But the highlight was definitely Friday night when our friend Joaquin was sweet enough to drive up from San Antonio to have dinner with the three of us. As always it was great to see him and so fun for him to meet Maya for the first time.

Hope we can get back to Austin again soon. It really is a city filled with energy.

Sunday a big group of Cranes came over for a pool party. It was Maya’s first swim in her Grandad’s pool and she had a great time. We’re ready to get back again soon for some more fun in the sun!

Her first tooth is almost halfway in now, too! She’s been a trooper through the teething. Sometimes it seems to really be bothering her, but other times she doesn’t seem to be hurting at all. Her first tooth will be her bottom, right tooth in the front. It looks like the one on the left is just starting to poke out, too. Let’s hope they don’t start to bother her anymore than they already have.

We’ve also been making daily trips to the park right behind our house. Maya gets so happy when we push her in the bucket swing. Her face lights up as soon as you put her in it. She also likes going down the small slide. (With mom and dad’s help, of course.) Sometimes when we get to the bottom she’ll just hang out there looking at all the trees and the blue sky. We’ve been having great weather in Fort Worth lately!

Now if only she could get her naps down, life would be perfect! For awhile she’d been doing down for a long nap each morning, but the last week she’s decided she doesn’t want to be put in her crib for her naps. She’s definitely starting to have a little separation anxiety because she gets upset when we leave the room much more often these days. Hopefully it won’t be long before she figures out that we’re always coming back for her. There’s often work waiting for mom when Maya goes down for her naps, so she really doesn’t have a choice in the matter!

Height: 26.5 inches (up from 26 inches two months ago)
Weight: 16 pounds 14 ounces (up from 15 pounds 8 ounces)
Head: 42.5 cm (up from 16 1/4 inches… don’t know why they changed measurement systems on this one, but I’ll leave the math up to you to see how much her head grew.)

She was in the 75th percentile for height and weight, so her pace is slowing a bit, which we expected. After all, her mom and dad aren’t in the 95th percentile of anything, especially height!

It’s been an amazing six months, and we couldn’t imagine our lives without Miss Maya. It’s great fun to watch her grow before our eyes, and her smile melts our hearts each and every time.

With this doctor appointment came her transition to solid foods. She had already started rice cereal, but now we’re diving in to tastier things. So far she’s had oatmeal and squash. Next on the list is peas. She never got much into the rice cereal, but she seems to love the oatmeal and squash most of the time. Sometimes her patience is short for eating though, and I think she’d rather just have some good ol’ milk. But she never makes it through a meal without cracking Jason and I up. Squash ends up in the most unlikely places!

She’s also babbling like crazy… she has a million things to tell us about. And she hasn’t mastered the difference between indoor and outdoor voices! She’s rolling over both ways, but still hasn’t used these skills to head all the way across a room. I guess she’s just happy hanging on her blankets for now.

I wouldn’t say she totally hates it, but she definitely doesn’t love it either. Although I think time will really tell. She’s still kind of figuring out what the heck she should be doing with this spoon that keeps coming at her face. Most of the cereal ends up on her bib or back on the spoon. Sometime she decides she’ll clamp her mouth shut to make it more fun for us. But sometimes she opens right up.

The family member most excited about Maya’s transition to solid foods is Bailey. They’ve been becoming best of friends lately: she reaches her hand out for kisses whenever he’s around. The first time we fed Maya cereal, Bailey was lingering around the high chair making eyes at Maya. She leaned right over the edge toward him, and he licked her face clean. They both loved it. We have a feeling Bailey will love it even more when she figures out how to throw the food down to him.

We head back to the doctor in about another week, so then we’ll get to start trying some other foods out. I mean really, would you want to eat that rice cereal? Looks worse than Cream of Wheat to me!

Jason and I especially loved being able to get out without our sweet girl a couple of times. We got to go to the gym on a regular basis, which doesn’t fit into our day very often anymore. And we also got to go out on a date one night and out with a group of friends another. Have to say, it was really, really nice to be out with our friends and around only adults for a few hours. Something we have to make sure we make time for at least every so often!

We had a few days of nice weather, so Nana got Maya outside on a blanket and in her bouncy chair so she could enjoy the weather before heading back to the Minnesota cold. We even took her to the park to give her her first push in a swing. She was so tiny! Not quite ready for the park yet! We also ate well, at home and out, and just did a lot of hanging out. She made my work week extra easy too. I can work much faster with a full-time Nana watching Maya as opposed to working as fast as I can with a few hours with a sitter. (But I do love our sitters too!)

So we were all happy to be at Grandad’s house where it was nice and warm. We got in just before bedtime on Friday night. On Saturday, we headed to Gram’s to catch up with some of the family. Maya was a little bit fussy, but it was still great for her to see everyone! She took an extra long nap when we got back to Grandad’s, so the drive the day before must have worn her out.

