From Poppin' Bottles to Makin' Bottles: April 2012

Happy 8 Month Birthday Caiden! It always seems like I just wrote a blog post, and yet another month flies by as Caiden gets further and further away from his newborn days. This month has been tons of fun, but also lots of teething. He is currently getting 3 of his top teeth in at once - poor little guy! He was having a tough time with it but now that they've broken through the gums, he seems to be much better. The funny part is that none of the 3 teeth are his front teeth - they are both his K9s (which don't usually come in until after a year) and one of his lateral incisors. He may look like he belongs in a Twilight film for a while until those front two teeth come in!

Besides going through the teething, Caiden has been working on mastering so many skills this month! One of the things that he's been able to do for a while now is to pick up little pieces of food and feed himself. He loves his puffs and other small fruits cut up like bananas, mangoes, etc. He is becoming quite the little pro at feeding himself - although we haven't tackled doing it with it a spoon yet! He is also doing a wonderful job of sitting on his own. Sometimes he gets overly excited and launches himself backwards, so we still have to keep an eye on him most of the time. We can also tell that he's working on the crawling thing - but hasn't quite figured it out yet. Right now he gets on his knees and sticks his butt up in the air and moves himself forward with his arms spread eagle on the ground...it is too funny to watch. Eventually he'll figure out the use of his arms in conjunction with his legs! In the meantime, he knows how to get around by rolling. We lay him down in one spot on the ground, and he'll be halfway across the room in a matter of seconds. Definitely can't take our eyes off of that little guy!

It also seems that he recently went through a growth spurt - as all his 9 month clothes are too short for him now! Seriously?! I can't believe that he is already wearing 12 month stuff!

And because he is such a biggie boy now, we decided that it was time to make the leap to the convertible car seat. Caiden is over 20lbs now and was getting too heavy to carry with the added weight of the car seat - and not to mention he's built like a football player and his shoulders were getting too wide for the seat. It is crazy how much these convertible car seats cost, but at least they go up to 70lbs so we won't have to worry about buying another one for quite a while! Caiden seems to love his new seat as it doesn't restrict his vision as much and he can look around more while in the car. The only downfall is having to wake him up when we get somewhere if he has fallen asleep - I feel so bad having to pull him out of the seat now! But I guess that is all part of him growing up :-(

One of our favorite things that has happened this month (which just actually happened last night) is that Caiden has started giving us kisses! Last night while sitting on my lap, he looked up at me and put his hand on my cheek to pull it closer to his face and opened his mouth to give me a big wet open-mouthed kiss! Although it was full of slobber, it was the best thing ever! It just melted my heart. I brought him into the other room to show Freddie and he did it again for him! I loved seeing him give his Daddy kisses too! These are the moments that make all the hardships of parenting worth EVERY minute! We love you Caiden!!

Here are some fun pictures from this month: