Kaden's 4 Month Highlights

Well hello again.  Thanks for tuning in for an update about Kaden.  He turned 4 months on December 16, 2012.  Here are some highlights: He currently weighs 11 lbs 1/2 oz (7th percentile) and is 23 1/4 inches long.  He has dropped from the 10th percentile so he actually needs to gain weight or the pediatrician is going to refer him to a GI soon. Kaden has discovered grabbing his toes and it is quite cute.  (Thanks to Kat Larsen for the darling knitted booties.) One of Kaden's new favorite toys- a tummy time car. (Thanks Mom for making tummy time bearable and fun for once!)

 Kaden still loves his bath a lot. Oh, and his fists. Yum!

 This is Kaden's other new favorite toy that we bought him for Christmas.  He stares mesmerizingly at it and plays there happily without us for long stretches of time. If you couldn't tell we busted out some of his presents early since we got excited...

 Kaden loves to play with his dad.  (Picture Curtis making the "whoosh" noise to get the full effect.)

 We started Kaden on solids this week because I'm already nursing and supplementing with formula and he's still not gaining weight and always seems hungry. He absolutely HATED rice cereal for those of you who didn't see my facebook post but I tried oatmeal the next day instead and he LOVED it! He ate a full (think baby-sized "full") bowl of it today and smiled the whole time. Yippee! We will need to invest in some plastic bibs because he is a MESS!

 Kaden loves his Bumbo chair and is getting better at sitting up in it instead of slumping over in it so much.

We love our little Kade-o.  He is sure a cute, happy and wiggly baby and makes our home a fun place to be with his shrieks, squeals and coos. 

The Little Christmas Elf

My mom sent Kaden this adorable Christmas elf outfit, complete with booties she made herself, so naturally we had to get some pictures! Here are some of my favorites.  You may notice a common theme in some of them- the fist in the mouth! I can't keep this kid's fists out of his mouth!  He is either sucking on that, his thumb or a pacifier 95% of the time he is awake and not eating. Must taste good, I don't know.

His foot came out of one of his booties and I thought it was kind of cute!

I jokingly told Kaden he made Santa's naughty list.  I kept reassuring him I was kidding but the damage had already been done...

Kaden's Blessing

We blessed Kaden on Sunday in our ward in New York.  It was a small, but special experience.  Curtis did a great job.  Some of the things that he blessed Kaden with was a deep love of the Savior, a sharp mind that he will learn and grow quickly.  He was blessed to associate with people who will uplift him and keep his calm, content spirit throughout his life.  Lastly he was blessed to remember the love his Father in Heaven has for him.  We had 3 of our friends from our ward stand in the circle with Curtis- Dave Hart, who lives 5 houses down and is a great friend, Andrew Bertasso- he's in the MBA program with Curtis and he and his family also live in our complex and Tyson Olson (Janelle's husband-one of my high school friends that is in our ward here).  We had asked 2 other friends to join as well but one was sick and the other was headed to his niece's baby blessing that same day.

Kaden looked SO cute in his blessing suit! I just love this boy!!

Typical Kaden-sucking on his thumb :)

It was simple but we really enjoyed seeing our sweet boy blessed and even though many of you couldn't be here to share this day with us, we hope that you'll enjoy the pictures anyway.

The Trend Continues

My new trend is to not be good at blogging regularly... I hope it won't keep up but it's been a crazy few weeks. For starters, I had a great birthday! I can't believe I'm 28. Yikes! I've been enjoying my new MacBook Air and especially the awesome photo editing capabilities it has.  You'll notice I've played around with a lot of Kaden's pictures and changed the colors and added other things as well.  I'm really enjoying our cool camera and learning to take better pictures and edit them now too.  Hopefully someday I'll be good enough to need an upgrade on both my camera and editing software, but for now I'm loving what I have and am enjoying this as a new hobby.  I have not mentioned yet that I got a tutoring job for second grade twins.  They are Asian and very smart but their mom wants them "above grade level" in all subjects, so I'm tutoring them in writing even though they are already good writers.  It's only two hours a week but it's nice to get to use my teaching skills still a little bit.  And let's be honest, the people here pay what I wanted to charge in Utah and got laughed at for so that's not too shabby either :)

 Kaden's 3 Month Update-

Kaden is such a delightful boy.  We love the cute personality he is developing.  These pictures highlight so well some of the things that he does on a regular basis now that he's 3 months old.

 Kaden is our smiley boy and he is smiling almost all the time now.  He is so cute to listen to because he is constantly cooing and making cute noises with his smiles.

Lately Kaden also LOVES to suck his thumb. I have mixed feelings about that... while it is a self-soothing technique, I happen to think the slurping noise is disgusting and the teacher in me worries he'll be the awkward kid in first grade still sucking his thumb... but for now, I let him because he's still only 10 lbs and it doesn't matter. Plus how can you deny this boy what makes him so happy?

 This is something Curtis and I find quite funny, captured perfectly in this photo.  Kaden has a really strong neck and is pretty good at holding himself upright, until he becomes tired and it's too much work.  Then he simply does this and puts his head down and leaves it down until we switch his position.  Obviously I tried to do too many "sitting up" pictures and he'd had enough clearly.  

 

Maybe I shouldn't include this last picture, but sadly this is a major part of Kaden's life still at 3 months. He has really bad reflux and the poor boy is sad a lot of the day from discomfort, despite the medications and other things we do to relieve his pain.  He is such a sweet baby that it is sad to watch him be in pain.  Hopefully for him this phase of life will be over soon.

