Teeth!!

Click on the picture to view it large so that you can experience James in all of his gap-toothed glory.

Is Daddy Home Yet?

Cute James story: On Friday, we went upstairs to play and to wait for Tim to get home from work. We do this everyday at about the same time. After playing for about 5 minutes, James said, "Dadadadada," and crawled over to the door and sat with his little face pressed against the glass. He did this until Tim got home. Now this could be purely random, especially since I am not 100% sure that he is saying dada and mama with meaning yet, but it still made me smile, and it made Tim's day to come home to James and Jax waiting at the door for him. And I do think that James has some kind of crazy accurate internal clock. He always wakes up at even times, like exactly 3:00 or 4:00. Maybe he is a genius afterall :-)

Stand Up!

Everytime I turn around, James is standing up. Literally, everytime. Tonight he pulled himself on a big cardboard box, flipped over it, landed on his head and did a somersault. He sat up and immediately pulled himself right back up on it. He is getting a lot more stable, although he is still not cruising or doing any other pre-walking skills. Fine with me, him standing up is scary enough. He always looks very pleased with himself when he finds something new to pull himself up on.I can't reisist his cute, skinny little baby tush.
His skinny little chicken legs still don't really fill out his babylegs, but we love them none the less.And this one shows off one of his pairs of cute Halloween jammies. (yes, he has more than 1 pair)And a shout out to our newest blog commenter, Great Grandma Pat. Thanks for posting Grandma, glad you are enjoying the blog!!

More from last weekend

I forgot to upload pictures from my other camera from last weekend. I found these two from getting ready to head down to Denver for Ryan and Kelly's rehearsal dinner and had to post them for 2 reasons. a.) I think the picture of James is adorable as usual and I think his outfit was extra cute (especially his shoes) and b.) For some reason I look about 7 feet tall in the second one which I secretly love.

Clapping

James will now clap on command. Well unless we are at music class and clapping is actually an appropriate thing to do. Then he just sucks on his finger and looks at me like I am crazy when I ask him to clap. And he loves it when we say, "Yay, James!" It makes him clap even more! This morning when he woke up and saw Tim he started clapping. How cute is that?

A Busy Weekend!

Ryan and Kelly's wedding was on Saturday, and we were so glad to be a part of their big day. The whole Seeman family is so important to us, and we are so happy that Ryan found such a wondeful person to marry! September 20th was a busy day because it is also the day that Anne and Sean welcomed baby George! He was born early Saturday morning, and I was able to meet him before the wedding. He is adorable, and I am so proud of Anne for having a natural birth with such a big baby-8 1/2 pounds! James and I are very excited there is finally another baby boy around! Congratulations Anne and Sean!

The wedding was perfect, Ryan and Kelly did such a good job of planning everything, and we had a great time. James was a champ and did great, even with 2 late nights in a row with the rehearsal dinner on Friday and the wedding on Saturday. Big surprise, but I had fun finding him a cute outfit, complete with matching hat to wear to the wedding. He was a big hit with everyone. And he hit another milestone at the wedding, he finally figured out how to clap! He spent most of the wedding clapping spontaneously. Stay tuned for a video clip showcasing his new talent.
All dressed up with Holland and Riley after the ceremony.
Not the best picture, but it gives you the full impact of his adorable outift complete with mini loafers.
James and Taylor were very well coordinated, but it is nearly impossible to get a picture of the two of them now that James is mobile, and Taylor is a wild child!

What big eyes you have....
James and Riley carrying on a long standing Nichols-Seeman tradition of rocking out to Billy Ocean's Get Out of My Dreams, Get Into My Car. This one may have to be the Nichols' family Christmas card, we will just have to photoshop in Thomas somewhere.

Just James (and leaves)

Baby bath robes are hilarious!
This is what James looks like after napping on me and sweating excessively.

