April 2011 - solid food for Eliza

Wow - it's been a busy month! I meant to do a posting the day Eliza ate her first food from a spoon (back on 4/13), and it's taken until today to actually make time to upload pictures and videos.

I'll start this post with a cute picture, with no particular story to tell about it:

A couple weeks ago, Rosa was doing a lot of talking about "the forest" and often "the tigers that live in the forest." So I decided we should all go to Muir Woods before the summer tourist season starts and it becomes impossible to park within miles of the park. When we arrived, I settled in to nurse Eliza. Jeff just missed a picture of Rosa and I sitting at opposite ends of this bench, both nursing our babies.

But he did manage to catch us both carrying our babies on our tummies!

Jeff and Rosa by the slice of redwood that began it's life in 900AD and fell down in the 1930s.

Beautiful, huge trees.

Rosa and Jeff lay down on the path and looked up at the patterns of the branches. Several people stopped and took pictures of them. I think they wanted to lay down and gaze up at the branches too!


Here's the littlest Miss on the ride home, clutching her Sophie the Giraffe. It reminded me of a picture I had taken of Rosa, what seems like so long ago!

(Rosa: 12/7/08)

Back to the present, Eliza has started solids! (Well, they're still pretty soupy, but it's the first step in the process!) We started with rice cereal, then last week she had avocado. I think tomorrow we'll start banana. She seems to like eating from a spoon!

Here's the girls doing a tandem ride in the swing! Probably won't be able to do this too much longer.
Miss Rosa Bosa at a birthday party... yummy chocolate cupcake!

A classic Rosa self-shot. You have no idea how many photos like this now populate my iPhoto. Someday I'll make a collage of them...

Last weekend we took a trip up to Sacramento. Our first stop was visiting Jeff's friends Catherine and Anthony. Catherine is a great bedtime story reader!

Rosa - in motion - at the playground right across the street from Catherine's house.

The next day we took a ride on an excursion train for Rosa's friend Peter's 3rd birthday.

Back at home, the next night two of Rosa's buddies had dinner at our house. It was an exciting night! It is pretty much impossible to get three 3-yr olds to look at a camera at the same time.

A timeless classic - kids jumping on Mom and Dad's bed! I was sort of floored to hear Jeff telling them to do that!

Thanks for the candy necklaces, Uncle Greg!

Two more videos of my adorable children:

Eliza has discovered the other baby in the mirror...

These two have started a band!

My big girl!

Rosa has suddenly taken one of her bigger developmental jumps in recent memory. The biggest one is definitely the potty. She pretty much hasn't used a diaper except for sleeping in the last two weeks. I'm still finding her (clean) diapers tucked into pockets of random tote bags from weeks ago, and now it seems so strange to think of her wearing them. Funny how (my) perceptions of what's normal can change so fast. She still asks to wear a diaper occasionally, but so far I've always been able to talk her out of it without too much trouble.

Other "biggirl" (all one word to Rosa) things that she's doing all of a sudden are: not using a pacifier, not using a sippy cup at meals, doing much better at feeding herself (she's been able to do this for a long time, but getting her to stay focused has always been a challenge), dressing herself (she almost won't let me put clothes on her), buckling her own buckles in the carseat (with a safety check from mom of course), doing (toddler-level) jigsaw puzzles, recognizing lots of letters and numbers, and then, the thing that made me realize all of this stuff was happening at once, was when she showed me this picture that she drew on her chalkboard:


In the upper left corner is a picture of "Grandma." It's totally recognizable as a person! There's the round head on top with eyes and a mouth, two arms, and two legs! It blew me away! After months of seeing scratchy, scrawly lines and having her say, "This is an airplane," or "This is a tiger," with no recognizable features, all of a sudden this was a drawing of a person! Almost more than using the potty or stopping the pacifiers, when I looked at this drawing I felt like I saw her transform in front of my eyes. Pretty amazing stuff!

What a couple of weeks!

Two weeks ago ended with a super fun birthday party... 3 hours of jumpy castle with breaks only to suck down apple juice - 4 boxes worth in the end. Then in the car on the way home, we all got to see that apple juice again, if you know what I mean.

Then, after a relatively uneventful week, Rosa got the croup last Saturday at 12:30 in the morning. She didn't have any signs of any sickness when she went to bed, then woke up coughing like a barking seal and couldn't draw in a breath in between coughs. She was scared and we were scared, so Jeff took her to the hospital. Once she got the steroid and started breathing easier, I dare say she enjoyed her ER visit! Here she is playing "Rosa astronaut."

When she got home at 2:30am, she was feeling much better, although still wheezy. She said, "Mommy, is it morning? Can I go play in the playroom?" Thankfully she did fall asleep eventually. And that night was the only really bad one. She's been much better since, but still has the runniest nose this side of the the Mississippi.

And then this week, Rosa has started wearing panties! She has made ALL her #1s and #2s in the potty, with practically NO resistance! Hooray! I will spare you all the pictures of her proud moments.

And finally, our most recent family picture, taken by Making Dinner drummer, Zarah Gamaldi!
It was out at Ocean Beach after a day of filming for the band's next video (not finished yet). For a good chuckle, check out our two most recent videos at http://makingdinnertheband.com.