Snow Day

A winter storm recently dumped about 8 inches of snow on Fort Worth...

Fortunately, we had nowhere to go so we spent the day...

Doing laundry

Riding the rocking horse that Grandpa built


Looking out the window and crawling around the house


Crawling and standing in the snow


Building a snowman

More things James can do...

He can give kisses! They are the drool-y, open mouthed kind, but kisses nonetheless! He's somewhat stingy with his kisses, but when he's willing, they are very sweet!

He can clap! In trying to teach him to clap, we would clap his hands for him. So, he will often grab our hands and make our hands clap. He finally figured out that he can make his own hands clap together!

We are working on teaching James a little sign language. We're focusing on 'mommy', 'daddy', 'more', and 'all done'. It seems James might be understanding the concept of 'more', but he's created his own variation of the sign.

Here's a couple recent pictures of our little cutie:

James is just relaxing with his cousin Tristan

James is flirting with the camera

James is 8 months old!

Month eight has been a big month for James! We can't believe how much our precious baby has changed in such a short time.

1) James is crawling fast! He doesn't like to put his knees down on the tile so he changes from crawling to bear crawling quickly as he moves from carpet to tile.
2) He can pull up to standing on pretty much anything, and he has started to try to climb. He can get up the step to the garden tub in our bathroom.
3) James has 2 teeth! His bottom front teeth came in one right after the other earlier this month. He won't let me get a look at them long enough to take a picture.
4) He can feed himself finger food. And, he's become a little stubborn at mealtime these days. We don't think he likes for us to feed him anymore, but he's not at all able to use a spoon yet. We have all sorts of tricks to getting him fed though. The key seems to be giving him something to do with his hands. We've been trying to give him more table food, but he won't eat much of it.
5) James can stand on his own for about 10-15 seconds. We catch him practicing this skill several times a day.
6) Lately, James has not been sleeping well. We were out of town and then James got a cold so he got a little off track. Hopefully we'll get back to normal soon.
7) He is taking a bath in the bathtub, not a baby bathtub. He kept standing up in the little baby tub and trying to step out of it. We figured it was safer just to stop using the baby tub. James seems to love having so much room for his baths. He still tries to stand up though!
8) James shakes his head "no" at us all the time. It seems he knows what it means because he does it when we're trying to feed him or trying to clean his face off (which he hates). He thinks it's the funniest thing. He's such a stinker!

We let James do some of the driving on our recent trip to Florida.




James was not incredibly cooperative for his monthly growth pictures. We have a ton of the top of his head because he was trying to sit down or crawl away. These are the best ones.