12 Months of Lucy

12 Months of our Little Lucy.

Maybe someday when I have time (hahaha!) I will have to collect all 12 months of each kid and make a huge collage of all of them!

{Lucy May Turns One!}

Today little Lucy May turns one!

(photo by Erica)

Time sure has flown by this past year - we all can't believe little Lucy is already one!  What a big girl!

Little Lucy is taking this baby stuff seriously - she doesn't want do walk, she prefers her little monkey-scoot-crawl.  She is getting a lot faster at pulling up and standing by stuff. We all carry her all the time, so it's no wonder she doesn't want to walk!  She can get places so much faster by getting us to carry her or her little scoot.

At one year Lucy has 4 little teeth.  And she is the worst teether!  Ugh.  She loves to bite just about anything with her four little teeth too!  

She likes to eat anything she can feed herself and she loves bottles and sippy cups of milk or juice...as long as someone holds them for her!  Silly girl.

Lucy has a couple words - she loves to say "uh-oh"  it's really the best thing ever!  She also can nod her head, "no" and likes to say dada, mama, wo-wa (noah) and is working on pa-pa (grandpa).

~~

This weekend we had 2 family birthday celebrations for her and Noah.  She had a great time being the center of attention.

Sunday we had a party with the Christiansens.  Aunt Pam brought her a present and it was wrapped in glitter wrapping paper.  Forget the present.  All Lucy wanted was the wrapping paper!  She kept putting it on her head - baby hair and glitter?  Let's just say it is Tuesday and she is still covered in glitter!

Wade decorated a big cake for her to eat (we mean destroy) on Sunday.

She really enjoyed playing in it but as soon as she got a taste of the cake - she pulled this face!  

What a goof ball.  

She didn't like it at all.  

And if you look close, you can see blue glitter all over her head in the pictures!

Monday night we invited my sisters family over and had another cupcake party.  Lucy liked her chocolate cupcake a lot better than her pink cake.  

Don't be fooled by the straight face.  

She was pretty excited about the candle!

What a year it's been.  We are so in love with little Lucy.  

We are so glad you are in our family, your little heart is healed and you are healthy!

Happy Birthday little Lucy May!

{Halloween 2013}

We had a busy and fun time this year for Halloween.  The trunk or treat at church was the day before and we had fun watching the big kids at their parade at school.  We spent Halloween night at Aunt Judy's house celebrating with a spookie dinner and a little trick or treating.

This year we had:

A hobbit:

A skeleton:

A fairy princess:

A pirate:

And a pretty little ladybug:

And the group picture - well it turned out typical for our family.

Don't they look like they are up to something?

BAM!

 Happy Halloween!

{11 months}

Little Lucy Lu turned 11 months old on the 5th.  

I can't believe how fast this year has slipped away from me.  

My baby is almost a year old!

What a fun little girl Lucy is!  She is starting to have such a funny little personality.  She smiles and laughs at her brothers and sister.  She loves to be right in the middle of all the action.  Anywhere they are, you can bet she will find a way to get there. She really loves her Daddy and her brothers.

We put her in the swings one day at the park and she was such a hoot!  She loved it!  She giggled and laughed even more when Daddy or Gage was swinging her.  She loves her boys!

She still doesn't crawl, instead she does her little bum scoot-monkey crawl.  She can go so fast!  Sometimes she just skips around the place, and she does look like a little baby monkey moving around.  She has started to stand a couple times and has really started to pull up on things.  She loves to pull up and stand and play at Eli's bed - because it's small and just her size.  I am in no rush for her to walk.  She will get there soon enough and then she will be into even more trouble than she already is!

She eats just about anything.  She loves gram crackers, chicken nuggets, bread, scrambled eggs, cookies.....anything she can do herself.  She wouldn't hold still for a picture this month until I handed her a cracker.  Silly girl.

