Garden

Here's a picture of my garden before planting. So far I've put in lettuce, carrots and parsley and when I get back from my trip to Utah I'll plant everything but the tomatoes and basil. Stay tuned for pictures once things start growing! Assuming of course, that I can actually get things to grow...

Funny Boy

Sawyer has picked up some funny habits in the past few weeks. One is rolling his tongue, like he's trying to pronounce "R" in Spanish. He is amazingly adept at this and can do it in any pitch or tone of voice. He has also started babbling all the time - before he made lots of noises, but now you can tell that he's imitating speech sounds. He makes "sentences" and obviously knows exactly what he's saying, even if Eric and I don't. We're still signing with him, but so far he still only signs back to us when he wants to go to bed. The other night I was nursing him to sleep and as he was drifting off he signed to himself "bed" over and over again, like he was saying "ahhh, I get to go to bed." He understands when we sign "bath", "Daddy", "eat", "bird", "light", "fan", "up", "more", "book" and "kiss."

My favorite funny thing he does is head-butting whoever is holding him. It seems to be his way of saying "I like you" (maybe he's part goat?)



We went to the beach with Eric's family for Easter and had a great weekend - the weather was fabulous. Sawyer had his first taste of sand. He was unimpressed. He then rubbed some all over his face and cried to be picked up.






This is how he's learned what "up" means. Eric will say "want to go up?" and he'll throw his head back in the air and clench his fists to get ready. There's nothing that makes him laugh harder.

Gardening

Now that I'm sleeping at night and actually have energy during the day, I've picked up a new venture: gardening. My mom is an extremely gifted gardener, but sadly I was never interested enough as a kid to learn from her. My project this year is a square foot garden. I learned about this technique from a friend of mine in college who had just returned from a trip to Haiti where he taught people how to grow their own vegetables more efficiently. The standard method of vegetable gardening is to plant in long parallel rows, which takes up a lot of space and usually produces much more than a typical family can use. A square foot garden is arranged as the name implies, in squares. The idea is to plant one crop per square foot - then when that crop is harvested you plant a new one in that square and you can continuously have vegetables growing. I'm doing a 4'x4' one this year and I'm planting: tomatoes, cantaloupe, cucumber, carrots, romaine lettuce, green leaf lettuce, parsley, rosemary, basil, strawberries, green beans, and some flowers (nasturtium, sweet peas, and marigolds). I have planted a few of the cool crop seeds (the lettuce and carrots) and they are growing beautifully. I am really enjoying this so far. Who knows? Maybe some of my mom's talent is genetic.

Ahhh, Sleep!

Sad that I've gone back to once a month posting...

BUT that may change soon since my life is completely different now! After lots of trial and error, I discovered that Sawyer has an allergy to cow's milk. That's why he was waking up screaming several times every night - the milk proteins from foods I consume pass into my breastmilk and he can't handle them. So I've been off dairy for a month and oh my goodness! What a difference. He is a changed baby. The dietary restrictions have been hard as I'm something of a dairy freak - I used to have milk on my cereal for breakfast, yogurt with lunch, cheese with almost everything, and ice cream for dessert. All that's changed now! I substitute rice milk with cereal in the mornings (which is kind of gross, but I'm getting used to it.) And it's totally worth whatever I have to do to be able to sleep at night - I can't believe how much energy I have!

I am also feeling totally vindicated in my parenting choices. I was getting a lot of pressure to let him "cry it out" to get him to sleep through the night. I am so glad I didn't give in! My poor baby was in pain and leaving him to cope by himself wouldn't have accomplished anything positive. Yay for parental instinct!