James attempted the stairs for the first time last night, and did great!
And totally random, and non-James related, but this is what our driveway/yard looked like a mere hours after sweeping and raking. Our tree is home to 3 ninja squirrels who are doing their best to break off every limb/branch and knock off every seed pod while tormenting the schnoodle. We can't even sit outside anymore without a constant shower of seed pods, leaves, and branches falling on our heads. And the squirrles are constantly falling out of the tree, so I am deathly afraid of having James in his swing for fear that one will fall on him and eat his face off. I hate squirrels, they need to find a new home.
So this video is probably only interesting for the grandparents, or anyone else who finds everything James does extremely adorable and utterly fascinating. Here he is showcasing a wide variety of his latest skills. Including but not limited to crawling, getting into a sitting position, pulling himself up, waving, and spinning in circles. If you are not a grandparent and choose to watch this, I am just warning you, it is a minute and a half that you will never get back in your life.

11 Months!

Happy 11 month birthday to James! We can now start the official count down to his first birthday. The main change for James this month has been how mobile he has gotten. He can get anywhere and everywhere around the house and he is such a climber! Right now his favorite thing to climb is up on the dishwasher when it is open, and the bar thing in our kitchen. He also loves pulling himself up on baskets, chairs, couches, stools, you name it. He hasn't started cruising yet, but I am sure it is right around the corner.

James is still having major attachment to me, which I know is a good thing, but is proving to be a little bit challenging for the time being. Despite his constant clingyness to me and his lack of stellar sleeping, we know how lucky we are with James. He is such a content baby and loves to go places. We can always take him to restaurants and with us on errands because he loves to observe different places and people. He is very easy going and laid back and is pretty flexible with his routine to a certain extent. We can always make him smile and we love to get some good belly laughs out of him at least once a day. If he does get fussy, it is nothing that being held or nursing for a little bit can't solve.

James loves to play peek-a-boo and thinks it is silly to see anything upside down. James still loves any and all balls. Beach balls, wiffle balls, playground balls, bouncy balls, Jax's tennis balls, and actually anything that is remotely shaped like a ball he immediately gravitates towards. His other favorite thing is wooden blocks. One of his favorite games is to take his blocks one at a time, lick it, offer it to me to lick and then throw it to the ground as hard as he can and repeat with every other block in the set. This activity holds his attention for a good 10 minutes at a time.

James' babbling has increased, but he is nowhere near saying an actual word yet. He will say mamamama and dadadada but not as a name for us. He will also occasionally babble babababanananana and our all time favorite that he reserves for yelling at the top of his lungs while standing in his crib at 2 in the morning is NAYNAYNAYNAY! We think this translates to, "Why the hell am I in here by myself, come and get me so we can play please!"

James is now eating more of a variety of regular food and not many purees. He eats plain, whole milk yogurt with fresh banana or peach for breakfast and then eats a few cheerios or pieces of a flaxseed whole grain waffle as finger food. Lunch is hit or miss, sometimes he is not in the mood. But a typical lunch is cottage cheese, avocado and applesauce. For dinner he will have a little of anything I have made that is appropriate for him to eat too. He had lentil soup last week, and tonight will get to try lasagna. If we are eating something I don't want him to have he will have pieces of a vegie burger, or sometimes multigrain cereal and some type of vegetable. So far we have avoided giving him juice or any overly processed or sugary foods. I figure he has the rest of his life to eat junk, so why start now? He still nurses all the time, which I think is probably for comfort about 60% of the time. He no longer takes a bottle, and has never really taken a pacifier, so nursing is the only real soothing/comfort he has. He is nowhere near ready to stop nursing, so I see us nursing well past a year. He loves to drink water out of a cup and we will introduce a little cow's milk in the next couple of months so that he can get used to drinking it and it will give me an opportunity to leave him for more than a couple hours at a time without having to pump (which is a good thing because the past few times I have pumped I have not gotten any milk).