This month we made the transition.  I no longer nurse her and she now drinks milk, juice or water like a big girl.  She also has started sleeping through the night!  Hallelujah!  Just like the other kids, I knew as soon as I quit nursing her she would.  I know it sounds strange, but I often like getting up with just the baby in the middle of the night - it's quiet, one on one time.  And some days it's the only time I am allowed to think peacefully.

Lucy loves music and stuffed animals.  Her brothers, sister and cousin decided to throw her a stuffed animal party one day.  She really loved it.  It was so funny!  She loves to hold my phone and listen to music.  She really likes to dance to "What does a fox say?" (who doesn't?) and "That's what makes you beautiful"

She is such a fun girl.  

It's hard to believe that in only a few weeks she will be one!  

10 Months!

I suppose it is time to get with it and post Lucy's 10 month pictures.  I took them the week she turned 10 months, and they have been sitting as a draft on blogger ever since. 

At 10 months Lucy is such a fun girl.  She loves to scoot around and scoots everywhere!  We find her down the hall, in the other room, in the kitchen, and mostly right under our feet with her arms up, wanting to be picked up.

She loves to play with her brothers and sister.  She gets so excited when they play with her.  She is bored when they are all gone.

Lucy has two little teeth.  And she will bite you with them to tell you all about them.  It's fun.

She loves to eat anything that she can do herself and we are constantly picking up and vacuuming.  Just when I think the floor is clean, she can find something and put it in her mouth.

(Mom - I think the picture above Lucy looks like the baby pictures of you.)

Lucy still wakes up in the night, but loves her two pink blankies.  She takes pretty good naps during the day and is an expert at taking naps anywhere - in the car, stroller, in our arms.

She loves music.  She loves toys that make music and she loves to bounce and dance with Eli to What Makes You Beautiful by One Direction.  Her favorite toy is still her maracas.  She has loved them forever and she never gets tired of them.

She can say dada, mama (only when she is crying) and her favorite is awa-awa.  Not sure what it means, but she loves to say it. a-wa-wa.  She babbles it all the time.

Obviously, Lucy is getting tired of these monthly pictures.  

Good thing she is 11 months soon, and only has just a few more of these photos shoots until she turns one!

Go Lucy Go!

Thanks to a lazy Sunday morning we finally got a video of Lucy doing her scoot/crawl. 

 (ignore the pajamas and bedhead).  

We've seen her get her one leg out and behind her, but she usually keeps it underneath her.  Silly girl.  

But she's figured out how to get where she wants - and she really can go faster than this video too! 

All the kids have crawled in their 9th month.  Lucy is 10 months this week so I wasn't sure she would make it - but she did...if you count this as crawling.  Maybe I should just say that all kids were mobile in their 9th month.

Either way -  

She's got places to go and things to see.  

Watch out world!

And just for fun, because the other kids love to see themselves - here are their crawling videos:
Noah, Eli, and Avery.  (Although I couldn't get the video on Noah's to work?  It's my favorite because he crawls for a cookie and Gage is in the background giggling and it's funny!  Hopefully it works!)
 
Poor Gage, he crawled before blogs existed.  But I will always remember he crawled on Christmas Eve at the Christiansen party.  There was just so much going on he couldn't resist!

{9 Months}

Lucy May is 9 Months old!

I can't believe she is quickly on her way to being one!

Lucy proved herself to be a ham this month and would not hold still for a decent month picture.  I tried numerous days and different outfits.  But the silly girl would not hold still.

Obviously, from her movement in these pictures she is a girl on the move.  No, she does not crawl.  She just bum scoots everywhere she wants to go.  She is pretty good at turning circles and it makes putting her hair up very hard!  Noah think's it is fantastic that she turns circles like this, because he did it as a baby all the time.  We nicknamed him Mr. Twister.

At 9 months Lucy is pretty picky at what she eats.  But you can't tell it by looking at her!  She loves baby puffs, yogurt bites and mash potatoes.  She doesn't like much baby food at all.  She likes real food.  She doesn't have the ability to get things into her mouth, so basically she likes to just pick up her food and throw it all on the floor.  She won't take a sippy cup, but she will take a bottle!  She loves apple juice.

