weekend update

It's a three-day weekend for everyone here, and we're making the most of it by staying home and out of the bitter cold. Kevin ventured out on Saturday to pick up dinner and a new coffee pot (ours blew up on Friday), but otherwise we've been snuggled up at home. Libby has been an angel this weekend. She's such a happy girl and seems to enjoy just hanging out and playing, napping, eating and watching TV—just like us. Her new skills include blowing raspberries, shrieking and coughing for fun, and spinning things. She has toys that spin on both her crib activity center and her exersaucer, which she's really been loving this weekend. She LOVES to stand up, so the exersaucer is perfect for her now (thank you Auntie Susan). She's partial to just a few toys on it, but she seems to be figuring out more and more each day. She's also started dropping lots of toys on the ground, but I don't think she's doing this on purpose yet. Remarkably, Gilmore understands which toys are hers and which are his, and he leaves hers alone—with one exception: Sophie the Giraffe. Sophie is a teething toy made of soft, natural rubber, and she squeeks. Gilmore wants her bad!

We tried rice cereal with Libby last week, as you probably saw in video and photos. After 3 nights, we decided to hang up the spoon and wait a week or so before another attempt. She didn't resist it, but she didn't seem to understand the concept of swallowing yet, either. To update you on previous concerns, her diaper rash is much better, and she doesn't seem to have eczema as I feared. We've been staving off the diaper rash by using white diaper rash cream at every changing. We were using Aquaphor, but it didn't do the trick. So A&D it is. We've just been limiting baths to every three days and keeping lots of lotion on her dry skin, and it seems to be fine. She's also growing like a weed, although she doesn't seem to outgrow all of her clothes at once. She's now wearing 6-month sleepers, 3-to-6-month tops and 3-month pants. It doesn't help that every brand is sized differently, so you just have to try things on to see if they fit, although I seem to constantly underestimate her size in tops. We've been giving Katie such random assortments of clothes for her baby. I've become a big fan of Carter's brand because it's so consistenly sized. Speaking of clothes, Libby was home with Kevin on Friday and it was the coldest day of the year. I came home to find her in quite a cute assortment of garments, including leg warmers and a Winnie the Pooh hat. I called her Flashdance Pooh. Check out the photo of the little ragamuffin I've posted here.

On a final, random note, Kevin installed a door at the bottom of the stairs to the second floor to help reduce the noise travelling up to Libby's room from the kitchen and to keep the cats downstairs at night (they kept coming into Libby's room and making all kinds of noise, just as we were getting her to sleep). It's also provided the unexpected benefit of keeping the cold air from travelling upstairs from the back door. It's original to the house, so we figured it would be a better way to keep Libby from climbing up the stairs once she's mobile than using a gate, although we'll still need to install a gate at the top of the stairs (we got a nice one for Christmas from Keith and Kathy!).