Not all skies have rainbows..

Last week started a new and exciting chapter in Ashlyn’s life: daycare. I think there are some good things about daycare. It teaches a level of independence since she won’t get attention 100% of the day. It helps build social skills, and kids in daycare tend to learn things faster when they see other kids doing them (crawling, for instance). It also, and some may argue that this is not a good thing, exposes them to germs now so that they won’t get sick as much when they start school.

The first day, to put it bluntly, sucked. I did NOT like leaving her there, and the image I kept having in my head was of her crying as we looked at her in her little crib. We moved out of sight and she calmed down and looked around, but I still couldn’t shake that image. Luckily, when I came by to pick her up she was happily playing away. So it wasn’t so bad, and each day gets a little easier. Unfortunately, she got sick the first week as almost every child does, and we got to experience her first ear infection. She’s on the mend from it, and we hope she’ll be back in full form by this weekend.

Despite all the change, Ashlyn has handled things pretty well. And because this blog will stay around much longer than my poor memory, I’m going to end this entry with some happy pictures that we took over the last few weeks.  These are the images I want to hold to.

A glance back, a look ahead...

I want to apologize in advance on this post.. something has been bugging me, and I was debating whether or not to write about it. In the end I decided that I'd post about it, at the encouragement of a few good friends of the family.

Sleeping through the night is a big milestone for babies, but an even bigger milestone for the parents since it finally allows them to shake that bleary eyed look that veteran parents get so much amusement out of.

For the past month, we worked on getting Ashlyn to sleep through the night by cutting back the amount of feedings, the amount of milk at each feeding, and finally by cutting out the last bottle all together. She fussed for a bit that last night when we didn't get up to feed her, but since then has been sleeping through the night with little or no fuss. And I have mixed feelings about this. Since I'm a light sleeper, and since Heather was giving so much to Ashlyn already, I took care of the night feedings. I'd get out of bed, warm up a bottle, feed her, and then put her on my shoulder where she instantly fell asleep while I patted her back.

Those moments, those few minutes where she slept on my shulder at three in the morning, were pretty special to me.  Rarely would Ashlyn sleep on anyone but Heather during the day, Mom must have the magic touch. And this is the rub, the thing that bugs me every time I think about it. I never knew when the last 3am feeding would be. Had I known, I probably would have stayed awake with her for awhile. And yes, I realize there will be many more last times: the last coo, the last time to watch her laugh when Heather hops up the stairs, the last time she'll let us pick her up, and so many more. I just wish I could know when the last time would be, so I could stay with it a bit longer. Oh well, I suppose I need to look forward to the firsts instead: the first step, the first word, the first day at school, the first date...

Okay, so I don't need to look forward to ALL the firsts.

To lighten the mood a bit, here's a few videos of recent developments.  One is Ashlyn laughing as hard as we've ever seen her laugh, the other is the first time we've been able to catch her babbles on camera.  I apologize for the background noise, the dryer was on but it's hard to capture her on camera because she stops babbling the second she sees someone.

Ashlyn's Big Laugh - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zKigrFM-l0
Ashlyn Babbles - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryRbpQ2l5U0

A quick update and birthday wish...

Ashlyn’s 6 month doctor visit was on last Friday, and we’re happy to report that Ashlyn is doing great. She’s now 26.5 inches wide, and almost 16 pounds. So she’s now the weight of a large bowling ball, just not quite so round. We also filled out a development chart, with questions like “Can she roll over from front to back or back to front?” to see how she’s doing. We filled out the front, and then filled out the back. The only thing she couldn’t do on the chart was push herself all the way up on her hands while turned on her stomach (like a push up). Her Doctor came in, looked at the front of the chart, and said “good”. The she glanced at the back and said “Oh, you filled out the nine month chart too.” Good job kiddo.

And on another note, today is Aunt Lisa’s birthday. Happy birthday Aunt Lisa!  Here’s a picture of Ashlyn from last night, where she was wishing Lisa a happy birthday while learning to use a sippy cup.

Bunnies like carrots..

Yes, bunnies like carrots, as the traditional images of Peter Rabbit and Bugs Bunny portray.  Today, I'm pleased to report that Ashlyn if following in their footsteps and has found a love for carrots.  After happily munching down on pears and bananas, her interest in avocados faded off and we weren't sure how she would take to vegetables.



As you can see, I think she's ok with them.  Next up is squash, or more likely sweet potatoes as I wouldn't wish squash on anyone, especially my own daughter.

Happy Birthday Ashlyn!

Today Ashlyn turned .5, and it’s been an interesting ride over the past six months. In that short amount of time, we’ve seen Ashlyn do a lot of things. We’ve seen her smile, laugh, coo, sit, eat, spit up, roll over, fill countless diapers, stand, and begin babbling. We’ve seen her play, cry, sleep, hold things, and stare in wonder at the world around her. She’s deprived us of sleep, filled us with joy, and changed our lives. In short, we wouldn’t change a thing. Happy 6 months Ashlyn, mommy and daddy love you.

