The Finke Family

For Thanksgiving this year we went to Chris’s Aunt Shirley’s house for turkey dinner. We had a great meal and Gabriel got to play with his cousin Bennett (Chris’s cousin Rachel’s son). In the evening, we went to my parent’s house and had a late spaghetti supper. As you will see from the last picture, Gabriel enjoyed chewing on some pickles.

Gabriel, Chris, & Grandpa Finke

Four Generations: Great Grandma Mielke, Grandma Finke, Chris, and Gabriel

Gabriel and Grandma Finke

Gabriel & cousin Bennett

Not sure what they were looking at here but they both seem in awe of it.

Gabriel loves pickles (I think he inherited this from his Grandpa Tewes who always used to joke about drinking pickle juice when we were growing up)

Last Friday we went to Target and got our Christmas pictures done. I wanted to get some done of Gabriel anyway so I figured we might as well get a picture for the Christmas card too. It’s always a little stressful taking the Christmas picture ourselves so I think this worked out a lot better. I won’t post our family Christmas picture until after we’ve sent out our cards, but I will share a couple of my favorites of Gabriel. I’ll post the rest of them after we get our cd with all the high res images sometime next week. He did really well but it was more difficult to get him to stay put long enough to take a picture.

Gabriel has gotten 2 more teeth recently. First he got another bottom one and today we found one of the top middle ones poking through.

Gabriel has been going from crawling to sitting all the time now. He used to never like to sit and would always prefer to be on his stomach. It always kind of catches me off guard now when I look over and see him just sitting there playing with something like such a little boy. He really likes this wire maze thing that has little wooden cars on it (you know, the toy you always see in doctors and dentist offices). I always wondered if kids really liked those things and I guess now I know that they are riveting.

Another thing he has learned is how to give “fives”. Sometimes it’s more like a little tap, but he knows what he’s supposed to do when we say “give me five”. This is the first thing that I feel that we’ve really “taught” him to do. (We obviously have our priorities in order.)

Sleeping through the night has been hit or miss lately. I’ll usually hear him cry once or twice during the night. Sometimes he’ll just go back to sleep on his own and sleep until morning. Other times he just yells off and on for an hour until I finally go and get him and feed him. He always goes right back to sleep after I feed him, but I’d really like to not have to wake up at all during the night.

My favorite thing to watch him do now is get excited over something that he sees. He’ll be crawling around on the floor and he’ll see something that grabs his attention (usually something we don’t want him to go near like the dog bowl or an open gate or door). He starts breathing really heavily through his nose, his eyes light up and he makes a beeline for it. I almost always know when he’s going to get into something he shouldn’t just by listening for his heavy breathing. Speaking of the dog dishes, we created a temporary solution by putting the water bowl on a kitchen chair and only putting the food bowl down when we are actually going to feed Pedro. Pedro is tall enough to drink directly from the bowl on the chair and the cats can sit on the chair next to the bowl and drink. So, problem solved until Gabriel starts standing up on his own.

A couple weekends ago (Oct. 24-25) Gabriel and I went up North to my friend Jenn’s cabin. The cabin and surrounding area were gorgeous and we had a lot of fun. On Saturday we even got to go swimming at the clubhouse. The girls gave Gabriel a spiky hairdo for the occasion. The only disappointment of the weekend was that we didn’t get to see any bears.

Jessica, Lexi, Sarah, Christina, Gabriel, & Jenn

Gabriel was ready to go swimming after getting his hair gelled.

We didn’t take Gabriel anywhere for his first Halloween. We did, however, carve a pumpkin just for him:

That’s a pumpkin hat on his head in the first four pictures. It didn’t quite fit on his head. The first time we put him in the pumpkin he was just wearing a onesie and he pretty much flipped out. I don’t think he liked the way it felt on his skin. For the pictures we put some pants on him along with the pumpkin booties and that seemed to help…a little.

We had two costumes that we got for him at garage sales this summer. We decided to take pictures of him in both. He wore the turtle costume for the majority of the night (mostly just because it had legs so he could still crawl around). My mom came over wearing a kitty mask and he didn’t know quite what to think of that. Eventually he warmed up to it and starting petting her face. We brought him to the door several times when trick or treaters came, and surprisingly, he wasn’t scared by the costumes. Next year we’re looking forward to taking him out and getting candy rather than buying it and giving it away. I’ve already picked up his costume – next year he gets to be a dinosaur. Here are pictures of his costumes:

This is the pumpkin that I carved.

Chris and I went to Chipotle decked out in our tinfoil hats with the intention of getting free burritos. However, the line was out the door and all the way through the parking lot. We decided it wasn’t worth it and instead got our free blackjack taco from Taco Bell and then went to McDonald’s. Oh well, maybe next year…

Here are some pictures of Gabriel in the leaves. I’ll be posting Halloween pictures soon so stay tuned:

Gabriel turned seven months old last week on the 27th. I can’t believe how fast the time has gone. His biggest accomplishment this month has been learning how to crawl. Once he figured it out, there was no stopping him, and now he’s cruising all over the house. His first stop is always Pedro’s water and food bowls. (if anyone has ideas on how to baby proof that let us know). After that he searches for all the doorstops. At some point he ends up rolling around on the floor with Charlie (the cat).

He seems to be hungrier than ever. We are now feeding him real food three times a day (usually a half jar of stage 2 baby food). We also pureed some apples and bananas recently so not everything he’s eating is coming out of a jar. So far, he has not refused anything we’ve given him and we’ve tried just about every kind of fruit and vegetable. We discovered these organic baby puffs that are sort of like little cheerios that dissolve really quickly so he can’t choke. He seems to enjoy those, although he hasn’t figured out how to get one from his hand to his mouth very accurately yet. He gets 2 or 3 bottles while I’m at work (about 15 ounces total). I nurse him before I go to work and then once or twice when I get home. He slept all the way through the night for about a week straight, and then a couple days ago he started waking up at about 3am acting really hungry. After about a half hour of on and off crying I finally got up and fed him. His inconsistent sleeping is very frustrating.

He’s “talking” all the time. Mostly ma ma ma and da da da along with some t sounds, b sounds, and a lot of screeching.

He’s wearing size 3 diapers and 6-9 month clothes.

He’s extremely ticklish – especially his thighs, ribs, and the bottoms of his feet. He thinks the cats are really funny and still enjoys playing pattycake.

He’s still taking three naps a day although the morning one has been getting shorter (about 1.5 hours). His afternoon nap usually lasts 2-2.5 hours and then his late afternoon/early evening nap is only a half hour.

I have officially started working part-time this month. I work three days and have 2 days off (usually Wednesdays and Fridays). It’s great having more time at home with Gabriel but it just never seems like enough.

It was a little more difficult to take pictures this month with his increased mobility but we still managed to get a few good ones: