I mean me. Climbing on me. This morning after he nursed in bed, he dozed for a bit.Then I woke up as he was trying to climb over me to get to Tim, and he ended his crusade by licking my face and head-butting me. The same is true if I'm sitting on the carpet - he'll mosey on over to me and start climbing up by leg to my ribcage in an effort to reach...what? my hair? my nose? my eyebrow?I don't know what is so appealing about climbing up a person.

Levi's had some fun experiences the past couple of weeks via his stroller. We went to a chili cookoff last weekend (only two of the 20 chilis got a solid two thumbs up from us, good you didn't waste your time Eric). No, we didn't let him eat any chili. We did let him play with one of our spoons after we used it though. Hm, I may have also cut up some pieces of pasta this week for him that had a dressing made with habanero mustard on them. ah well, he's been ingesting some high-intensity spices since conception anyway.

Today we also went to one of Lancaster County's famous mud sales. I thought it was sort of like a big yard sale - they're often run by the Amish community, and I figured we might find some good deals or some cool stuff. Turns out it was a giant auction, with about a half-dozen auctioneers selling things from horses to buggies to hand-made furniture to lawn equipment to plants. It was also barely 40 degrees outside with crazy gusts of winds that made Tim's hair look pretty funny :) Sooo....we didn't buy anything because it was way too cold to stand around waiting for an auctioneer to hold up some item we actually wanted (no lists or organization appeared to be in place, other than an announcer sometimes popping up to say the horse auction would start in ten minutes). Also, I couldn't understand a word the auctioneers were saying, so who knows how much we might have ended up paying for anything :)

So Levi's adventures have been confined to the stroller, but exciting places and people to see.

On the move...we think

Levi is on the move...sort of.

(I know it's sideways... I'll fix it later)

He regularly gets all four limbs under him in crawl-ready position. He usually backs up a couple of steps, maybe moves forward one, and then flops on his tummy. He doesn't seem to understand that this crawling thing can actually get him somewhere. But who wants to crawl when they can be carried around by mommy, right?

Along with the crawling, Levi can get from sitting up to laying down and vice versa. He sometimes also grabs onto things to try to stand - he's only ever gotten to his knees, but it's the thought that counts.

All this predicated moving his crib mattress down, we've not done so since he moved into his crib around 10 weeks old. He's never sat up or tried to get out...until now. This week he was supposed to be napping around dinner time, and we heard a banging coming from his room. He was sitting up, wrapped in blankets, kicking the crib  slats and laughing about it :)

I think I mentioned last post that Levi's been a bit of a teething monster - he has three teeth now, and at least three others right at the surface of his gums. We've almost used up one little tube of Orajel, which numbs his gums. We've also been rotating pacifiers in and out of the freezer, because the rubber freezes nicely for chewing and relief on his little swollen mouth.

He's also been waking up at about 5:45 every day. This could partly be from our neighbor's car that is obnoxiously loud, which he turns on and lets idle every morning around that time. Either way, 5:45 is not time for breakfast or time to be awake yet. Some mornings he'll wail for a few minutes and then go back to sleep. Other mornings we have to convince him to go back to sleep with a frozen paci to soothe him. And still other mornings we've found that if his gums seem to hurt a dose of Tylenol will put him back down until it's a reasonable hour.



Levi has been acclimating to some table foods. He's tried some carrots, sweet potatoes, avocados, pasta... I think that's it so far. He also tried his first hard food today -- cheerios. He made a funny face because unlike all the other foods he's tried, it's not very mushy and doesn't dissolve like the puffs cereal we give him.

For those wondering, his hair is looking less reddish than when he was smaller, now it's straight tow-headed blonde. His eyes are a bright blue and he looks more and more like Tim every day - though a few people here and there have told us he looks like me, which I don't see.

The boy is also making more noise than ever- no definitive meaningful words yet, but he's getting there. I call him a baby dinosaur, because that's what he sounds like with all of his squeaks and squeals.