i can't stand it!

Cecelia got her first haircut today! she's not even 9 months! but since she'll be mini-flower girl in her uncle matt & auntie melisssa's wedding in a week & a half it was time. no more shaggy ragamuffin.

cece approves! still cute!

we of course took lots more pictures & even a video, so i'll try to post more soon

sunny days, chasing the stinks away!

now that we've been having some lovely sunny weather instead of monsoons & flooding, i wanted to try giving our cloth diapers some sun. i've read that it helps bleach out discoloring (wink wink) and improves their smell. ours were getting a bit rank, so this seemed like an easy way to try to fix that.

pretty & fresh smelling. mmmmm.

andy also recalled that we may need to play with the amount of detergent we need, where the microfiber liners are so absorbent, perhaps they weren't getting clean enough? (ick!) they smell & look good now at least so we're trying a little bit more soap. 

(guarding the hole the clothesline goes in. )

food fail!

our FIRST food fail!


Cecelia has been pretty open to the foods we've offered her. some she's more enthusiastic about than others. usually she'll try them and if she doesn't like them she usually ignores them. well, we found one that was offensive enough to warrant spitting out and quite a bit of fussing & crying.

the winner is: Kiwi!

hmm.. what's this?

wah! why did you give me this terrible thing? are you trying to poison me?

It's going to take a lot of cheerios for me to forgive this!

Easter!

Here Cece gets in on the Easter action with some eggs that The Bunny was nice enough to fill with cheerios & ce's cousins Kiley & Cam were nice enough to find for her. Happy Easter!

8 months!

I cannot believe it's been 8 months (and a few days now) since Cecelia joined us 'on the outside' ;)  She's turning into quite a little character. lots of laughing, and raspberries. now she can wave (sometimes with one hand, sometimes with a little help from the other) and her rapidly becoming famous "boo face" where she scrunches up her nose and snuffles. i have no idea where it came from, but it's quite comical.

you can kind of see her boo face in this picture, although it LOOKS as if she's trying to eat the plastic egg, she's not.

The name 'boo face' comes from my friend Heather, who said her sister used to make the same face and that's what they called it. Sounded good to me!

as far as milestones, lots of babbling (bah bah bah, blah blah, & da's) some scootching, but that still makes her really frustrated because she can't go forward. she loves standing, and can pull herself up pretty well in her crib and on me. :)

eating!

Cecelia is getting pretty darn good at eating. check it out:


i lovingly call this one "pancake smash" :)

more about the cloth

I have had a few people asking about our cloth experiences so I wanted to do a follow up blog about how it's going.

really- i *swore* i'd never cloth diaper. so gross, and think of the water, and eeeew! but, really it's not as gross as i expected. i mean, with a baby you're dealing with poop all the time anyway, so what's one extra step.  as far as the water goes- while I was pregnant with Cecelia, we were able to get a high efficiency washer & dryer (well, as efficient as a dryer can be) and that has helped me feel better about the water usage, because it doesn't use much.

anyway! here is a bit more about the process that works for us:

(click on photo to enlarge)

(ok, so the washcloths aren't really relevant to cloth diapering, sorry, neither is the laundry bin)

really the poopy diaper transport bin is KEY. the pee diapers can just get tossed in that white bin (which has a waterproof bag liner in it) the poopy ones need to be rinsed, because she's eating solids now. if we had started while she was just breastfed they could have been tossed strait in the wash, because that poop is water soluble- i have no idea if formula poops need to be rinsed or not.

so one the poopy diaper is removed from the baby's bottom and she's rediapered and placed somewhere safe- we bring the offending diaper to the bathroom where we have this brilliant thing:

it's like the dish sprayer for your sink, only on the john! and this is another thing without which i doubt we'd be cloth diapering. GET THIS. here, here's a link!

see, it attaches to your toilet, and even has a shut off valve:

i'll be honest, andrew installed it and he's clever when it comes to that sort of thing, so i have no idea how difficult it would be for those of us NOT plumbingly inclined, but it's totally worth it to find someone who is to have this.

once they are sprayed down, toss them in the bin and you're all set. we have enough of a stash that we do a load of diapers every 2 or 3 days.

ce is fussing, so i guess that's all for now!