At her nine month appointment she weighed  17 pounds and 4 ounces.  She was in the 25 percentile for weight.  She was 27.5 inches tall and 50 percentile for height.  I would not guess that she was tall and skinny, but it looks like that is what she is!

She loves to play music, she loves to bang anything together to make music.  And she loves to dance and bounce when we play music.  She has started to talk quite a bit lately.  Baba, mama and dada are her words.  She also likes to growl at us.  Everyone's pretty smitten with anything that she says.

Honestly, at nine months she is a horrible sleeper at night.  But that is pretty much my fault.  I hardly ever let her cry. I need to get better at that.  She does take 2 good naps a day.  And somedays a mini nap before bedtime.

She has one tiny little tooth.  She likes to bite with it.

She's a hard one to get going, but is a fun girl for sure.  

We are so in love with Lucy May.

{8 Months}

Little Lucy Lu is 8 months old!

(Actually she is almost 9, I am just behind)

She is a girl (trying) to be on the move.  She is our little bum scooter!  She will scoot from one side of the room to the other.  She still can't crawl, but I think she will pretty soon.  We like to say she's like a snail, if you sit and watch her, you might never see her move, but if you look away and look back, she's moved!  She wants to crawl and get faster because she gets so frustrated she can't keep up with everyone else.  It's just a matter of days now!

She is so funny and won't eat her baby food.  She loves to play with solid foods, but doesn't have the coordination to make much of it to her mouth yet.  She just looks at us with a horrible expression when we sit her down to eat every day.  We want her to eat what?  I am so mean - bananas, applesauce, baby puffs....yep, I am one mean mom.  It's gross stuff.

Lucy had her follow up appointment with the cardiologist this past month.  She passed with flying colors.  You can still hear her murmur, but you can't feel it anymore.  She is good until December!  Woo hoo!

Lucy still loves to play with any musical toys.  She loves the maracas and bells.  She loves to pound on the toy piano and if you play music she will bounce up and down dancing.  It's such a fun stage.

She loves to clap and wave.  

She is so attached to me right now.  Sometimes she doesn't even let me go out of her site without screaming.  She loves to play the "pass the baby" game.  When Wade is holding her she will lean to me, then I will take her and she will look at Wade, smile and then lean back to him.  We then "pass the baby" a couple times.  She thinks she is so cleaver.

She also loves to play the drop it game with the big kids.  They think it's pretty funny she will drop things on purpose just to have them pick them up for her.  

She has us all wrapped around her baby fingers.

We love our little Lucy May.

{7 Months}

Lucy May is 7 months old!

And it is serious business...

Just kidding....

At seven months old Lucy is such a fun girl!  She is very happy sitting up and playing with toys.  She is trying to reach things and falls on her tummy when they are out of her reach.  She has moved her legs a couple times while attempting to crawl, but she mostly just gets mad.  I'm sure she'll get it eventually and then we'll have to hide every lego in the house.

Lucy tolerates baby food every afternoon while I try to feed her.  But mostly she just looks at me like I'm shoving poison in her mouth.  Although, she does like banana baby food, and it's pretty funny when we try to feed her baby puffs.  She just pops them right out and then tries to get them back in her mouth with her tongue. 

Just when I thought I got her diaper explosions under control (by moving her up 2 diaper sizes) she proved me wrong yesterday.  All over my white shirt.  Gross!  Good thing she is cute.

Lucy loves her pink blankie.  She sleeps with two of them every night.  If you can call what she does sleeping.  She's pretty hit and miss.  She is still in our room.  Some nights she does great, others I feel like she is up all night long.  Who knows.  She just likes to rock in the chair with me.  And since she is my baby, I guess I won't complain.  She doesn't have any teeth yet. Maybe that is why she is up some nights.