Love this boy's big eyes!  He is getting more curious each day and has a few "lines of concern" over his left eye (looking at him it's his left at least).  This is a look he get when he is staring at something new. 

 Kaden also loves to sit up on our laps, especially at mealtimes.  We eat almost every meal of the day with him on our laps since he gets so sad if we're at the table and leave him on the floor on a blanket or in his bouncy chair.

 Switching gears completely, we had Thanksgiving with 40 people at the church in Rochester.  All of us that were without family bonded together and made a meal of it.  It was fun but it did feel a little bit more like a ward function than Thanksgiving since a lot of us didn't know each other and were asking "first date" questions over our turkey.  (You know, "where are you from? what brought you here?" etc...)

 Kaden wore his little turkey outfit that my mom sent him.  It was cute on him, though the pants kept riding up as you can probably tell as well :)  This boy is so long and skinny, that usually his pants fall off his waist but are too short on him. If this trend continues he may be the boy wearing "man capris" that are actually supposed to be pants someday... ha ha!

Someone must have come to Thanksgiving with a stomach bug because I caught it and so did a bunch of other girls.  We all spent the rest of the weekend puking our guts out and other details I will leave out.  I actually got so dehydrated on Saturday that I had Curtis take me to the ER Saturday night to get some fluids since Instacare couldn't do that and I couldn't feed Kaden.  It took a few days but I am finally feeling better and am so glad.  I sometimes forget how grateful I am for a healthy body until I'm not healthy.  A good post-Thanksgiving reminder to me I guess to remember my blessings I sometimes don't stop to think about like my healthy body. 

Fairbourn and Halloween Hoopla

Wow! I am behind on blogging... The Fairbourns (Marv and Dana) came to visit us October 25-29 and we had such a good time together. It was fun for Kaden to meet his Nana and Papa and for them to meet him too.  We love having company come visit (hint, hint) because we tend to be more adventurous when others are here and we go and explore the new places around us more.  Notice in this picture that Kaden's hair almost has a reddish hue to it.  We've decided he may be more of a strawberry blonde than a pure blonde.

The first day Marv and Dana were here the weather was AWESOME! It was 70 degrees outside, which it hasn't been since August. We walked along the Erie Canal Trail which is by our house.

 

 We hung out at the house a bit too so Kaden could play with his Nana and Papa

 

 

We also went to Letchworth State Park the "Grand Canyon of the East."  We had heard it was beautiful in the fall, which it was, but I wish we would have gone just a week or two earlier because I bet it would've been even prettier with all the leaves still on the trees.  By the time we got there a lot of the leaves had already fallen off.  Still breathtaking though!

 

Curtis took this picture- I love it!!! 

 

 

We also went to Palmyra and to the Sacred Grove which is incredible in the fall!

 I was looking at this picture and decided I know where this boy gets his face shape from.  See a resemblance? Anyone?

 

We couldn't have been together around Halloween without doing a Halloween dinner. I just knew we would miss it if we didn't do that with them this year since that is one of my favorite traditions the Fairbourns do.

 

Marv and Dana timed their visit just right with Hurricane Sandy so that all the airports were closed and their flight out of Rochester got cancelled.  They were scheduled to leave on a Monday and the soonest changed flight they could get would have gotten them home on Friday, so being the brave and awesome people they are, they rented a car and drove through the night and made it home Tuesday afternoon! Wow! I could never do that.  It sure was fun to have them come and visit and I'm glad they were able to get home safely.

 

Since I love the Halloween dinner tradition so much I decided to invite over the families in our ward that live in Elmwood Terrace for a Halloween dinner on October 30.  Everyone wore costumes and brought fun, Halloween food.  We had chili, spooky cheese, spooky corn bread, ghoul-aid (punch), chips and salsa, Halloween veggies (arranged in the shape of a monster face) and monster cupcakes.  Everyone contributed and it was fun. 

We had a "pumpkin walk" for the kids (like a cake walk, but they got a mini-jack pumpkin instead), a "witches' swamp" (fish pond) and dancing to Halloween music. Our house was CRAZY with all those little kids running around but we had a good time.

 Curtis and I were "laundry" and "static cling" ha ha.

 

And of course the cutest and happiest skeleton you've ever seen in your life... Love this boy! His costume glowed in the dark- pretty cool if you ask me. 

Happy 2 Months!

Kaden celebrated being 2 months old on October 16! I can hardly believe it.  Time flies quickly with a baby.  He had his two month checkup this week and he is weighing in at 9 lbs 8.5 oz, 22 1/4 inches long.  He is 10th percentile for weight and 25th percentile for height still.  Still small, but growing.  He has finally outgrown a few of his newborn outfits.  We'll see how long it takes him to fit into the 0-3 month size though...

 

I saw this cute idea on Pinterest and wanted to try it with Kaden...

 

This is how Kaden's version turned out! He HATED it!! I tried it with things inside the pumpkin propping him up so it'd be soft. I thought maybe he was cold and brought down the space heater. Nope. Despite my best efforts this boy was not happy to be in a pumpkin. Oh well. Maybe next year?

 Curtis was snuggling Kaden after the traumatizing pumpkin event I caused

 He's still a cute little pumpkin even if he won't sit in the pumpkin for me

 My favorite thing about Kaden getting bigger right now is that he is smiling more and he will coo at you.  If you coo back he keeps doing it back and forth. It is the cutest thing! It's like he's having a conversation with you. I love it.