Helen Jeanette had her first weekend in Charlottesville! Fun times were had by all.

We arrive late Friday night and Helen Jeanette slept a good portion of the trip and then transitioned sweetly to sleeping on the flour since we had forgotten her play pen. Saturday we hung out for a little while I’m the morning waiting for it to warm up and then headed to the Charlottesville mall for a couple hours enjoying the weather and shopping. Helen Jeanette was quite spoiled and together Chris and I bought her three new books.

Keith and Jenny came over for dinner and we had a great meal on the porch watching the geese play in the lake.

Sunday morning Keith came over for brunch and we spent some time going through old boxes of Chris’s stuff. Helen Jeanette got to try on a sweater and hat that Keith wrote as a baby. She also really took to some of Chris’s old toys.

We’re slowly getting our old bedroom set up as an office so we need a place for Helen Jeanette to play. She was awfully excited for her new space!

Someone was very cute today!

Can you believe it?

She’s in the 38% for height, 65% for weight, and 92% for head circumference. She weighs 16 lbs 13 oz.

She’s eating broccoli and rice cereal and she spent her first night away from her mom this week.

She’s not crawling yet but she wants to so much! She can go from sitting to on her belly pretty comfortably and its disconcerting to sit her up and turn around to find her in a totally different position without any noise!

She’s still super smiley and wants to put everything she finds in her mouth. She loves to play peek a boo and will laugh and laugh every time. She gets super groggy if she doesn’t have a good nap but when you try to entertain her in this state she’ll sometimes go into historical hyper laughing. It’s incredibly sweet.

No special chair photos yet but here are a few from today.

We ended up moving her 6 month milestone up 4 days because I’ll be spending my first night away from her Thursday and we wanted something to supplement my unimpressive freezer stash. I’m also pumping around the clock until then.

Presenting: steamed broccoli! 3/4/14

I’m ready mom, bring it on!

She wasn’t quite sure what to think but decided she’d better keep going! I have a video which is great but I need to set the blog to accept videos first.

It was nice enough to take Helen Jeanette to the neighborhood park!

She’s gotten so good at this! I can even leave her for a minute or two.

This last weekend was Helen Jeanette’s 5 month birthday. The day after we had some people over for Chris’s 26th birthday including 2 babies younger then Helen Jeanette and weighing around 9-10 pounds. Helen Jeanette looked huge compared to them and it was so hard to believe that it’s only been a few months since she was that size, we can hardly remember her being that tiny.

So what is going on in a 5 month old’s world? We don’t have any weight/height statistics because she only goes to the doctor every other month these days, but here are a couple things going on.

*She’s sitting! If we sit her up she can hold herself pretty steady and remain upright while she grabs at and plays with toys.

*She’s really refining her grabbing skills and can confidently reach for and grab items. She’s started watching her hands again and I think she’s discovering her fingers because she’s mostly making pinching motions when she does this.

*Her sleep is still not great, and we’re thinking fondly back to the days when she was sleeping through the night. These days there are usually 2 night wakings where she’s hungry, eats, and goes right back to sleep. I’ve considered letting her cry but when she eats it’s clear that she was hungry so for now I’m just hoping that introducing solids at 6 months will help her sleep through again.

*She loves reading books and wants to grab, grab, grab whatever we’re reading to her.

*She can play quietly for long periods of time and sometimes we just put her stuffed doggy in the crib and let her play for 10-20 minutes.

*She’s started squirming so much in her crib that the back of her head is a tangled, frizzy, bird’s nest. She’s also getting a lot more hair, although the length isn’t changing much.

*She’s super social and lights up when people come to visit her in the nursery at work.

*It’s becoming much more difficult to take her pictures in the rocker, since she now wants to play with the toys instead of sweetly sitting there stationary.

During our snowsports vacation I was pleased to find and use a snow map plugin for OsmAnd. It only had the lifts, but I recorded traces of all the Beech mountain slopes and some of the Sugar Mountain slopes, although I haven’t sat down to get most of those into OSM yet.

While searching through F-Droid’s mapping and geography applications, I found Keypad Mapper 3. House numbers are one of the most noticeably missing features on OpenStreetMap in the United States (and New Zealand when we were there in 2012), and Keypad Mapper makes it easy to add them in.

Once the data is collected I’ve had to email it to myself, which while lame, works. I open the GPX and OSM files from Keypad Mapper up in JOSM and download the full map for the same area (automatically selected). Tags can be copied with control+c and pasted into another node with control+shift+v.