Food 101

Go back with me in time 1 month ago and pretend Emerson was just eating food for the first time and you wanted to hear all about how it went.  It's taken us about a month to learn how to eat, so it's really more appropriate than not that it took me this long to blog and post about it!  Emerson LOVED chewing on the spoon, but the fist time she ate rice cereal, she wasn't totally sure what she thought of it.  She didn't seem to not like the flavor, she just wasn't really associating that opening her mouth equated in getting food.  So lots of it ended up lots of places other than her mouth.

[Oh hello big picture - haven't tried this yet since the new formatting lets you upload pictures in XL fashion!]

So after about 2 weeks of eating twice a day...the sweet girl still hadn't gotten it.  Poor Emerson that her mother is a pediatric therapist that specializes in feeding...poor, poor Emerson.  Wait, what am I talking about - POOR, POOR ME!  This was super stressing me out.  I was stressed every time I fed her, and for like 20 minutes before and afterwards.  Just ask Terry.  And in the meantime, be thankful that Beth fed her a lot during the week and her report was always that she 'did great.'  Again, praise the Lord for Beth.  So not to worry, of course I asked a speech therapist I work with about it, who of course told me she was fine but to just keep working on it and she would get it.  And one weekend, she did.  She just got it.  The mantra in my head when I was stressed is exactly what I tell families all the time, as I have been taught: "Variety=quantity, variety=quantity, variety=quantity."  And it worked.  Imagine that!

So the rice cereal was fine, whatever, I spiced it up with cinnamon, switched over to oatmeal, kept spicing it up, tried it bland, but the real fun started when the real food started.  We were having roasted sweet potatoes for dinner, so Emerson did too.  We were having green beans for dinner, so Emerson did too.  The sweet potatoes (with nutmeg and cinnamon) were a breeze, but the green beans...well not so much.  I thought I had done my due diligence in reading about how to 'best' make them, but I had no idea how hard it would really be to puree the shells.  It might have something to do with how old my blender is.  But don't worry, I tried the food processer, blender, and immersion blender - just to be thorough.

All this turned into these tiny little pods (which were a total rip of and waste of money - have switched to ice cube trays) - way to think you needed something fancy at first just to be proved wrong Ellen, K.I.S.S! [remember this acronym??]

If I had remembered it, maybe my kitchen sink wouldn't have looked like THIS the first cooking process:

I know, I can't believe I'm showing you this either.  But really, I'm just showing you so that I can tell you it's gotten much easier, cleaner, and efficient. 

And since, we have made & eaten: sweet potatoes, green beans, avocado, butternut squash, carrots, pumpkin, strawberries, blueberries, pear, apple, apricots, prune juice, watermelon and 3 bites of icecream :)  Now she opens her mouth and chows down like a champ - hooray Em!

More on the ice cream and visit with Molly & Bella later.  But before that you'll get to hear all about our trip to California!

[I'm kind of loving these new huge pictures.  Please tell me if they are obnoxious!]

Proposal

For the record, I am so glad Terry didn't do something like this when he proposed to me...but this is hilarious and awesome!  Found it here.  It makes me so happy to be loved and in love.  xo

Still kickin'

If any of you are left out there, you've either:
a. been checking daily for blog posts and have been very disappointed
b. stopped checking all the time and are shocked to find something new on here today
c. know that our computer hasn't been working and take pity on us, because you know no one wants to read a blog post without pictures!

But thankfully, Aunt Becca was here this weekend, and I was able to steal a picture from her on facebook so I could post and not lose all of our family members, blog stalkers, and other miscellaneous friends! We have been crazy busy the past few weeks checking lots of boxes off of Emerson's list of firsts! 

- First plane ride, check.  All the way across the country to California - and she did AWESOME.  No crying, took 2 hour long naps, no ear problems from the pressure change, entertained nearby passengers with wide mouth smiles and lots of giggling.
- Met 5 cousins that live in California, check.  LOVED them, I mean she loved them - Taylor, Riley & Jordan could make her smile and laugh like no one else!  She and Mikayla loved grabbing at each other's faces and smiling, and meanwhile Kaden was a pro at making a baby laugh from the backseat! [I have SO MANY cute pictures from this trip, I cannot wait to share them with you all once the computer isn't sick anymore!]
     - Went on her first yacht ride
     - Stuck her toes in the sand and in the freezing cold ocean - she might not have liked the ocean so much.  But it sure did make for hilarious photos.
     - Went to In-N-Out.  Yum.  Well, she didn't eat it, but we did, yum.  Also on this list should be: Pinkberry, Yogurt Town, Yogurt Land, Yogurt Mania, and 800 other yogurt places we saw and wanted to go to because they are all delicious.  [Sidenote, HOORAY found out this weekend there is a new yogurt place here in Charlotte - Yoforia.  I wonder how many other names they can come up with.]
- Eaten a ton of new foods including but not limited to: rice, oatmeal, avocado, sweet potatoes, green beans, butternut squash, carrots, apples, pears, blueberries, strawberries, bananas, prune juice (as you can imagine the ones that are crossed out aren't really preferred...at all)
- Gotten 2 teeth ?!?!?!?!
- Started babbling with all kinds of new sounds mamamamammababababababbabadadadadadada

Hoping to get the computer and all of its accessories working this weekend - while visiting Molly & Bella and celebrating Molly's 30th birthday! - (I'm blogging from work, shhhhh) so that I can show you some of these fabulous photos from the last month's happenings.  Don't give up on us, we'll be making a big comeback!