My one year old is finally teething!

And no, that is not an April fools day joke. I can feel one sharp little tiny bottom tooth just barely sticking out. Her gums are also swollen and she lets me know that they hurt! We tried pears in her mesh food eater and that soft texture seemed to be really soothing on her teeth: she ate an entire pear by herself!

No pictures of the little tooth yet, you can't see it, but you can feel it if you stick your finger in her mouth.

The very first cake I ever made

Yep, that's right: I had never baked a non-cheesecake cake before I decided to give it a try for Eve's birthday. I want to say that I've also never decorated a cake until then, but once when I was in 8th grade my mom had baked a kitty cat cake for one of my sister's birthdays and was trying to figure out how to make whiskers on it. I suggested uncooked spaghetti noodles and my mom let me place them on. So does that count as previous cake decorating? Even if the spaghetti whiskers count, I still hadn't ever frosted a cake before. I guess you could see it one of two ways:

1. I love Eve more so I felt like putting more effort into her cake.
2. I love Kylie more and I didn't want to ruin her cake so I ordered them from the grocery store, knowing they would look good.

Which one of those options is it? That's for you to figure out, I'm not telling (HINT: it's neither!). So I baked 3 cake mixes and cut them into shapes to layer. Then I called my mom who told me I needed to put a glaze over the cut edges or they wouldn't frost. So I did that, but I don't think that I did it right. I also made marshmallow fondant; not enough to cover an entire cake, but just enough to add a little something. While I was doing all this, Kylie asked me if I was making brownies since she had never seen me bake a cake before. I thought that was pretty funny.

Thankfully my mom showed up the next day with a couple of tricks up her sleeve on how to frost the cake. She did lots of the actual frosting while I did the fondant part:

This is what the table looked like when we were done:
And the final product:
The birthday girl with her cake:

Here I am bringing Eve her own little miniature cake while carrying a cranky and tired Kylie. We are all wearing tutu's since we had a fun little tutu party:
As you can see: Eve loved her cake. I'm not surprised. This girl loves food and loves making a mess. Kylie on the other hand, simply likes food enough and hates to be a mess, so Kylie was much more dainty and much less messy. Just another example of how different my two girls can be.

I saved these next two pictures for last because while they were taken while Eve was in her chair waiting for her cake, they don't really look like birthday pictures. But these pictures really capture the way Eve really looks in her candid state better than any other pictures I have of her. She is just a real life doll:

An Everz update

Eve just turned 10 months old. We took her to get her 9 month well baby check-up yesterday. Yes, I know, we are a month behind. Things kind of got hectic around the holiday season, not to mention it was also Jason's finals week. So we scheduled our appointment kind of late. No biggie. We didn't have any health concerns for this little girl. And I really do mean "little". She weighs 14 lbs. 4 oz and is 25.5 inches tall at 10 months. I really thought that she would at least on the growth chart by now. I mean, this girl eats so much food! I thought that maybe she would have reached the 3rd percentile or something. But no, she hasn't. Thankfully my doctor is no longer worried about her like he was in the first couple months of her life. I'm glad we don't have to make any extra appointments to track her weight like we used to. He just told me that since I'm small, she's small.

Well, there's no denying that she's healthy, this girl is very active. She is a very fast crawler, check out one of my favorite recent pictures:
Obviously not an action shot of her crawling, but still cute.

