Hallie smiles at daddy

She did it! I am working from my laptop and bouncing Hallie in her chair with my foot - trying to get her to nap. Suddenly, I look down and she has spit out her sucker and gave me a huge grin. We had a little conversation and she gave me several huge smiles, what a sweetheart.

It's about time! She has been smiling at everyone but me lately. Grandma Brenda came to visit this week so I could run experiments all day every day (thanks Grandma!!!) and the other day Hallie smiled at her for about 20 minutes, but when I stuck my face in front of her, the smile vanished. Oh well, I finally got one and it was great.

Hallie, can you smile at me?

It is still a very rare occurrence, but Hallie has started smiling. In fact I witnessed one time when she smiled at Erin, it was beautiful. I don't have one yet but mom, Will, and Clementine the cat have all gotten smiles. I'm trying hard to get one, I think we're close. These pictures were taken when she was unusually calm, and we were trying to get her to smile.




It didn't work... before too long, we had this again:




I'm trying everything. Mom's suggestion to get her to smile: pretty shoes

Will reads Hallie a bedtime story

No kidding, Will can actually read some words - he at least knows that "W-I-L-L" spells Will - and he can recognize it in a pararaph of text. He also knows the words "wet" and "fish" from the two waterproof books he reads every night in the bath. But he also has the uncanny ability to memorize a story if you read it to him a few times, and then he can "read" it back to himself.

Well, here he is reading "Day Out with Daddy" to Hallie right before bed. Hallie doesn't like the part where the boy runs outside before he gets dressed ("he didn't have clothes on!"). But some brotherly help with the sucker calms her down (he tried, at least). By the time Will finishes the story she's pretty mellow and ready for bed.

We going to the zoo, zoo, zoo.

A week ago we went to the Toledo Zoo for the day as part of an event with UM which got us in for free. It was well worth the price - that is a sweet zoo. It was our first major excursion with Hallie and it went very well. Will really had the most fun, Hallie for the most part slept the whole time in the stroller except for right before we were planning to leave when she woke up hungry in the monkey house and screamed like the monkeys until we were able to find a secret place to feed her.

We were talking up this trip the entire week beforehand, and taught Will the song "We're going to the zoo, zoo, zoo, how about you, you, you...". He sang it quite a bit while we were driving there and while we were walking around the zoo. Still sings it a lot.

We had four main goals on our trip: 1) see the lions. 2) see the tigers. 3) see a bear. 4) see elephants. 4 for 4 on those. Above we're posing with the tiger doing the fist pump Will does when he's talking about the Detroit Tigers, which has an uncanny resemblance to Tiger Woods' fist pump after sinking a long putt.

We saw these statues of a "daddy roar and a baby roar" so I thought we should pose with them. Usually when we play the game daddy roar/baby roar Will is the daddy and I'm the baby (basically the daddy roars and the baby mews and runs away). But for this picture Will was a bit scared of the daddy lion. It took quite a bit of coaxing for him to even touch the baby.

The drive home from Toledo is about an hour, and we were going straight to the housewarming/graduation party of our friends KC and Rachel from there, so we were hoping Will would take a short afternoon nap in the car. It didn't go well. Here he is obeying our instructions to close his eyes and try to fall asleep. Eventually it worked, but he couldn't have slept more than 45 minutes and it showed at the party, where he had several meltdowns. Lesson learned on that one.

Will feeds baby Roar

I am going to let this video speak for itself.

Hallie's bath pictures: 1 month

I'm not sure how we did it, but we got pictures of Will in the bathtub when he was one month old and he wasn't nearly this angry. Hallie still gets quite angry when we bathe her. She's a feisty one.

YO!

Hallie's bath pictures: first bath at home

In keeping with what we did for Will (see the links under "Will's bath pictures" on the left), we'll take pictures of Hallie in the bath every month. This is a good way to have a constant frame of reference and see how she grows over time. These pictures were taken the day we brought her home from the hospital, and on Sunday we'll take her 1 month bath pictures.



You can see, that like her brother was with his first baths, Hallie is not yet very happy to take them. Although by now her umbilical cord has fallen off so she can be submerged in the water - baths still go mostly like this but she now has brief moments of calm when she realizes how nice the warm water feels.



We took the video clip below after the bath - she was so worn out from screaming at us during the bath all she could do was continue to complain with weak little whimpers...

glamour shots

Erin and Grandma Brenda, and Will - well, I guess everyone but me - put a lot of effort into getting some nice pictures taken of Will and Hallie in her first week of life. I think they turned out really well, but in the way that Will looks very sweet and Hallie looks hilariously angry.

I have been posting several sets of pictures on my picture site, check them out. At this point our lives are a pretty happy routine - play with Will & comfort Hallie until they both are asleep. Not a lot of blog-worthy stories beyond that, but I'm sure there will be more in the near future. For one, we're going to the zoo this weekend, then Uncle Adam and Aunt Chandi are visiting!

Here are a few more highlight pictures from the past few weeks.

Here we're doing guy stuff - chucking rocks in the river and deciding what we should attack next with Will's sword.

Hawkeye Hallie!

Goodnight Sweetheart

Before Will started insisting we sing goofy songs like the Little Einsteins' themesong to him, Erin and I used to sing him a duet lullabye "Goodnight Sweetheart (...well, it's time to go...)". Here is a video of Will singing Goodnight Sweetheart to Hallie to calm her down and help her fall asleep. He also gave her Roar (the lion-blanket) to snuggle.

Hallie can have ice cream!

Unlike her big brother, Hallie is apparently not allergic to dairy products, much to our relief. This is especially good news for Erin and her dairy-loving side of the family and their connections to a certain state university that has its own on-campus dairy farm.

We gave Hallie formula for the first time today - the version that's based on cow's milk. And she did just fine! No spitting up or rashes, so in my experience as an amateur allergist, that means (in a few months) she's cleared for pizza with the cheese still on it. The other good news is that she takes a bottle from me pretty well, so dad can be more involved in feeding her - especially in the middle of the night, hooray!