Lucy loves the baby piano toy.  She will sit and play on it all day.  

She is so proud of herself for making music.

She loves anything that makes music, shakers, the piano, rattles.  She also is clapping and waving.  I love the clapping!  

Lucy loves bath time.  She gets so excited and splashes like crazy.  Last Saturday we took her swimming for the first time and she had a great time in the pool.  I only got one picture of her before we got in, I've decided that with 5 kids to watch at the pool, it is not the time for pictures.

 Lucy has her cardiology follow up appointment at the end of the month.  Hopefully her little heart is doing fine after her surgery.  We shall see.

She is the cutest little girl.  We love her chubby cheeks.  

Happy seven months!

{6 Months!}

Little Lucy May is 6 months old!

I can't believe that she is now on the way to a year.  

What a big girl, she has been growing up much too fast.

The past two weeks she has really started to show such a funny personality.  She has finally got the hang of sitting up on her own and she loves it!  (I love it too!  One of my favorite stages because they are happy, they can sit up, play with toys, babble, but they can't move and make a big mess).

She loves to sit and watch everyone around her.  She will grab and play with toys.  She loves baby link chains and waving them all over the place.  She will babble and talk as she sits and plays.  She gets so happy and excited when her big brothers sit and play with her.  She likes Avery too, but Avery tends to get right in her face and tries to pick her up, which she doesn't really like.

She will giggle and laugh now.  It's great.

 "Hey, Eli, what do you think you are doing in my 6 month picture?"  

We had her 6 month appointment last week and she is growing great.  She was 25.75 inches (50 percentile) and weighed 15 pounds, 3 ounces (35 percentile).  She has got chubby little cheeks and thighs.  We love them.

Two weeks ago I started trying baby cereal with her every afternoon and she wasn't really sure about it.  Then last Tuesday she really got the hang of it.  (That was also the day she had her appointment and got shots) then later that night she threw everything up.  So I backed off.  We'll try again this week.  I'm not in a rush.  She'll get it.

Besides, who needs food? In her 6 month pictures,  all she wanted to do was eat her feet.

She has her next cardiology appointment next week.  I think she is growing and healthy, but we'll see how her heart is doing then.

She is HUGELY attached to me.  She likes to smile at Wade.  When he comes home she gets so smiley and starts to flap her arms like she is going to take off in flight.  But she really likes me to hold her.  All. the. time.  We leave her during our date night swap every other week and she either sleeps or cries.  I leave her with Wade every week when I go on visits for church, and she cries.  Poor girl loves her mama.

She is attached to her pink blankets and she does love to cuddle with her butterfly pillow pet.  She still wakes up at night.  But I haven't really tried hard to make her sleep through the night either.

She is notorious for blowing out diapers.  Always, every day.  I have tried all kinds of different brands, but they all fail.  And usually at the worst possible time...like in the middle of a shopping trip, or church.  She has ruined more clothes than I thought possible.  My other 4 kids never did this, I guess Lucy has to prove that everyone is unique and different.

She's a cute little munchkin   

Growing up too fast.

And I think we will keep her.

{5 Months}

Little Lucy May turned 5 Months old at the beginning of this month.  I kinda cheated, this pictures is more like 5 and a half months.  It's been a little bit of a crazy month for us. But better late than never, I took her picture.

At 5 months Lucy is almost sitting up on her own.  She can do it for a few seconds before leaning forward too much and then taking a head dive.  She is so happy to sit up and watch everyone around her.  She loves sitting in her bumbo seat on the kitchen counter every morning (Yeah, I know, I probably shouldn't put her there).  She giggles and talks while we all eat our breakfast and make school lunches.

She LOVES to watch  her siblings.  If you want to see Lucy get grumpy fast, get her alone without anyone to watch.  She isn't too happy.