This isn't recent news, but she loves pulling up on everything. She can cruise around furniture, but she has figured out that crawling is much faster, so she prefers that method of getting where she wants to go. Here's a picture of her pulling up on her daddy's foot (I thought it was so funny that she was using his shoe to stand, so I had to take a picture)
So she's been pulling up for several months now, and now she has recently figured out how to stand without holding on to anything. I'm such a proud mother. Here are some pics (By the way, it's so hard to get a picture of her standing, because when I notice she's doing it, I have to run and get my camera. By then she has lost interest, and she will not do it for me "on command." She's stubborn.) The first picture was taken at Jason's mom's house right after Christmas-time, so she was 9 months. Jason snapped that picture and he was so excited to show me that he managed to take a picture after one try when I had been trying for a couple weeks! The second picture is one I took just recently. She was pushing the shopping cart (that her older sister had filled full of jeans from their dresser drawers by the way) and just decided to let go and hang out there for a minute. You can tell she was proud by the look on her face. Oh, how I love these milestones!
I'm wondering when she is going to walk. Not because I'm concerned at all, I do realize that she is still very young. I'm just a curious mother. If you would have asked me a couple months ago, I would have guessed by 9 months, like her older sister. She seemed to do everything else earlier than Kylie did, so I thought walking would be the same. Obviously that didn't happen. Which is perfectly alright, I'll be a proud mom regardless of when it happens! I don't even think at this point that it will be anytime soon. She just doesn't have any desire to take any steps. By the age of 4 months, Kylie used to love it when I would hold her hands and make her "practice" walk. Well at 10 months, Eve still hates it. She doesn't want any of it. She will force herself down and crawl off as fast as possible. Whatever. I'm just going to let it happen whenever it happens. No more practicing. Over Christmas, I did see her take 2 steps, completely unassisted. Then she fell down and giggled. Then she stood up again, fell down and giggled again. I guess falling is much more fun than walking. At least it is to Eve. My sister Rachel tried to "train" her while we were visiting for Christmas. She was determined to have her walking before she left to go study abroad in France. She left today by the way, so her strict program didn't work. So I guess I don't know when she'll be walking, but what I do know is that no matter when it is, I will be so excited to see my little girl toddling around.

There is another very important development that I should mention: I gave Eve her very first pigtails today. How adorable is this:
The naughty girl was putting a "hair pretty" in her mouth in that first picture, but what can you expect, she's 10 month old. Don't worry, I was obviously there to take it away (that and all the other "pretties" that a certain toddler dumped all over the floor).

Oh, something else fun? She loves to dance! When she hears music that she likes, she pulls up and bounces up and down. I have a video of her doing it for the first time back in October. I'll try to remember to post it sometime.

All about Eve

It's been way too long since I've posted! Oops! I'm going to try and write a post about each family member so I can get this blog updated, starting with my baby. I know this is going to be very long, but it's more for me to remember than anything else, so I won't be offended if you, as the reader, do not want to read everything. I love this age and I want to look back and remember everything about this stage in her life. My little Evie (or "Evie Stevie" or "Everz" as we call her) is my sweet little doll baby and I absolutely love her to pieces in a way I could never quite explain in just this blog.


Current Age: 7 months


Eve is my tiny little girl. When she was last weighed at the Doctor's office for her 6 month appointment, they tried to tell me she was only 11 lbs. 3 oz. I was very worried about this because I knew she has gained more than that since her 4 month appointment. So, I weighed her myself and showed the doctor. And she did weigh more by a whole pound! I knew it. The doctor told me that it was hard to weigh her because she's so wiggly, but I'm just really good at those old fashioned scales. But that's not the point of this story, the point is that she barely weighed 12 lbs at her 6 month appointment, which is in the 1%, not even on the charts. I think her length was 24.5 inches which put her in the 20th percentile for length, but I'm not sure about that. It's so strange to me because her sister was always average or just a little less on weight and in the 90s% for length. But Eve is very healthy and there's absolutely nothing to worry about. She's still in 3-6 months clothes but the good news is that they fit her pretty well. I always struggled dressing Kylie because she was always so much longer than she should have been based on her height so everything fell off of her. Eve on the other hand, even though she's small, her weight and length percentiles are closer together so the fit of baby clothes is much better (even if the size itself is much smaller than what she should wear based on age).


It's funny that she's so small because she loves to eat. Within the last week I have stopped breastfeeding her and she's now taking bottles (That's a whole entire story coming up later). She loves bottles and eats them at least every 3 hours. In addition to that, she loves solid food and eats a couple baby jars a day and lots of table food. She loves mashed potatoes, scrambled eggs, potato soup, yogurt... pretty much anything that I feel is safe to give her she will gobble up. It is exhausting trying to feed her but I have so much more energy now due to not breastfeeding/pumping around the clock. Did you know that breastfeeding takes on average 500 extra calories? Not to mention if the baby wakes up at night, guess who gets to wake up EVERY TIME with her? That's right, me, the mommy.