But Sunday was the big day for her. She got to attend her first parade, and it was a Mardi Gras parade so it was that much better! It was a little chilly, so she curled up in her stroller for the first half and took a little nap, but she got up for the end. We got a few smiles from her here and there when floats would come by, but I think she was mostly a little confused by it all! Why are all these people throwing things at me? But it was great to have her out there, and next year she’s sure to have even more fun.

It’s been quite a weekend for our family. Fort Worth looked a little bit like Minnesota last week, when we got 12 inches of snow in one day. Practically shut the city down! I wouldn’t have been so bad, but we lost our power. Had it been just Jason and I, we would have piled the blankets on the bed and toughed it out. But it was way too cold for little Miss Maya! So we headed to a hotel Thursday night.

We wish her first night in a hotel had been under better circumstances, but she did pretty well anyway. She was probably a little confused when Jason was trying to pack up with a flashlight! I was at work for the night so I met them at the hotel when I got off, and Maya was already asleep in her pack-and-play.

A little snow does wonders for the beauty of any city, and despite all the downed tree branches, it was fun to see snow covering Fort Worth. It was Maya’s first Texas snow (she got to see plenty in Minnesota over Christmas) and it was Bailey’s first significant snow. He’s been around for dustings, but nothing like 12 inches, and he LOVED it! He was running around in circles as soon as we let him out. He loved chasinng his ball and losing it in the snow. And he’d stick his snout in it and enjoy some for a snack, too.

Finally three days later our power is back. Luckily we had planned to head to Shreveport the weekend for Mardi Gras, so that couldn’t have worked out any better. We were happy to have a place to keep warm!

Height: 25 inches
Weight: 15 lbs, 8 oz

She took her shots with about as much grace as a 4-month-old can show, which means she turned bright red and screamed as loud as she could! Poor little thing.

We’ve been having a blast with Maya lately. She’s always smiling and laughing, which makes everything so much fun for Jason and I. We love knowing she’s having a good time instead of just wondering what she thinks!

Some fun facts about our 4-month-old girl:

She still loves her baths. She’s started furiously kicking her legs when she’s in the water and gets a kick out of being able to splash herself a little. A swimmer in the making?

She’s finally taken a little bit of an interest in Bailey. She’ll at least spend a little time looking at him now when he’s near her, and she enjoys watching him when he goes crazy running circles around the yard.

Her favorite toys are her small pink rattle that she can hold and shake and the snail rattle from her exersaucer. This one gets her attention even if she’s screaming.

She loves playing airplane and sometimes will even squeal a little.

She finally takes a bottle without too many complaints.

Bedtime is 9 p.m., so dad can have some playtime when he gets home from work. She usually gets up between 7 and 8.

She still takes five or six naps a days. Staying awake much more than two hours is tough for little girls!

She’s great at grabbing things, holding things and getting almost everything she can hold into her mouth.

She can hold her head all the way up while on her tummy and actually doesn’t mind it so much anymore.

She’s starting to eye our food when we’re eating…but her doctor says to hold off on anything solid until closer to six months.

At times, she’s a babbling, laughing fool. Other times, she’s a big ol’ bucket of fuss. It’s becoming more of the former and less of the latter, which makes for a lot of fun.

She’ll happily sit in her bumbo chair for short periods of time. She has fun sitting in it on the kitchen counter, watching mom cook.

Can’t wait to see what the next month brings.

I had originally thought I’d only return to work part time; I loved every second of maternity leave but knew that I still wanted to at least work a little, to keep using that part of my mind. But we didn’t want Maya in daycare if we could at all help it. Thanks to their flexibility at the paper, we’re getting to make full time work, without feeling like Maya has to spend too much time away from a parent. Two days a week, Jason works an early shift and I work a late shift, so we pass Maya off at the office. These days are great for me, because I get to be at work, around adults, stimulating my brain again, for a full 8 hours, but I know that Maya is with dad so I don’t feel guilty about being away! And I think Jason and Maya are going to really start to love their time alone together each week. (It’s gotten off to a rough start with them both being a little sick!) The other three days a week, I work from home. So I’m just steps away from my little gal! We have a sitter that comes to play with her during some of that time, and then I do some of my work while Jason is home in the morning or at night, some on weekends, etc. So overall, I don’t feel like she is missing out on much time with her parents, which is a great compromise for all of us! We have a sitter whose true love for kids is so apparent that I really am excited about Maya being able to spend time with her. I think it’s been great for her to have someone new to play with.

So in the end, even though the transition has been a little rough, we’re all thinking it’s going to work out pretty well after we get used to our new routines!