We started a little bit of rice cereal this month.  She wasn't too thrilled about it so I decided to wait a few more weeks.  We'll try again soon.  Soon enough she will be eating us out of house and home like the rest of them.  We aren't in a huge hurry.

Lucy still doesn't sleep through the night.  But honestly, I am a horrible sleep trainer.  She does go to sleep between 7 and 8 with Avery and Eli and she will sleep for about 6-7 hours.  So I believe if you are looking for text book answers "technically" she is sleeping through the night.  She nurses super fast and then goes right back to sleep.  Her crib is still in our room.  And it doesn't really take much of my time.  She is such a spoiled little girl to get to sleep in our room for so long!

Lucy has been a lot more smiley lately.  She has started to giggle a few times and started to talk to us every once in while.  Noah is the best at getting Lucy to smile.  He was standing behind me when I took her picture this month.  She loves Noah!

She still has her moments, but Lucy is starting to get a lot better at riding in the car.  I'm not sure why, but I am SO glad she has decided to be happy most of the time.

She is growing up so fast.
We love our little Lucy May!

Lucy's Heart

Finally after lots of waiting and rescheduling, Thursday this week Lucy had her appointment for a sedated echo on her heart.

Honestly, going into this I was more nervous about the fact that she couldn't eat for a couple hours before the test.  I wasn't sure how she would do with that.  I couldn't feed her after 5:30 that morning, and she usually eats at 7, so I was kinda nervous for her.  But she ended up being really good and not too grumpy till the very end.

Here we are right before the IV team came into the room.

She was such a trooper!  I couldn't believe how good she was for the IV team.  They had a therapist come with them and he had a baby app on his ipad that she watched the whole time.  She was mesmerized!   We downloaded the app too. (Baby View is the app)  It's just black, white, and red images, perfect for babies.  She really loves the one with little lady bugs crawling around the screen.  She didn't even flinch when they stuck her with a needle!

Some babies they can give just enough medicine to relax, but Lucy did not like the "in between" state at all.  She was pretty frustrated with it, and they had to give her extra medicine to make sure she was all the way out.

Sleeping away in post-op.

We got the results that day.  It wasn't good new, or really bad news.

Lucy has pulmonary valve stenosis.   We knew this information already. In January they measured the pressure going through that valve and it was a middle ground number - not too good, not too bad.  But she was upset, so her heart was working a little harder, so that was the reason we did the sedated echo.  With the sedated echo the number was a few points higher, but still middle ground.  So our cardiologist said we should do an EKG.

Good thing we downloaded that lady bug app, Lucy was now awake and we needed her to lay still again.  

After the EKG, we went back to talk to the cardiologist.

The muscle wall of her right ventricle has thickened a little bit from January and that isn't great news.  It means that her little heart is working harder than it should.  The right ventricle should have low pressure, but she has high pressure.

We got two choices.  Some kids do out grow this condition.  

So we could wait and come back in two months.

Or we could get an appointment with the cath lab and have a procedure to try and balloon the suprapulmonary.

Our cardiologist couldn't really say either way. So after a lot of questions, we decided to wait and have another echo done in 2 months.  If it's still bad then we can go to the cath lab.

I am so glad Wade was there with me.  I can never think of any questions to ask till I get home, but he started spouting off questions left and right.   I guess sometimes all that medical background can come in handy;)

Lucy is growing and acting normal, and our cardiologist gave us lots of signs and symptoms to watch for.  She has never had any of these.

I want to think that she will out grow it, since Gage has a similar murmur and we've never had to do anything for him but have it checked out every couple years.  It was also hard to make the decision to send her back in for another procedure, even if it was in a couple weeks,  after watching her be put to sleep that morning.

So we are kind in the same boat as before.  

Waiting for another couple months.  

And hoping she grows and her heart  and little body can fix itself.

~~

hopefully I described and explained things right.  I have to look at the diagram they give me and then it really makes sense, or have Wade explain it.  Sorry if I didn't do a great job.  Ask Wade if you really want to know.