
My baby girl is officially 6 months old! I took her to the pediatrician today for her 6 month check-up. She weighed in at 17 pounds, 2 ounces (75th percentile) and measured 26 3/4 inches (90th percentile). Looks like she’s taking after her daddy in height! For comparison’s sake, here’s a picture of her brother at 6 months:

Crazy resemblance, huh? Her ears just stick out like a little elf, and his head is a LOT bigger. Molly is also taking after her big brother by also having eczema. Bummer. As of today, I’ve switched over to soap-free cleanser and fragrance-free baby lotion. No more smelling like a baby. So sad. I hate eczema.
Here are some other things Molly’s been into lately:
*Rolling over. She loves doing it and thinks she’s awesome when she does it.
*Playing peek-a-boo. This makes Molly do her big belly laugh…which I can’t get enough of.
*Her big brother. She thinks he is so cool. She loves to watch him and he loves to try to play with her.
*Being REALLY loud. Molly loves to hear herself talk. She has developed this very loud gurgly squeal. It’s great.
*Eating! She loves to eat avocado, sweet potatoes, bananas, pears, butternut squash, and peas. The only food she doesn’t like so far is apples. Good track record so far!
Molly continues to be such a happy girl. She loves people and gets so excited when people talk to her. It’s not hard to make this girl smile!

Owen is 29 months old…and he’s been a big brother now for half a year. He’s a great big brother. I never would have imagined that he’d adapt so well. The kid continues to surprise me!

Here are some things that Owen’s been into lately:
*He still LOVES Star Wars. He can now sing the Star Wars theme song very well, and he loves to do it in public places. It’s great.
*He loves to go to school. He talks about his teachers all the time. He loves to tell me all the things he does at school, and he’s very proud of his art work. I always hang his weekly project on the fridge, and whenever he walks by he says, “I do dat!”.
*We’re taking baby steps toward potty training. So far he’s peed in the potty twice! For Owen, potty training has to be totally on his terms. If I act at all like I want him to use the potty, he freaks out and refuses to go near it. That’s just the kind of kid he is. For the next 2 months we’ll keep casually working on it. The plan is to hit it hard during Christmas break when Travis is home for a while to help out. Should be interesting. I’m going to seminars and reading up on the subject in the meantime. This kid likes to make things hard on me.
*He loves mealtime! He loves it so much that he likes to spend an hour eating every meal! For a while this was okay. I liked the fact that he was confined to a chair for that long. Now it’s getting old. We are late almost everywhere we go. A bit frustrating for me. I’ve concocted a plan to break him of this excruciatingly long mealtime routine we’ve got going on. It’s simple really. I set a timer for 20 minutes. When the dinger dings, the meal is over. Even if his food is still there, it’s time to be done. So far it seems to be working. We’re on day 2 of the timed meals, and tonight he actually finished eating BEFORE Travis and me! This was huge. This has never happened. We’re making progress.
Don’t you love the tough guy look? He’s so not into taking pictures these days. Notice how Shamu the whale has appeared in both pictures. There’s a little story behind that. Poor kid was up for about 3 hours last night screaming because he was having nightmares. Finally we got it out of him that he dreamed about a pirate in a pumpkin patch by a gate (maybe something that he saw when we visited the pumpkin patch last weekend??). We tried to put him back to bed 3 times and each time he’d be in there for a few minutes and then would start screaming again. We did everything we could think of to calm him down…singing, praying, laying down with him, watching part of Cars to distract him, giving him happy dream ideas to replace the scary ones, and then finally the one that worked…Shamu. The fourth time we tried to put Owen back to bed, we’d just finished praying with him that God would protect him from the scary dreams. He was still a bit weepy. As a last ditch effort, I asked him if he’d like to sleep with Shamu. I told him that Shamu was a big tough guy and could scare the bad guys away. For some reason this did the trick. Shamu slept on Owen’s pillow all night last night. Today he woke up talking about how Shamu’s a “big tough guy”. Shamu is on his pillow again tonight. Whatever works, right?
That’s all for this month!!