That brings me to my next update: nights with Eve. Everything started out fine with her. The first couple months really didn't seem that bad. I was able to sometimes get 4 straight hours of sleep which is more than I expected since Kylie had her nights mixed up as a baby so I was ready for the worse with Eve. So waking up every 3 to 4 hours didn't seem that bad with Eve at first. However, she never really started to sleep longer and it became convenient for me to just let her sleep in bed with me and I would breastfeed her in my sleep. This was great until she became so attached to me that many nights she wouldn't sleep unless she was cuddled up to me and using me as her personal pacifier, if you get what I mean. Jason eventually moved to the couch to sleep because I wanted as much room as possible with her by my side on our small full size bed. So, at about 6 and a half months we started sleep training... which included giving her bottles instead of breastfeeding... and letting her do some crying it out. We moved her bed out into the hallway and plan to move it into Kylie's room whenever we trust Eve not to wake her up in the middle of the night. So far it's been a whole week that she has slept through the night and I feel like a whole new person! It's amazing what an uninterrupted night's sleep can do for a person :).

Eve is a very active little girl. She is crawling everywhere. She does a combination of real crawling, the inch worm (where she gets up on all fours really high and lunges forward) and the bear crawl (where she stays up really high with her bottom up in the air and crawls that way.) She's a momma's girl so she follows me around everywhere. When I'm cooking in the kitchen, she's hanging out at my feet. When I'm in the laundry room, there she is. You get the idea. She can easily pull herself up to a sitting position and tries really hard to stand up on her own without any success yet. We don't have much in our apartment for her to use to pull up on, so she might not be cruising anytime soon. I'll see what I can find for her to use. I might have to pull out some of Kylie's toy boxes. Eve is a very happy baby (most of the time :] )and makes some pretty funny happy sounds, usually very loud squealing or loud "ba ba ba" talk. Oh, and I'm reluctant to admit this, because I'm not proud of it, but she LOVES TV, unlike Kylie at this age who would usually ignore it if it was on. If the TV is on, Eve will twist around until she can see it... not good. Thank goodness, she also loves books and playing with her sister as long as she is being nice to her :).

She never lost her hair, so she has lots of long honey brown hair sitting on top of brand new baby hair that's growing in. It looks pretty funny, but also adorable. She has very defined and beautiful bone structure and chin and the same dimples as her big sister. I love dimples! I truly think she is a gorgeous little baby. Everyone tells me that she looks like me, but based on my baby pictures, I don't really see that much resemblance. I'll put up some of my pictures sometime in the future, right now they are all at my parent's house. I had a long face, long forehead and ears that stuck out. Eve's face is more angular and more "compact" and her eyes are almond shaped which makes her look like she might have some Asian ancestry. I was also bald, so I'm sure that makes me look a lot different just looking at the pictures. I do see some of me in her, and I also see some of Jason in her especially in the facial expressions. I also had very dark brown eyes and Eve's eyes are a mixture of many different colors. I'm not disagreeing 100% when people say she looks like me, I just don't think she is a clone of me like a lot of people tell me. I think she's cuter than I was :). We'll see who we are comparing her to as she gets older. It's weird how it can all change in a couple years.

Eve is a very friendly little girl. I've called her my "little flirt" because she loves smiling at strangers and very coyly looking away. Kylie, as a baby, went through a period where she was scared of strangers, especially men and if the man had a beard, he had NO CHANCE of winning her affection. Eve never went through that. She smiles and squeals at any new face who looks her way. She loves other babies and young children the most. I have caught her giving huge slobbery kisses to other babies her age. However she's still a mommy's girl and she won't be friendly with anyone until she has gotten in enough "mommy's cuddles" for the day. This really can drive me nuts sometimes, but I'm trying to remember that someday I will long for these fun cuddles when she wants nothing to do with her dear mommy.

I will post pictures later. Right now all our pictures are on the other (faster and better) laptop and we are waiting for a new charger to come in the mail before we can get on it. I might take some pictures and upload them to this computer, but it doesn't have any great editing options like the other one, so it might be a while before I upload any pictures. So stay tuned ;)