Here's a couple of her more recent achievements, stay tuned for more as we work towards her "real" birthday in October.

Happy Easter!

Today is Easter, a day filled with hunts for eggs filled with chocolate, jelly beans, and the occasional Starbucks gift card.  Since Ashlyn is only 6 months, well one day short of six months anyway, candy will not be part of our holiday this year.  However, embarrassing pictures are definitely in:

Infants don't pose for pictures well though, so you have to be prepared for a few "oops" moments.  I don't think the poor bunny knew what he was signing up for.

Yep, the bunny is airborne.  That small incident aside (the bunny suffered no lasting injuries), we got some great pictures of her.  Have a Happy Easter everyone.

To our brothers overseas...

Now I have two brothers overseas, with Scott going who knows where to do who knows what and John in Korea doing whatever helicopter pilots do in Korea.  To both of you, and to the rest of the men and women serving all over the world, thanks.  And since this blog is about Ashlyn, we asked her what she thought about her brothers.  She made a "gaaaaahhhh" noise and then spit out a piece of avacado we fed her earlier.  I have no clue what that means, but she seemed pretty to happy to put on an Army shirt so I'm pretty sure it was positive.

Be safe guys!

And we roll into a new stage...

Another milestone has been reached by our little Ashlyn, she's now an expert at rolling over.  We've been trying to teach her to roll over for awhile, but I think we were going about it the wrong way.  We changed up our tactics a bit, and now she's rolling over like a champ.  Check out the video below, taken today (the first day she rolled over without assistance).

Ashlyn rolls over!

So what's next in the adventure that is Ashlyn's life?  Only time will tell...

Top o' the morning to you!

There are many things that we like in the Flinn household. One of them is our dear old Texas Aggies.

A second thing we enjoy, which we recently discovered, is sitting. If you recall from a few weeks back, Ashlyn was learning the froggy sit.

Over the past few days, she’s learned how to do the real thing. Congrats little one, mommy and daddy are proud.

And today, we like Ireland. Heather, being of Scottish decent, may disagree with me on this one. However, she was the one that found Ahslyn’s name. And according to thinkbabynames.com, the meaning of Ashlyn is as follows:

The girl's name Ashlyn \a-shl-yn, ash-lyn\, is a variant of Ashlynn (Irish, Gaelic), and the meaning of Ashlyn is "dream".

So Happy Saint Patrick’s day everyone, may the luck o’ the Irish be with you!

"When Irish eyes are smiling,

Tis like a morn in spring.

With a lilt of Irish laughter

You can hear the angels sing

When Irish hearts are happy

All the world is bright and gay

When Irish eyes are smiling

Sure, they steal your heart away."

  -Irish song

Feed me!

So what’s new in Ashlyn’s world? Food. She’s eating food now.. kind of. We’ve been able to get her to eat three food items: banana, avocado, and pear. At this point more of the food ends up on her bib instead of on her stomach, but she’s learning to eat and that’s a step forward. Her favorite so far is the pear. About half of the banana makes it down, about a fourth of the avocado, but most of the pear is making it in. A-pear-antly, she likes the sweeter fruits. See what I did there? That noise you just heard was Heather groaning, but I think she’s secretly hoping that Ashlyn will inherit my incredible sense of humor.

We’ll continue to try new foods as she gets older, but of course we have to be pretty selective at this point due to her age.

 
 
 
 

Also, last night was the first night that Ashlyn slept all the way through the night.  There was a slight panic moment when I first woke up, because for the past five months we've been waking up multiple times a night.  The past week or so has been spent cutting back on food at night, hoping that Ashlyn will stop wanting to wake up.  It seems to be working.  And here's a random picture of Ashlyn excitedly petting Nala.  She likes kitties.
 

We're back!

That’s right, we’re finally done with the old house, although it took us much longer than expected to get ready. Apparently trying to move into a new house, move out of an old house, and take care of a 4 month old baby is a lot do at one time. Who knew? And can you believe it, Ashlyn is already over the four month mark, getting closer to five months, and a lot has happened since the last blog post. I’ll make an attempt to get you caught up, but I’m sure I’ll miss a few things. That’s ok though, it will give me more material for future posts, which I hope to be more regular now.

While we wait for the old house to sell, Ashlyn is sleeping in the Pack n’ Play and storing her clothes on IKEA office shelves.

During our time moving and cleaning, Ashlyn learned a few new things. First, she’s starting to sit. She needs a little help at first, but she’s getting the “frog” position down pretty well. Ribbit!

Attempting to skip past sitting and go straight to standing, she’s actually fairly adept at standing on both her legs with minimal support. Take your hands away though and she’ll topple over, so she has some work to do on the balancing part.