I have been enjoying all of the activities that I signed the two of us up for, and I will speak for James and say that he seems to enjoy them as well. He seems to be a little more shy than other babies we are around, so I think that being around other people and babies is good socializing for him (and me!). He loves to shake the shakers at music and play with the scarves. He isn't clapping yet, but he will sometimes wave/flap when we sing and listen to music. We went to our first swim class this week, and it was great. Longmont Rec Center is awesome and has a whole kid's area with warm water and fountains, waterfalls, slides and a mini lazy river. We just splashed around and sang songs mainly, but we had fun as long as the water stayed far away from James' face. We do Gymboree class in Boulder, which I have mentioned before, and it has really encouraged James to try new things. He watches other babies do things and then will try it himself. It also gives him a new variety of things to climb on and crawl around each week. Not to mention they have mass quantities of a variety of different balls, so James finds a new favorite ball each week he latches onto for the whole class. It is also nice to talk to other moms with babies James' same age at all our different activities. I really miss Book Babies in Denver though :-( Storytime at Longmont library is way lame in comparison. Once Baby O'Reilly is a little older, we may have to plan some Book Baby playdates.

I am sitting here with a sleeping/nursing James laying on my lap enjoying his snuggles (and sweaty head) and have gotten a little long winded in my 11 month update, so I don't think I have left anything to add to a list for the month. So I will just end with saying I can't believe how much things have changed for our family in the past 11 months. We are very lucky to have James, and James is very lucky to have so many people who love him.

New Pictures

Even though it may not seem like it with all the posts on here, I have totally been slacking on taking pictures lately (for me that is, not for the average person). So I have been doing some major picture taking the past few days. James is looking like such a big boy to me recently. And he has almost 6 teeth now. The two on top are almost all the way in and he looks hilarious. He will totally be needing braces as a tween. Then 1 more tooth on the bottom and 1 more up top are just starting to break through. This makes his crappy sleeping even more fun. Who knew that I would have an almost 1 year old who slept worse than the average newborn? I just keep telling myself that he will most likely sleep through the night before kindergarten. If not, I will sell him to the highest bidder. And I forgot to post pictures of James and Marley from this weekend. Marley is our friend Carol's baby who is a year old. She is such a cute little peanut, and James took seeing her as an opportunity to practice his open mouth kisses on someone besides family. Lucky Marley. We were just trying to get a picture of their faces close together, but James went in for the smooch.

Go Broncos!

My friend from SAS, Sandy, works for the Broncos and bought James this outfit when he was born. It finally fits him just in time for football season, so he wore it over to Grandma Katie's to watch the game yesterday. It must be good luck because they won!

James the Moving Machine

Moving seems to be the trend with babies this week. James has become increasingly mobile each day this week. Everytime I turn around he is doing something that I have not seen him do before. We go to a Gymboree class (a baby gym place) once a week in Boulder which we both are loving, and it has really encouraged James to try new things. This week he climbed up a series of stairs and big boxes, crawled up a ramp, and went down a slide on his tummy--all by himself. It is fun to watch him discover all these new things that he can do. He has now mastered getting gracefully from a sitting...to crawling...

to standing position...

and everything in between....He has started to do a few crawls on his hands and knees, but he quickly switches back to his army crawl if he is in a hurry to get somewhere.

James is also getting better at pulling himself up on anything he can grab a hold of.

Note that his love of Coors goes beyond just sucking on empty bottles. He also still licks everything and everyone, including bathroom walls. Yumm-o! And incase that wasn't enough new pictures, a cute picture with Dad:and Auntie Mel who had lunch with us today!James has gone on quite the growth spurt and outgrown all his summer clothes, so I am happy that the weather is cooling off and he can wear all his new fall clothes! (and shoes, and hats..)

Weekend in Denver

We had a great weekend that we spent in Denver. I had Kelly's shower to go to on Saturday and Tim had Ryan's bachelor party that night (their wedding is in 2 weeks!) and then we went to the Rockies game on Sunday. Kelsey was nice enough to let us invade her weekend and crash at her place-thanks Kelsey! We also got to see Anne and Sean who are getting ready to have a baby anyday now. Anne is the cutest pregnant person ever, and I am SO, so excited to meet their baby soon! Besides my friends, the thing I miss the most in Denver is Wash Park, so we had to go for a walk around the park and take some pictures of James at the gardens, which are at their peak right now.

Jax and I both got haircuts on Saturday as well, so here we are showing off our new looks.
The whole Nichols' gang went to the game on Sunday. The weather was perfect, and James got a chance to wear his Rockies uniform that Grandma Katie bought for him this summer.


James didn't make it on the jumbo-tron this time, but Taylor did right after we left! Maybe next time....