First food that's not entirely from Mommy

On Christmas Day, a week shy of 6 months, after a month of her trying to pull food off my plate, we decided to try a bit of solid food just to see how she liked the texture and to give her practice with the spoon. I admit it was bittersweet. How could my tiny little baby suddenly be old enough for solid food? Until now, her entire diet came from me. It's hard to describe, there was just something special about that. It was weird putting something 'foreign' in her mouth!

As for how she liked it, well....




The spoon wasn't interesting enough, she had to go for the whole bowl.

Merry Christmas!

A brief break in San Francisco

Fredo goes to SF every December for a conference, so we decided to tag along this year. I don't know why people say it's always foggy there, every time I've been there the weather has been gorgeous. This time it was just cold. Angelina loved it, but that's just because Mommy was holding her ALL DAY LONG. Good thing for slings!
And lucky us, we got to hang out with Elise for a bit.

Angelina's First Girl's Night In

And Chakapu thinking she's our Christmas present

Thanksgiving Road Trip

We spent Thanksgiving at South Padre Island, the souternmost tip of Texas coast, near the Mexican border. It's a 5ish hour drive from San Antonio. Have we told you how much Angelina hates driving???? Here she is before we left, still happy. She's not a road trip person I guess.




The weather and the water was fabulous! It was Angelina's first glimpse of the sea and she was mesmerized. She wouldn't take her eyes off. We didn't take her swimming, but she loved every minute there.





From there we went to McAllen, Texas to visit the Bentson Bird Refuge. It's supposed to be a 'World Birding Center.' We met this old guy whom we're sure was Swiss tho we didn't ask. His accented sounded Swiss German and he was just goofy enough to be Swiss. He told us the place used to be full of birds, but they cut down a bunch of trees last year and now, nothing! It's possible the lack of birds was also due to the drought. A bit unfortunate, we've seen more birds in San Antonio. But we did see the Rio Grande and though we didn't cross into Mexico, Fredo got a glimpse of it. Angelina seemed to enjoy her hike at least.






More pics to come.

Off to Cali

In early November we took Angelina on her second plane journey - a trip to visit her California cousins. Since Fredo was already there, I had to fly with her by myself. That was, um, interesting.... it wasn't horrible, but sitting surrounded by men trying to nurse a screaming child while not trying to totally flash them all was eventful. Fortunately she managed ok. Not as great as when we went to Switzerland, but she can't always be perfect!



With little Miss Hannah Banana


With Nanny

She loves her Opa!

With Aunt Debbie, her Rohr cousins and a neighborhood friend

Visiting at Nanny's house

In her pretty new dress from Louise in Ireland!

Our little Tiger

Nearly 4 months old now

Amazing Angelina Allegrini (sometimes known as Angelini Tortellini) is still amazing. We saw a developmental pediatrician at 3.5 months, just for a bit of followup from her hospital stay to make sure she had no issues with lack of oxygen or from being heavily sedated for awhile. Well, no issues! Not only was she doing everything a 3 month old should do she was doing lots of things a 4 month old should do! And just to show off, from that day on she started a whole bag of new tricks (ok, maybe thanks to Nanny spending so much time with her). She grabs onto our fingers and pulls herself in little crunches (perhaps she learned that from sitting on mommy's belly while trying to work off the pregnancy flab). She doesn't fully roll over but she sure tries to. She can scoot all over the place. She of course puts everything in her mouth and she's just found her toes! At this point, she shows all signs of being a perfectly healthy and happy almost 4 month old.

And she's growing like a weed. As of October 25 she was 61cm (~25 inches) long and 11 lbs, 11 oz. However I think she's had another growth spurt since then. None of the 3-6 month one piece outfits with feet fit her. She has her Papa's long legs.

(more recent pictures to come...the one night I finally have a bit of time to post them, the dang program isn't letting me!)

More Pictures

I just love her silly face on this one!



Hanging out with Garth. He's a natural at this stuff! Garth was the first person to get her to drink from a bottle, if only a little bit.


Sleeping on the flight home from Geneva....



With her Allegrini Cousins



A family photo


Some views from Switzerland