Standing is a bit more difficult when your butt is stuck in the Bumbo though.

And finally, Uncle John and Aunt Kristen were back in town from Korea for a few days. Kristen still found time to read a book to her niece. She may not understand the book, but Ashlyn seems to be enjoying herself. Have a safe trip back to Korea!

And that’s it for now. I was hoping to have a video ready of Ashlyn taking her first bites of banana, but I broke my computer and haven’t had time to fix it. Hopefully next time, which I promise won’t be three weeks!

Is she laughing with you, or at you? Definitely at you.

I have mixed emotions about this particular post. Yesterday, for the first time, Ashlyn laughed. She’s had a few noises in the past that sounded like a laugh, but yesterday she did it deliberately and repeatedly. Hearing your daughter laugh for the first time is a great thing, and I can’t deny my joy in witnessing it. It was the cause of the laughter that has me a little concerned. It wasn’t a goofy face. It wasn’t a song or dance. It wasn’t even a bright and shiny toy. The laughter came from Ashlyn kicking me in the face.

Hoping that it was a fluke, we tried it again today with the same result. Luckily, this time we were able to get it on camera as proof.

Ashlyn starts to laugh

Like I said, I have mixed emotions on this. I was kicked repeatedly in the face by a tiny human being wearing a one piece pajama outfit with little fuzzy ears on the feet.

Did it hurt? Yes (well, not really, but my incredible acting skills made it look like it, right?).
Did I have a headache afterwards from the whiplash? Yep.
Was it worth it? Without a doubt.

We move boxes, she moves forward in life...

We’re still busy packing away and getting things ready for the big move to the new house. It’s taking us longer than we expected, but everything is pointing to being able to move next weekend. I hope to be able to increase the frequency of the blog posts once we get moved in.

While we’ve been packing boxes full of stuff that we haven’t even looked at in years, which we’ll either leave in boxes or unpack to locations where it will get lost for several more years, Ashlyn has decided to work on a few new milestones.

She still has a ways to go before she’ll be able to sit up on her own, but she’s starting to a show an active interest in the idea. When we have her sitting on our legs, she tries to sit up straight. This typically ends with her falling forward on to her face, but you have to give her points for effort.

Just today, not hours prior to this post, Ashlyn rolled over on to her side for the first time after being on her back.

She’s learned a new trick from mommy. Heather would make Ashlyn smile by making that ptptptpt noise with her lips when blowing out air. Starting today, Ashlyn is starting to make the noise back. It’s cute to watch, she can’t get the lips moving that fast so she kind of spits to get the same effect. I didn’t have the camera with me this evening, but I’ll get it on camera soon and post it.

That’s all I have for tonight, adios!

Good morning!

(Note: We’re still in the process of packing, cleaning, fixing, and moving. Unfortunately, this means blog posts are going to remain a little sporadic while we work everything out. Still, I want to keep our friends and family up to date.)

Parents love milestones, seeing their children do something new for the first time is an exciting experience. Even if it’s a simple thing like staring at their hands, it’s still fun to watch. However, some milestones are shared by parents and baby, and we experienced one last night. We slept for seven hours. In a row, with no interruptions. People without kids may not think this is something to celebrate; after all it’s still only seven hours. Not us, we’re going to the store to buy streamers. The Aggies could have won the National Championship this year, and it would have paled in comparison to a seven hour sleep.

I think this is even more momentous because we spent a month with a baby crying non-stop until 4:00am. When the colic ended we were afraid Ashlyn would have a difficult time adjusting to sleeping at night, and we were nervous about Heather going back to work with neither of us getting sleep. Luckily, Ashlyn came through in fine style; she’s sleeping great and smiles all the time. Sure, she has her fussy periods, but these are not the norm. She’s playing more, making more noises, and doing all the things that babies are supposed to do.

All in all, life is good in the Flinn house. I’ll do my best to have more frequent posts over the next few weeks, but I can’t promise anything. For now, here’s a dumb little video I created. I’m helping some people create a 20 year anniversary video at work, and I was playing around with some video editing software. This is Ashlyn grinning at the thought of Mack Brown being upset when they were losing to Oklahoma State a few years back. Yes, it’s cheesy, but it’s still funny to me.

Ashlyn grins at an upset Mack Brown

Happy New Year Year!

I guess since it's now 2010 it's time for a quick blog update.

I apologize for not getting the Christmas pictures out sooner, but we had a rather rough Christmas. Ashlyn spent about 4 hours on Christmas night in the hospital, with a fever and trouble breathing. She's all better now, but it was still a long day and it was hard to watch her go through that. We didn’t even open our presents for her until days later. Luckily, she’s only 3 months old and has no clue what she missed. It’s actually rather anti-climactic opening up baby gifts with a 3 month old. She just looked around and drooled on things as we excitedly opened up everything. When we were done, she just drooled some more. She was cute doing it though.

