Andrew's 7 Months Old

 

You are now 7 months old, and you are growing so fast. This month alone you have accomplished three major milestones. On March 6th, you began to cut your first tooth...and then two days later we noticed that you were cutting your second tooth right next to the first one. YIKES...you were not a fan of that at all...but you now have a super duper cute smile with two tiny teeth sitting on the bottom of your mouth.

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Andrew's 6 Months Old

You are now 6 months old. I can't believe how much you have grown is such a short time...though when I look back, I can't imagine that you have only been in our lives for 6 months because I can't imagine our lives without you. Things are finally starting to settle and fall into place with you. Your night time sleeping is improving...slowly but surely.

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Andrew's Half Birthday Celebration

Happy half birthday Andrew!!!

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Andrew's 5 Months Old

Look at this little man!!! What a cutie pie! As you can see, you have such a gorgeous smile which we now have the privilege of enjoying throughout the day. This 5th month has been a bit rough for us all...though more for you, Andrew. You went under the weather for the first time shortly after turning 5 months. It hit you when we started to sleep train.
There are a few things that I wanted to work on with your sleep habits: your lack in the ability to self soothe and being able to sleep longer than three hours at a time throughout the night. I have been reading the book, "Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child" and started to implement some of the strategies. After a couple of days, I was seeing absolutely no progress and decided to make an appointment with your doctor to go over the strategies I was using. Our pediatrician is absolutely amazing and totally supported the strategies and agreed that it was time for you to learn how to sleep on your own...without mom and dad trying to soothe him for, at the very least, 30 minutes before you would fall asleep in our arms...but this is a whole other discussion/post, so we can come back to this later.

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Emily's Artwork For Dad

 One of the things on Craig's Christmas list this year is an art project from Emily. I wanted it to be something pretty cool that he could easily display on his desk at work. I saw a few examples of this style of art on pinterest and so I thought Emily would have a lot of fun with this.

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DIY Reward Chart

 

In addition to finding a need for a chore chart for Emily, I also that she was ready for a reward chart. I wasn't quite sure how I wanted to go about doing this...so off to Pinterest I went. I found an amazing post from, "Life Sprinkled With Glitter" on a great reward system that I followed with just a couple of adjustments to match our chore chart. The post goes into great detail on how this works, but I'll just give you a brief summary. Basically, Emily starts each day with all of her "coins" (on our chart they are princesses) no matter how many "coins" were lost the day before, you start fresh each and every day. When Emily displays poor choices/behavior she has to give me a princess. I let her choose which princess she wants to give me (at the age of three she already has her favorites that are always the last to go...one word...Cinderella). When she makes good choices she can earn a "coin" back. The goal is to have ALL of her princesses by the end of the day. If she has all of them, then she earns a sticker. If she doesn't have all seven princesses then she doesn't get a sticker. Once she earns 10 stickers then we can go to the store and she can pick out a $10 toy. NOW, if she is really having an off day and happens to lose all of her coins before the end of the day then she can not earn her coins back. She will have to wait until the next day to get her princesses back. 

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DIY Chore Chart

Now that I am staying home full time, the need for these charts quickly presented itself. I'll begin with the chore chart. Honestly, this chart is more for me than it is for Emily. There are so many things that Emily can now do on her own but I kept doing them for her out of habit. I'm simply going through the house grabbing things as I go and constantly picking up...which is doing Emily a disservice. For example, Emily is absolutely capable of taking her dirty dishes to the sink all by herself. She is able to pick up all of her toys when she is done playing with them. She can get dressed and (for the most part) she can brush her teeth all by herself. These are all things that I was doing for her because I just get in that mindset of "do...do...do", I want to clean up, put things away, get her dressed and ready, etc.

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