Catching Up/Five Months

So this one time, I had a blog. Then I had a baby and the blog got neglected because post-baby life was all about survival and blogging was very much a leisure activity. But now, all these weeks later, it is time for a little catching up because goodness, life has changed.

The biggest change is that we've moved! After over 3 1/2 years in the same place, after hosting Christmases and Thanksgivings and parties, after being Hotel Herrick a dozen times, after going from newlyweds to new parents in our little basement apartment, we moved in with my parents in Draper. The plan is to stay here for about six months, save some money, and spend time with my mom and dad. Tim is still going to school at UVU and working at Novell, so he's commuting quite a bit, but we're really happy to be here. Tim is also working at my office to help us with some shipping and he has a little contract work on the side. Needless to say, he's keeping busy!

I am still working 25-30 hours/week and it's getting...marginally easier? I was able to reshuffle some responsibilities at work so my workload is more proportionate to the time I have, but it's still stressful. I don't know how other working mothers do it - I am definitely still trying to figure it out. (More about that another time.)

I can't think of much else to update. Mostly, we moved and we have a baby who takes up lots of love and attention. We all got super sick for a week and a half in February - Georgie had a cold and double ear infection (trauma for all of us, by the way) and the resulting lack of sleep made Tim and I sick. Not so fun. And we got to see all of our Herrick family last month at our niece Lillian's blessing. We got this awesome picture of the three cousins who were all born within six months of each other. I can't wait for these girls to be old enough to actually play with each other! It's going to be so sweet.

I guess that's the other big thing to update - we have a five-month-old. It's not too much different from having a four-month-old; she's just growing and developing and delighting us with her advances. She giggles more easily and she's a rolling champ (back to front especially) and she really really wants to crawl. She gets up on her toes and tried to push forward and then ends up turning in a circle. We think the weeks of drooling and gumming on things might finally be turning into actual teething soon but it's hard to tell. 

I think the best part of five months is that she responds to us more and more. She lights up when she sees Tim and sometimes when she's upset she can't help but smile at me when I make faces at her. She is just barely starting to reach for us when we go to pick her up but it already melts us. Our favorite nicknames for her are Bugaboo and Chickadee and Fussbudget (for the fussy times). She seems to be entering an attachment phase and sometimes gets really upset when I leave the room even if she's being held by someone else. 

She has very expressive eyebrows and eyes - they always give her away when she's tired, happy, excited, or upset. Her eyes are definitely blue and her hair is still a dark blonde - it's getting long enough it doesn't stand up on its own and just kinda swirls on the top of her head. I swear she's going through a growth spurt but I always think that so who knows? She was doing really well with sleeping at night and taking naps and then she got sick (a cold with a double ear infection - it was traumatic for all of us) and then we moved and now she's not sleeping at all - 45 minute naps (we can sometimes convince her to take two naps back-to-back but that's it) and waking up two or three times at night, if not more. We're wondering if she is having nightmares or something because she just recently starting getting scared - not just startled but actually frightened - and that might be waking her up. The only upside is that she sleeps equally badly in her swing or crib so we made the switch to having her sleep in her crib all the time. Hopefully this phase passes quickly!

She spends a lot of her time on her play mat (this was taken today):

And this was from almost a month ago but dang, it's just so cute! I never saw the appeal of babies in oversized hats until this moment right here:

I haven't been good about taking pictures since life has been so crazy, but I'm sure I will inundate the blog with more soon. So that's the update - baby, moving, work, blog, life. Word.