Luckily, we are now getting passed whatever had her sick. She’s feeling better, eating more, and sleeping more consistently. We think the colic is finally going away, which is great because Heather starts work next week. Also, with a new year comes a new baby development: she’s starting to play with things. She hasn’t quite figured out how to hold things and shake them, but check out the video below of her starting to play with a rattle. Well, not a rattle really. It’s a moose foot with a bell in it. This is hot off the presses, this was the first time she ever started doing it and we were fortunate to catch it on film.

Ashyln plays with a rattle

If the blog slows down a little over the next few weeks, it’s because we’ll be moving to a new house. Ashlyn may have spent her first few months of life in this house, but we’re excited that we found a house that she’ll call home as she grows up and starts building memories. A new year brings new starts, and we’re looking forward to watching Ashlyn grow in 2010.

Merry Christmas!

Before I go any further, I want to answer the question that I'm sure is on everyone's minds. No, I did not go to Jared's. Luckily, Heather has already forgiven me for this lapse in judgment. Now that we have that out of the way, I can say Merry Christmas to everyone reading the blog. Apparently people read this thing from all over the country, so wherever you are we wish you a very Merry Christmas.

Here in ‘ol DFW, it’s going to be a white Christmas. I looked outside this morning and everything is covered in snow. You can’t even tell that I’ve been lazy and haven’t raked the leaves up in weeks. Thanks Santa!

Ashlyn was so excited about Christmas that she stayed up until 4:00am, so it looks like she’ll be sleeping through most of the Christmas festivities. We’ll be taking plenty of pictures of Ashlyn’s first Christmas, and will post those as soon as we’re able to. Hopefully we’ll get a few pictures with her eyes open.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be Longhorns...

Relationships with grandparents can be tricky. They fed you, cared for you, and raised you. So it can be hard sometimes when you see them influencing your own child in a way that you didn’t anticipate. Every parent goes through this, especially when your child is lucky enough to have grandparents that want to be part of their lives. It starts with something simple, a gesture or word when you don’t think your child is even paying attention.

You take a picture of it, and laugh. But then later, when you least expect it... this happens.

So let this be a lesson to all you parents out there. Grandparents may love their grandchildren, but that doesn’t mean they won’t happily corrupt them.

Congratulations are in order..

My sister Lisa is now engaged. Her fiancé’s parents have great taste in naming children, and we like him a lot. We couldn’t be happier for both of them, and I look forward to welcoming Jeff into the family.  In response to he news, Ashlyn broke out the crayons.

Okay, so obviously that wasn't her that wrote it.  Ashlyn has much better handwriting.  On a side note,
Ashlyn hda her first restaurant experience last night and did just fine. She mostly slept on Heather while the adults enjoyed some margaritas and charro beans with the Wolfes.  Both of Grandpa Wolfe's brothers were in town, and it was great to hang out with them for the evening. 

To Mr. and Mrs. Wolfe, Mr. and Mrs. Wolfe, and Mr. and Mrs. Wolfe, thanks the dinner and company.  You'll also see more of Heather's family, Jeff and Britta (you could also call them Mr. and Mrs. Wolfe), featured in the pictures below.  It was nice seeing them again and congrats to their son Tip on their team placing 2nd place in the chess tournament.

The baby speaks.. sort of.

Ashlyn has started cooing, which is nice because we get to hear noises other than grunts and cries.  We still have a long way to go until she's actually talking of course, but this is a good start.  Instead of doing a cooing montage, we were able to film a longer segment where she was going coo crazy.  I cut out the parts in between noises to keep it short.  Unfortunately, we had to cut the session short when she started getting hiccups.  Enjoy!

Ashlyn Coos

Smile, it's Colic!

It’s confirmed. Ashlyn’s Doctor feels that it’s the dreaded colic. The past four nights have been long for mom, who’s had to adjust her sleeping schedule to Ashlyn’s 3:00am bed time. The Doctor went ahead and did all the shots and measurements while she was there. They don’t give exact percentages on growth, but they do categorize into buckets: 50% (meaning average), 75%, and 95%. The higher the percentage, the greater above average. Here’s where our little Ashlyn sits:

• Weight: 50%, she’s right on track for her age.
• Length: 95%, she’s a long baby!
• Head: 75%, she’s got a decent sized noggin’.

The best news though is that her Doctor has given Ashlyn a clean bill of health, she’s a still a happy and healthy baby girl. To mark this welcome news, here’s a video of some smiles that we caught on camera.

Ashlyn Smiling Montage

Please forgive the repeating music.  The actual song is over 3 minutes long, but the section I cut out for the video is the only part I could use.  Despite the upbeat words and whistling in the video, the rest of the song would get people in trouble at work for listening to it.